Costumers at Work: The Collaborative Creativity, Emotional Labour, and Technical Skill of Costume Creation explores the various forms of work carried out in the costume workshop by the myriads of skilled professionals who transform ideas and sketches into the wearable costumes seen on stage.

Costume work, as collective, collaborative, and material labour produced by a predominantly female workforce, has been long overlooked by the performance industry and those who study it. This book exposes the inherent tensions between theatre’s strict hierarchies and collaborative ideology and how these inform the structures negotiated day to day by costumers as they carry out their work. Through close attention to their work, the book establishes costumers’ work as collaborative and complex, a creative and emotional labour that contributes to enhanced storytelling, actor performance, and audience experience. Using extensive ethnographic observation conducted over 14 months at three professional theatre costume workshops around Australia, combined with extant interviews and research from across the globe, Costumers at Work provides explicit theories and guidance about the behaviours, skills, and communication modes that make costume collaboration more effective and enjoyable.

This book is written for costume researchers, practitioners, and students of theatrical costume design and construction, along with theatre scholars broadly.

Dr Madeline Taylor is both a creator and researcher of costume. A lecturer in Fashion at the Queensland University of Technology, her research focuses on contemporary costume practice, social engagement using clothing, and community-led circularity practices. This draws on two decades of experience in costuming for theatre, dance, opera, circus, contemporary performance, and film around Australia and the UK, and her creative practice as a co-director of Meanjin / Brisbane-based fashion and design group The Stitchery Collective. She has written about contemporary costume design, production and aesthetics, and alternative modes of engaging with, consuming, and displaying fashion and clothing in book chapters, conference proceedings and journal articles. These publications build on her diverse experience, including a 2010 research internship at the Victoria & Albert Museum under Research Fellow Donatella Barbieri and working as Australian Editor for World Scenography Project Vol II – 1990 – 2005. She is Book Reviews Editor for the international peer-reviewed journal Studies in Costume and Performance (Intellect), a co-director of TextileR, a QUT research group focused on circularity in fashion practice, and a 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow.