The Importance of Being Costumed

The sketches above display the costumes for one of the couples in Act II: Algernon and Cecily. Do the outfits look like they belong together? Why or why not? What do the costumes tell you about the people wearing them? (Think about gender, time period, class, age, etc.) Director Aaron Schmookler mentions in his interview that when he thought about how this production should look, he was partly inspired by an abstracted image of Alfred Hitchcock. How do the costume designs by Heather Crocker Aulenback reflect that image? Once you can see the connection between the lines in the Hitchcock image and the lines accenting the suit and dress, is this similarity one of the things that allows these two costumes to compliment one another so nicely? These questions can seem abstract and hard to answer. That’s the way it should to be! When you examine the costumes, set, props, lights, and sound of a production more closely, you find similarities that allow all of these very different areas to combine to form a unified world. When you watch the play, you aren’t supposed to focus on these details. You simply take them all in and subconsciously make decisions about the characters or place you are seeing develop on the stage.

Now that you’ve started thinking about what draws different aspects of a production together, consider what makes them different. Above are three sketches of costumes designed for the UMass Amherst Department of Theater’s production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. How is each of these costumes different from the other two? What does that tell you about these people and what can you infer about their relationships to one another? Heather Crocker Aulenback, our costume designer, put a lot of thought into what each and every costume would say about its wearer and how these different costumes would combine to form the world of the play:

“When designing The Importance Of Being Earnest, one of the challenges of the design was creating three different worlds of characters: the world of the Aesthetes, the Non-Aesthetes, and the characters outside those categories. The Aesthetes are young characters who are able to manipulate the world around them, while the Non-Aesthetes, an older group, are forced to succumb to the bounds of real life, and the characters in between are a mix of the two. When designing the Aesthetes I used bright jewel toned colors, flashy accessories, and dressed them as stylish, attractive people. When designing the characters in between I chose to use slightly duller colors, but dressed them in clothing similar to the clothing of the Aesthetes. For the Non-Aesthetes, I chose to dress them in a dull muted color scheme, with very simple outfits, signifying people of a lower class, as opposed to the upper class Aesthetes.”