Non-Binary Monologues: Personally, I really appreciate being able to chat one on one with a costume designer before measurements are taken. Even before coming out as non-binary, I’ve had extremely negative experiences with costumers. These experiences have ranged from costumers suggesting I go on a diet to them telling the director they didn’t know how to costume for my body type.
2 comments:
This is such a relevant article. This is an opinion based text, yet the information provided within the article is pretty straight forward with limited wiggle room for complete differing opinions. Tying this to the Carnegie Mellon recent work The Dance Floor… there was a character that identified as trans and a lot of the dialogue surrounding them and the other characters was regarding misuse of pronouns and terms such as “guys” that many people have ungendered but hearing them caused anxiety and that sense of dysphoria that this article talks about. I think this article is super relevant and everyone, especially those going into costume design and work, should read this article. I had never really thought about how integrated clothing and gender were until this article. I knew that there were clothes that are commercially made or labeled as men vs women’s clothes, but I didn’t realize the impact it has on others.
Costume fittings are a largely personal event that happens for an actor and involves a type of vulnerability for them to be comfortable talking about their clothing and their body that is vastly different from the vulnerability that comes along with being on stage. I think it is important to think about the introduction with actors (in the same way we talk about the introduction with our crews being so crucial) because it creates a comfortability and trust between a collaborative group of people. Especially with costuming, it is important for the actor to feel comfortable with what they are wearing so when they go on stage they feel comfortable performing, and a first step of this is costume fittings. Even more so, it is important that these safe spaces are also created for non-cisgender people, and this article is definitely a way to start a conversation in costume shops about doing this. What’s even more important than just conversation is action, and that is what also needs to happen for things like this to produce genuine success.
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