Since this is the time of year that families gather and Dead Grandma's Stuff needs to be dealt with, while we appreciate the fact that fur coats come with a whole lot of emotional baggage around dead animals and cruelty and you want them to be used/reused to make it seem 'more OK,' you are not the first person to feel this, OR to think "hey, donating this to a theater costume shop would be great! furs are expensive and I bet they'd love to have this!"

Most theaters I've worked in are well overstocked on fur coats, fur stoles, fur collars, fur lined gloves and the like. The sad truth is that they really don't get used on stage all that much, because they're REALLY WARM and REALLY HARD TO CLEAN, which is not a great combination when dealing with sweaty actors wearing greasepaint on the daily. Furs are also hard to store well in our often limited storage spaces, and take up a LOT of room.

Unless your fur is in pristine condition and immediately wearable, please don't give them to us. Instead, may I point you in the direction of "Coats for Cubs," run by the Humane Society and retailer Buffalo Exchange, or urge you to contact any local wildlife rehab center, and ask if they'd like your fur coat to help baby animals get back into the wild.

Bra straps, bra hooks, and stays are parts of the Captain America costumes that keep the waist covered even in action scenes. Wendy Craig, Motion Pictures Costumers IATSE local 705 union member and Marvel Costume Department Supervisor describes the work involved from concept through filming to display.

https://youtu.be/PVuX5U19iEk

HOKAY SO, buckle in kidlets, because this could be a long one. 

FIRST, the short answer: DEPENDS ON THE SHOP. 

NOW, the long answer: 

In most shops you will have, 1 costume designer 1 shop manager, 1-6 cutter/draper/tailors, 1-6 first hands and 1-12 stitchers. From there, you could also add a design assistant, a rentals manager, a craftsperson and/or a crafts assistant, and even a set of VERY SPECIALIZED craftspeople like armorers, cobblers, dyers, milliners, jewelers, etc. 

So, if you’re The Ultimate Costume Shop Who’s Just Won The Lottery, you could logically have 30 people in the shop at any given time. (I would hazard a guess that OSF probably runs close to this-I’m willing to bet that they have 5 or 6 teams working at any point, not including craftspeople.)

BUT TEKA, WHO’S ON A TEAM?Glad you asked, Yelly Self. A “team” in a shop is generally made up of three or four people. 

1)Cutter/Draper/Tailor. (This is sort of an amorphous term, which if unpacked, is a whole other post that basically boils down to “well, what technique do you mostly use and/or what do you call yourself?”) This person leads the team, and is in charge of making all of the patterns for the garments and figuring out how they’re going to go together to give the designer what they want. They then hand patterns off to the: 

2) First Hand. This person takes the patterns and actually cuts them out of the fabric, figures out how the whole thing more or less works, and assembles parts packets that include all the bits you need to put it together. That packet then goes to the 

3) Stitchers, who, well, stitch it all together. 

Usually a team is 1 draper, 1 first hand and 1-2 stitchers. For the most part, a draper can do any of the positions, a first hand can cut and stitch, and the stitchers ONLY stitch. However, I’ve met some whizbang stitchers in Seattle who can get a coat together WAY faster than you expect, so stitchers are no slouches in their own right. 

The general process is as follows: 

The designer will come in and they and the shop manager will meet with all the drapers ahead of time about what they’re making. Often the designer has some of the fabrics already, or they know generally what they want. 

The drapers will take this information and the actors’ measurements and go into the Cone of Solitude to make all the patterns for first fittings. (aka they’ll be thinking really hard and kind of snappish if you interrupt them in the middle of The Maths)

First fitting patterns will go to the First Hand who will cut them out of muslin and hand them off to the stitchers to put together. (This patterning/cutting time is also when the designer is generally off shopping fabric, and the shop manager is riding their ass to get the fabric in on time)

At first fitting, the actor comes in and tries on the muslin. The draper climbs all over and fits it to the actor so that it looks like the designer’s sketch/the designer likes it. First hands in this process are generally note-takers. 

The draper takes the fitted muslin and the notes, and alters the original pattern. 

The hope is that after this stage, you’re confident enough to go into the Real Fabric. About 75% of the time, this is true, but once in a while, whether it’s a designer problem or a draper issue, you get stuck at this point in a recursive loop of pattern alterations and fittings until you either get it right or someone gives up… or in the case of Equity, you run out of fitting time.

This altered pattern then goes to the first hand, who cuts it out of the real fabric, assembles the packet of zippers/buttons/interfacings/etc and hands it off to the stitchers…..

….who put it together. 

Granted, this is sort of an idealized setup. In reality, there’s a lot of trading back and forth of things- Stitcher A may not have a good handle on welt pockets, so the draper may take their jacket and do only the welt pockets then hand it back, or you may have a bazillion things to cut to get out to the stitchers (musical theater) so the draper may become a second first hand and help with the cutting.

First hands, after they’re done cutting, become high-powered stitchers, and generally keep tabs on any alterations/pulled garments that are coming through as well, to feed that out to stitchers/interns as possible. 

Most of the time shop managers are former drapers (my feelings on this, another whole separate post about wasting good craftspeople in admin positions) so sometimes if you’re really in the weeds, they’ll come out on the floor and either cut or sew as well. (I had two first hands on Curtains recently, because we had something like 34 garments to get made in two weeks so our shop manager came out and played first hand for me for a while.)

Crafts works much the same way as the draper teams, but with fewer people. In general, crafts gets told “We need a big green hat!” and one of the craftspeople makes a big green hat to a fitting stage, tries it on at the fitting, alters it, and then finishes it themselves. 

