To costume designer and professor Deborah Landis, the story of a stage performance begins before the characters utter a single word.
Landis, founding director of the David Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design, said costumes are integral in developing the characters’ story.
Through the art of costume design, eight students strive to create imaginative stories that can be told without the use of a script or dialogue in the Timken Museum’s Art of Fashion 2014 competition.
On Feb. 8, the Copley Center and the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego will be hosting the awards ceremony for the Art of Fashion 2014, an annual design competition and fundraising gala. For the first time, it will showcase the work of eight UCLA graduate students in costume design.
The winning student designer will receive a $5,000 scholarship and the student’s costume will be put on display in the Timken Museum. The remaining costumes will be auctioned off at the awards ceremony to benefit UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television design fund.
The students’ task was to produce small-scale costumes, half the size of an ordinary outfit, using not a script as their blueprint of inspiration, as most designers in theater or film would, but rather a painting.
Thomas Gainsborough’s late-18th-century landscape painting, “A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door,” currently on loan to the Timken Museum from UCLA’s own Hammer Museum, set the stage for eight distinctive and imaginative female characters the students created to base their designs upon. The designers each had their own individual approach for developing a character that they imagined would live in the picturesque world.
“The (Gainsborough painting) was the script and provided the entire story, and the character that they were creating had to look like she emerged from the painting,” said Landis, who met with the students every week to supervise their creative process.
International fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who founded the Art of Fashion in 2008, originally invited fashion students in San Diego to participate and create couture gowns based on art in the Timken Museum.
With the involvement of Timken board member and UCLA alumna Lori Walton, her husband UCLA All-American and professional basketball player Bill Walton and the Hammer Museum this year, the decision to include UCLA costume design students was made.
On Saturday, prior to the awards ceremony, Rhodes and a Timken Museum committee will judge each student on his or her craftsmanship and ability to remain authentic to the 18th-century style of the painting while otherwise maintaining complete imaginative liberty.
“Of all eight students, not one of the costumes resembles another. All of them are completely personal creations,” said Landis.
Third-year graduate student Caitlin Doolittle was fascinated by Gainsborough’s treatment of light in his painting and originally planned to use LED lights as part of her design. However, she later chose to print portions of the actual painting onto her fabric that accentuated the use of light in her 18th-century-style gown.
“As my design evolved, I found that I was more interested in the shape that the light and trees created, and I incorporated those moments that I found most interesting, like the light passing through the tree trunks into the portions of the painting I selected for my fabric printing,” Doolittle said.
Lexie Newman, a third-year graduate student, also chose to print images onto her fabric in order to incorporate Gainsborough’s glorification of nature into her creation of a contemporary naïve shepherdess.
“I thought of a girl who really has no experience with nature, and she really doesn’t understand the harsh realities of being a farmer or a peasant or a shepherd,” said Newman, who drew her inspiration from the pastoral palette of the painting and intensified the colors.
The natural aspects of the painting also inspired Jenny Davis, a first-year graduate student. Davis said she wanted to personify Mother Nature in her design and use her as a celebration of the changing seasons. She used very organic shapes, vibrant red and gold fabrics and the image of an opening chrysalis to create this effect.
“I loved the movement of the wind through the trees (in the painting),” said Davis. “There are these beautiful golden tones running through it of the light of the sun just as it’s about to set, so trying to maintain that energy and translate it into a design was kind of what I was going for.”
The competition was open to all UCLA graduate students in costume design on top of their coursework during fall quarter. It sought to challenge them artistically as designers, and Landis said all eight participants pulled through.
“Our students have done such an incredible job. I think each one of them is a winner. … I am very happy I don’t have to make the decision, because I love each and every one of (the designs),” said Landis.
Now that the weeks of designing and crafting have come to a close, the student designers are anxiously awaiting to debut their characters and their stories to the audience at the Timken Museum.