Rachel 3/23/10

I decided that my next sketching project would be Tennessee Williams'
play Summer and Smoke.

I saw an excellent community production of this play when i was maybe about 14 or 15, and it has always remained one of my favorites. (Let's not delve into what that says about my psyche.)

It's set in an interesting time period for clothes--1914--when men are dapper and women are in that strange transitional phase between the pigeon-breasted wasp-waisted fin de siecle style and the dropped-waist bobbed-hair boy-bodied look of the 1920s. Ankles are starting to show as hems rise, yet bustlines are being more compressed and weirdly flattened. The very fashion itself echos what's going on in the head and heart of this play's protagonist. The script also has lots of hats and parasols (even as character-building plot-points), which are a personal favorite in my real-life day-job of milliner and crafts artisan.

One thing I admit I had not really considered when I stepped up to challenge myself as a contributor to this blog, was that not only would I be generating sketches, but also doing a lot of the preliminary research and paperwork for costume design. I mean, true, with a paper sketch-only project you don't have to concern yourself with budget or collaboration with a director or the rest of a design team, nor in this case do you have to address color palettes or swatching. But unless you are just doing life drawing of non-naked people, you do have to create costume plots to determine double-casting, quick changes, and so forth, and actually think about style line choices as a means of conveying character within the context of a given period or script.

So, I dashed off a costume plot last night and figured out how I'd double-up my cast to cover all the roles in this show. I did an admittedly somewhat cursory perusal of various period styles (thumbing through reference books from the shop library at work and image-googling fashions of 1910-1914), and spent some time thinking about the characters within the context of those clothes.

Today, I have a first sketch to share: Miss Alma Winemiller's first costume in Act I. It's the Fourth of July in a small Mississippi town, and she's just given a singing performance on the bandstand in the town square.

Alma is a study in contradictions--in fact, that's the premise of the play, pretty much, an exploration of how someone so at odds with herself or himself deals with being both attracted and repelled by another person equally splintered. Alma is a pastor's daughter whose mother is mentally ill. She's been to finishing school and people in town think of her as someone who puts on airs. She's a music teacher, leads an intellectual society for discussing poetry and literature; she considers herself artistically-minded and fashion-forward, but at the same time is devout in her faith and bound by the restrictive upbringing of a pastor's daughter. She craves witty repartee and flirtation, while at the same time being shocked by impropriety and ribaldry.

I looked at a lot of clothes from this time period and was excited about some of the interesting images of asymmetrical design elements and style lines--so many great asymmetrical closure and ornament details on the blouses and the cut of the skirts. All of Alma's costumes will employ elements of asymmetry, both as a nod to her desire to come off as sophisticated and to indicate her internal struggle between the two sides of her personality.

As Alma explores more facets of the warring sides of herself over the course of the play, I'm planning to push the asymmetrical elements more. Here she's just got the unusual single-lapel bodice and the prim little trios of buttons. And of course that amazing hat. Hats in this period are fascinating--still fairly large but tending toward the styles that became more popular in smaller form a decade later. Alma is just theatrical and dorky enough to think that this modified bicorne-almost-a-tricorne style would be just perfect for an Independence Day performance in the park.

It's clear in the script that the Winemiller women love their millinery, are regular patrons of the local hat shop (Alma's mother shoplifts a hat during the course of the play), and i like the idea that Alma takes the most risks with her hat styles.

So there she is when we first meet her, the preacher's daughter with her barely concealed crush on the rakish, damaged young Doctor John Buchanan...

Man, now i wish we were actually doing this show! :D