To be literate in clothing is to be fully present in all the senses. Costume work requires a knowledge of materials that comes more from the hands than the head; it requires skills of deep listening, close looking, and a kind of empathetic imagination. This embodied knowledge is such a key part of costume practice….but what is it, actually? Why is it a valuable skill? 

The post-pandemic years have theoretically brought us back “in person,” yet we spend more and more of our time on zoom, online, remote, virtual… disembodied. Anxiety has been called an “invisible pandemic,” and we have all seen how it affects our students and ourselves. The best recourse to anxiety is being grounded in the present, in our bodies, in community, making things, and giving our imaginations a place to roam in positive directions. In other words, costume practice is the perfect antidote to one of the biggest challenges faced by our students today. 

In this year’s workshop, we turn to the physical and material discourse of costume production to examine the embodied practice essential to our work. We will map when, where, and why we do it, and unpack how we show our students (and our institutions) why this kind of work has value.