Also in the theater, on top of budget limitations, there is also the consideration of what is going to be seen by the audience, both in the front row and the "cheap seats" Lighting, director's vision, and just the present-time aesthetics also play a big part.
Costume budgets have always been a relatively small part of the total budget in historically-set films. In the multi-disc DVD version of Room With a View, costume designer Jenny Bevan remarks on the difficulty on working with small budgets and what you can even source--she mentions that during the '70's everything was polyester. What the costume designer or costume department wants to do and what ends up on stage and screen has almost always been a compromise. We have to remember that mass-market pattern suppliers are marketing to a wide audience and what will sell is what comes first. So what is relatively easy to make and looks attractive to the modern eye trumps authenticity more often than not. What most of us couldn't afford to today is the amount of money people in the past had to spend on a single outfit. One noble person's single ensemble,during the reign of Elizabeth I, for court wear, could cost as much as a Porshe or more today. And would we want to have to work with lengths of expensive fabrics as narrow as 21" wide? Cindy Abel _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
