Peripheral Voices: The Costume Makers’ Labour from Within the Profession

Backstage people, their labour, and their collaboration processes within production teams are increasingly becoming part of scenographic scholarly discourse. This presentation introduces a study of the costume maker profession in the context of theatrical production in Greece. The paper revisits ethnographic research undertaken in 2010-12, during which interviews were conducted with 28 cutters, drapers, and seamstresses who worked at the Greek National Opera costume workshop in the period 1998-2012. The research concentrates on distinct features of the costume maker’s profession, such as the fragmentation and specialization of the work; the organizational complexity and related hierarchies; the affinity in the ways of working and the exchange of workers with the fashion field, in particular haute couture and custom dressmaking. The paper also examines the makers’ background, their training and special work conditions, including the need observed among Greek seamstresses to work until an old age. The study of the costume maker profession thus offers material for further sociological inquiry as a gender and class experience. The scope of this paper is to bring into scholarly discourse a peripheral site of theatrical production and to attempt an understanding of the costume makers’ work from within the profession.