Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : activating costume : a new approach to costume for performance / Sofia Pantouvaki and Peter McNeil -- Real or Virtual? : studying historical costume drawings and sketches / Margaret Mitchell -- Cooking : studying film costume design / Drake Stutesman -- Displaying stage costumes : exhibitions at the National Centre for Stage Costume, France / Delphine Pinasa -- Cross cultural costume research : Beijing Opera Costumes / Alexandra B. Bonds -- Reading Maltese Carnival Costumes / Vicki Ann Cremona -- Curating costume : reflection / Aoife Monks -- Costume centre stage : re-membering Ellen Terry (1847-1928) / Veronica Isaac -- 'On and Off the Stage' : costume, dress, and locating the actor-manager's identity, 1870-1900 / Helen Margaret Walter -- Extravagance, expense and notoriety in costume : Gaby Deslys and Parisian Modernity on the American stage, 1911-14 / Emily Brayshaw -- A foreign affair on and off screen / Christina M. Johnson -- Recording costume design in the theatre and performance Collections at the V&A : Vivien Leigh and Oliver Messel / Keith Lodwick -- The first premiere and other stories : towards a history of the costume design profession in Finland / Joanna Weckman -- Spinning Yarns : locating, learning and Listening in the social world of popular Hindi film costume production / Clare M. Wilkinson -- Hollywood Costume : a journey to curation / Deborah Nadoolman Landis -- 'The Getting of Wisdom ': learning from Anna Senior / Jennifer Gall -- Design for TV : costume and contemporary clothing / Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko -- The body as the matter of costume: a phenomenological practice / Donatella Barbieri -- The body as site : interdisciplinary approaches to dress in/as performance / Jessica Bugg -- 'Aware Wearing' : a somatic costume design methodology for performance / Sally E. Dean -- Costuming the foot : a designer/performer's personal artistic methods / Alexandra Murray-Leslie -- Costume and the modernist body : fashioning August Strindberg / Viveka Kjellmer -- Building costumes, building language in the costume workshop / Madeline Taylor -- Fitting threads : embodied conversations in the costume design process / Suzanne Osmond -- Haptic descriptions : costume design by Gillian Gallow and April Viczko / Natalie Rewa -- The costume designer's 'Golden List' of competence / Christina Lindgren -- Exploring Rossini's Berta : young audiences and the agency of opera costume / Sofia Pantouvaki -- Designing hospital clown costumes : psychological and social benefits for Finnish children's healthcare / Merja Väisänen -- Costume of conflict / Mateja Fajt -- From effect to affect : the costumed body and the autistic child / Melissa Trimingham -- Designing tsunami : costume evolution from documentary to Surrealist / Michiko Kitayama Skinner -- The collaborative process of costume creation : travesties in São Paulo / Fausto Viana.

Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance.