Blog 3

My undergraduate major is “Hair, the Make – up and Prosthetics for Performance”. The reason why I chose “Navigating Through Clothing” is that when I was doing professional courses, I used to have a lot of ideas about costumes. But since I only learned about makeup and didn’t know anything about costumes, it was difficult for me to improve my ideas. I chose this theme because I wanted to learn more about costumes, to get a complete picture of how the whole character is designed and executed, to improve and develop my ideas.

In the lecture of better lives, I came up with the idea of making costumes out of vintage clothes, which is combined with the theme of “sustainable development”. In the process of research, I found that a lot of clothes were discarded because of burning, but in my opinion, those clothes were exactly in line with the character setting of “poor and miserable” of the protagonist of my story. So I came up with the idea of using burned clothing to complete part of the costume. The costumes are made in this way, low cost and in line with the character image, and easy to make, consistent with the theme of sustainable development.

Then I made a collage of my character’s image, choosing some old clothes that had been burned as part of the costume, as well as some patched fabrics. But though the characters’ clothes are shabby, they are well-groomed. I think it’s part of the completion of the fairy tale. Throughout the fairy tale, the candy house and the end result are beautiful, so in my opinion, it is necessary to maintain some respectability in the costumes.

Due to the covid-19 crisis, people are isolated at home and cannot go to the fabric market or the antique market to select suitable goods. This special period made me focus on the fabric around me. Doesn’t the best “sustainable development” start with the little things around us? I looked at the fabric in my home and found that some textures were very suitable for the costumes. I think this kind of work is very special. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t been isolated at home.

The subject of “Navigating Through Clothing” has enabled me to do a lot of different things in my life today. Before I got into better lives, I had no idea how to complete a costume. When fairy tales really need me to design clothes, I feel a lot of pressure. Before that, I thought it was easy to design costumes, because many plays already had perfect costume models. But when I really began to research, I found that costume design can be imaginative, and all the fantasy can be completed here. Despite the pressure, my design is free and happy. And when we analyze the script, there will be a sense that the characters are really around, and we need to explore and understand their hearts, which is really different from what I thought before.

All in all, I think my course is very helpful to my undergraduate major and is a very correct choice.