Studies in Costume & Performance - Current Issue

Michael Powell’s (1960) horror masterpiece Peeping Tom was instrumental in shaping the costume design tropes of the modern horror genre, particularly the slasher film and the costume of the Final Girl. Although less widely recognized than its counterpart Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom introduced themes of voyeurism, gender theory and Freudian psychoanalysis in a visually stimulating and haunting style. By dissecting the film through its costume and the context of fashion history, connections to the costuming of other seminal horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) become apparent, as does the characteristic costuming of the trope of the Final Girl.

Yakshagana is a traditional theatre form of Karnataka, a southern state of India. With a history of over 500 years, it incorporates creative elements of elaborate gestures, facial expressions, body movement, costume, make-up, music, dance and dialogue. Performed in open-air theatres, this form of traditional dance drama reflects the socio-economic and cultural milieu they are a part of, reinterpreting the Hindu epics through the art of storytelling adapted through improvisation, which is why each performance uniquely shapes the characters. Enacting epic stories from Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavatas, the drama interconnects the religious culture through people’s daily life, social interaction, festivals and ritualistic elements, related to phenomena such as birth, death, puberty, marriage, hunting, battle and propitiation of Gods. As well as enacting stories from the scriptures, Yakshagana also includes various themes related to issues such as health, the environment, literacy, family planning, women’s empowerment, social harmony and agricultural development. This research examines the act of Yakshagana from a contemporary sociocultural perspective and the role of costume and performance in communicating the Prasanga (‘written text’). It focuses on the agency of costume, emphasizing the position of the costume design(er) and costume-based performance in producing, interpreting or performing various individual and collective identities, bodies, ecological concerns, social activism and the artist’s social status.

Nicole Tran Ba Vang deems her own artwork a ‘second skin’, often taking the human body as fabric by stitching it. This article focuses on costumes she designed for poly-disciplinary queer performance artist Jean-Luc Verna in video artist Brice Dellsperger’s 2000 re-enactment video, Body Double (X), of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1975L’important c’est d’aimer. Dellsperger creates a queer context, conceiving his work as something that newly approaches the original narrative to empty it of its fiction and action. Dellsperger partly fills this emptied narrative by toying with the meaning of clothes/costumes. Tran Ba Vang and Verna explore the stability of clothes as drag and clothes as cultural classifications by combining them (and performing them) in a way that subverts how they can be read. This article situates their work in a centuries’ long European lineage.

The film Poor Things won several major awards, including Best Costume Design, at both the Oscars and BAFTAs. Costume designer Holly Waddington could not have done it alone, though – a point she acknowledges in her Oscars acceptance speech. This In Conversation piece explores three key themes from Waddington’s speech: teamwork, the film’s Hungarian connections and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the film’s costuming. Through interviews with three of the film’s costume and wardrobe crew members – assistant costume designer Timea Luzsi, costume maker Fábián Kis Juhász and costume coordinator Zoé Nemes – we uncover the responsibilities of some lesser-known and often-overlooked costuming roles and how they interact and function as part of the larger teams, illuminated by behind-the-scenes anecdotes and unique insight into the booming Hungarian film industry. Hungarian contributors played a major role in defining the visual world of Poor Things, yet their contributions remain largely unknown to those outside the country. We hope these conversations and their subsequent insights into the making of this film will not only broaden the recognition of Hungarians’ work in the industry but will also contribute to a better understanding of these hidden roles in filmmaking more generally.

Review of: Drag: A British History, Jacob Bloomfield (2023)

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 245 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-52039-332-5, h/bk, £25.00

Review of: 10 Together: Performances by Longva + Carpenter, 2010–20, Laurel Jay Carpenter and Terese Longva (eds) (2022)

Bergen: PABlish, 150 pp.,

ISBN 978-8-29396-500-8, p/bk, £20

Review of: Bloomsbury Historic Dress in Detail, written by Pauline Loven, directed by Nicole Loven and filmed by Crow’s Eye Productions (2024)

Review of: New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies, Ashley Bellet (ed.) (2024)

New York and London: Routledge, 206 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03223-542-4, p/bk, £34.99