Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2013 - 70

book

review

but it is her costume illustration collaborators who have entries.
"Head appreciated that fine artists could showcase her ideas best,"
Landis writes. "These illustrators, many of them distinguished motion picture costume designers in their own right, included: Adele Balkan, Waldo
Angelo, Pat Barto, Grace Sprague, Donna Petersen, Leah Rhodes, Renie
Conley, Marilyn Sotto, Rudi Gernreich, Richard Hopper, and Bob Mackie,
among others. Although none of these illustrators shared a signature with
Head, their work is mostly identifiable by their own style and the decade in
which it was produced."
Landis worked diligently to find and preserve costume sketches and
renderings, attending auctions, searching through garages and archives, and
likely even doing some dumpster diving! As she says, they should be more numerous, given the number of films made, but they have not been systematically
preserved until relatively recently in personal collections and archives.
The 63-page introduction should be required reading for anyone interested in a career in the movies, either as a designer or as an illustrator
(and perhaps any aspect of filmmaking). The rest of the book should be
required looking for anyone who loves art, design, craft and the people
who practice them. And the endpapers deserve reading as well. They contain signatures and union stamps of notable costume designers and illustrators, such as Cecil Beaton, Orry Kelly, René Hubert, Travilla, Ann Roth,
Adrian, Julie Weiss, and many more.

theatre design

& technology

Thanks, Deborah! Keep up the good work documenting and celebrating costume design through your books and exhibitions and commitment to educating the next generation.
Bobbi Owen is a professor of dramatic art at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches costume design
and costume history and serves as senior associate dean for
undergraduate education. She edited late and Great: american
Designers 1960-2010, USITT's 50th anniversary monograph.

Basic Sewing for Costume Construction
A Handbook, Second Edition

By Rebecca Cunningham. Long Grove, IL, Waveland Press, 2012. 168
pages, illustrations. Loose-leaf binder, $27.95.
Reviewed by Martha A. Marking
Brooklyn College Professor Emerita
Rebecca Cunningham has revised
her Basic Sewing for Costume
Construction: A Handbook (See
TD&T, Vol. 42, No. 2, Spring, 2006,
for a review of the first edition). In
the new introduction, Cunningham
has added information about the
origins of sewing techniques and
the practitioners who use them,
and she identifies the differences
between stitching for commercial, couture, home sewing, and theatre.
This edition has several features that have improved upon the first
edition. The bolding of capitalized headings helps the practitioner identify
important terms more easily. The manner in which the illustrations are
now shaded allows the samples to stand out more easily from the page.
The author has provided a vertical space to mount samples next to the
comparable vertical illustrations.
Another improvement is allowing one sample per page, which is less
confusing for students trying to identify the differences between two or
more samples on the same page. Providing the dimensions to prepare the
samples is an added benefit for this edition, as well as new information
on the use of thimbles. To carry this idea further, it would be helpful if the
author included the dimensions and numbers of samples needed at the
beginning of each chapter.
Instead of having large paragraphs, as was more common in the first
edition, the written instructions are broken down into smaller segments.
Larger samples have been allowed for more regularly in this edition, especially early in the book. Larger spaces for some of later samples and the
inclusion of a space for a zipper sample would be beneficial. Other than the
stylistic changes previously mentioned, many illustrations are the same as in
the first edition. Some, such as the two-hole button illustration, are clearer.

s p r i n g 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2013