At the UCI Costume Shop, four graduate costume design students started costume designing for the winter quarter productions in the fall 2024 quarter. The process entailed sketching, buying, fitting, cutting and sometimes dying the fabric, and carried on for months until opening day. During the winter quarter, they began work on spring theater productions, such as dance shows Starmites and La Belle et la Bête. In addition to their design work, they took inventory of the shop’s garments — 5,000 of which were cataloged in just eight weeks.
Before the winter quarter there was no formal record of which garments were borrowed by satellite campuses, like the UCLA Costume Shop. To address this, Costume Shop Manager Jenn Dugan initiated an inventory system.
Now, with 5,000 garments cataloged, the inventory is accessible through a shared database. This system is managed through Microsoft SharePoint, a web-based platform that streamlines the process.
The process of sorting and cataloging garments is physically demanding, but the UCI team sees it as an investment in future efficiency. Graduate costume design student Savannah Flower has strained her neck many times searching for the right clothes after a request on SharePoint, or for an actor in campus productions.
“I get a lot of neck pain [because] our storage is a giant dry cleaning rack. In order to stop and start, you have to stand right next to it. So in a little time, just like this, you’ll be up there for hours,” Flower told New University. “Just looking up at so many clothes. If you’re up there for hours and just looking up is so painful.”
The team spends hours dedicated to meticulous data entry such as labeling garments with tags, taking photos, printing records and measuring details like neck size and length. Graduate student Christian Alvarez believes it will pay off in the long run.
“Currently a hundred clothes to be inventoried, I mean we’ve done the bulk of the work. I know a hundred is not a high number, but that is worth many hours of work. It’s ‘cause there is a lot of input that has to go in,” Alvarez told New University. “We’re really trying to be thorough with this inventory so it’s more convenient for everyone. So we’re putting in a lot of work now to save us a lot of work in the future.”
Graduate student Rebecca Shepherd experiences the physical demands of the job, from hours of ironing to the labor-intensive process of dyeing fabrics.
“Ironing is half of our job; it’s very important for the clothes that go on stage to look pressed and all the seams are flat like they’re supposed to be, and so it involves a lot of ironing actually. Like, the irons are always on,” Shepherd told New University. “Sometimes we have a whole day of just ironing. And dyeing is a workout, standing over that giant vat. It can be pretty tiring.”
Aside from inventorying, dyeing clothes is a regular part of these graduate students’ routine. The dye room features a large vat resembling an industrial cooking pot, where they use an EHLS-approved respirator and stir the fabric with a wooden staff for 30 minutes.
Despite the physically demanding nature of their work, UCI’s Costume Shop offers students hands-on experience across multiple aspects of costume design — something that sets it apart from other shops.
Holly Poe Durbin, head of costume design at UCI, has visited costume shops worldwide, including in England, Italy and Germany. She highlights that UCI’s shop is unique in its all-in-one setup. While most metropolitan costume shops focus solely on construction or rentals, UCI’s shop integrates industrial sewing, garment storage, a dye room and a laundry facility.
“If you go to costume shops in New York or LA, they specialize more. So a commercial costume shop, where films are built or something like that, would not necessarily have a dye room. We might have to go to a shop that is just a dye shop or find specialty shops that do costume crafts,” Durbin told New University. “They specialize more. Some shops specialize more in tailoring for men and then others specialize in building creatures that walk around Disneyland.”
This hands-on training prepares them for diverse career opportunities in the field. Audiences can soon see their work in upcoming productions such as Dance Escape 2025, Physical Graffiti 2025, La Belle et la Bête, and Starmites.
Clara Carvalho is a Features Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at claraac@uci.edu.