The biggest shop like this I’ve worked in has been the Seattle Opera, where we had three teams with two stitchers each and a two person crafts team, and three admin folks (manager, asst. manager, rentals coord) with one designer. 

The smallest shop I’ve worked in has been at my last job, where the entire shop was a designer and me, and I played draper and shop manager all at once. 

There are also other shops that don’t work like this at all- at Michael Curry’s studio, you see a project from beginning to end as a single person, and the crossover is more between departments- I might be acting as dyer and put a gradient down, which then goes to paint to get speckled, which comes back to me as a fabric tech to be cut and sewn into a puppet cover, which then goes out to the sculpting team so they can install it over the armature they have built before it goes to electrics to wire it for movement.

@addicted-to-nostalgia​ asks “What about specialized things like beading and embroidery on costumes? Are there people who do specifically that?”

Again, the short answer is: sometimes?

I know when you’re talking about things like Game of Thrones and probably other Really Embroidery Heavy movies/tv shows (and I haven’t worked formally on movies/tv yet, just made the occasional thing on contract but I would bet that their costume shop process is pretty much the same as the one I outlined for theater) they have an Official Embroidery Crew, so in that case yes, stuff does go to a completely different group of folks who specialize in just that.

HOWEVER, honestly, embroidery and beading often take a LOT of time, so it’s rare for a theater costume shop to decide to do a lot of them, because it’s the teams themselves that’ll do it, not a specialized person. More often than not, if you’re beading something it’s just little bits, like adding beaded fringe to a 20′s dress, or adding individual bead/sequins/heat set rhinestones to something for light bounce. This is where prebeaded fabrics (as much as they’re a pain in the ass to work with) make all the difference-the time it takes to crack the beads off and secure the ends through the seams is still less than beading the whole thing from scratch. Not that it *couldn’t* happen from scratch, just that it’s a big time and man hour investment.

As far as embroidery, it’s much the same-it’s another big man-hour investment, and at least with that there are generally other ways for theater to fake that embroidered look, because our audience is usually at least 20 feet away. Trim is used a lot for stuff to look semi-embroidered, I’ve definitely machine-free-arm “embroidered” things before, and honestly, even puff paint or Sharpie judicially used in a big enough house will read as embroidery. In the case of a small theater, yeah, sometimes you have to do it, and that again, usually falls to the person on the team with the most previous knowledge of it. My experience with adding embroidery has been mostly “this needs to look rustic or ethnic” or “we can’t see this so we need to outline it in something.” In the theater, if you’re trying to do a Big Embroidered Game of Thrones Dress, you’ll usually find a pre-embroidered fabric, cut the motifs you want out, and re-build it as a big applique onto the dress itself, like so:

(this is beaded flower fabric with a red mesh that’s been pinned to a Big Fuckoff Red Satin Skirt by our designer and now we have a student stitcher whipstitich that all on-much faster than doing it all by hand)

WARDROBE OVERSIGHT EDITION!

AW-RIGHT kidlets, buckle up because here we go again. 

SO, in general, the costume shop gets done with making stuff in time for tech. Some places bring costumes in during first tech, some don’t, but I’m seeing more and more do one tech without so the actors can run into sets and trip over props in their normal clothes with their show shoes before they get a four-foot pannier on for Added Difficulty Level. 

Once the shop gets done, they sort of hand off costumes to the wardrobe crew. Usually this “handoff” isn’t fully done until the show opens-the shop spends tech week fixing/reinforcing/changing whatever needs done before opening, and then AND ONLY THEN do they throw their hands up and yell NOT OUR PROBLEM ANYMORE! And of course, there are always exceptions to this- sometimes things get broken beyond what the wardrobe folks can handle, so the shop will step in, sometimes you deal with a dry cleaner who bleaches AND shreds a main dress in My Fair Lady, so the shop re-builds it as fast as possible, but for the most part, it’s all now wardrobe’s problem. In the case of touring shows, this is doubly true, as you’re miles out from your shop and The Show Must Go On. 

The size of a wardrobe crew really depends on a myriad of different things-how many actors do you have, how many quick changes are there, who’s considered a “principal,” what does the laundry schedule look like, etc. For the most part on the big union touring shows, one dresser is considered able to dress three people, so on a show like Lion King, where there are around 40 people onstage and around 6 considered “principals”, I think there were 18 dressers working every night. 

As far as the hierarchy of Wardrobe Land, there’s always a Head of Wardrobe who’s the point person for the crew. They’re the ones talking with the shop and the designer as the show starts to go up, and they’re generally the ones making the paperwork for the crew. The rest of the crew is pretty much just a pool below them-the principal dressers are often a little more experienced than the ensemble dressers, but there are also ensemble tracks that take a crap-ton of presence to run too (whether it’s because of the difficulty of the track itself or the actor in it), so sometimes your more experienced people go there.

Sort of wrapped up in wardrobe, you also generally get hair and makeup. On most big union shows, they’re a separate crew, but the smaller your theater gets, the more likely it is that the wardrobe crew does a fair amount of that too. Most actors will do their own “basic” makeup and hair, but when you get into shows like Wicked or Lion King or Shrek where there’s a lot of effects stuff, you’re likely to have at least a makeup/hair supervisor who does/helps the principals and keeps an eye on what the ensemble is doing, if not a whole makeup/hair crew who does individual actors. Big Shot Opera is the hoity-toity guys in here, where EVERYONE gets their hair and makeup done by a separate crew, from the leads on down.

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