Lenses of costume design analysis

As with all other aspects of a filmic narrative, there are many different creative arts that are combined to tell the story. All these elements may be handled by different artists with different areas of expertise, but ideally they are all practicing their crafts together in concert to serve the vision in whatever way they can. And they can do even more than the more notional elements of the story. As I like to say, the script is god, but aesthetics are king— all the story elements may have been created with the text, but the more sensory elements, such as the visuals, have a more immediate impact on the audience, and therefore a more visceral power to influence the audience’s perception.

Costuming design is one of these visual elements. Based on any number of qualities of clothing, a costumer can influence the way the viewer understands the characters, and convey any amount of information about the ideas, emotions, directions, connections, and conflicts of the story. This can be a subjective matter, often more a matter of suggestion and subject, but people tend to absorb ideas this way even if they can’t articulate them. When it comes to these ideas, costuming tends to work through two approaches— the diegetic, and the semiotic.

Diegetic costuming deals with the idea that these are the clothes the characters chose to wear within the world of the story. Any meaning comes out of the notions that these are characters dressing themselves, choosing their clothes due to who they are as people, what their circumstances are like, what their lives are like— largely in the manner that real people do. Costuming is much more curated than people’s everyday dressing choices, of course, and so can be trusted to be much more meaningful indicators than what a real person might wear on any given day. But from this school of thought, the designer works based on what a person like this character would choose to wear, given the nature of their personality and their circumstances. Therefore, you, the viewer, can use these choices to learn about who the characters are and what their lives are like, within the world of the narrative.

By contrast, semiotic costuming deal with the idea that costuming can be used to send messages the author wishes for the audience to receive, independently from anything a character decides deliberately or accidentally to wear. These are choices made simply for their narrative meaning, as opposed to the considerations a character would naturalistically take into account when selecting clothing. We might say this is where costuming choices become symbolic, indicating the themes, ideas, motifs, and meanings of the story that the characters wouldn’t necessarily be conscious of.

The line between these two approaches can blur, depending on how conscious a storyteller wants to make the characters of the communication inherent in clothing. Theoretically a character could be making a costuming choice in-universe to send a semiotic message. But it’s useful to have a grasp of the difference between these two approaches, because it helps identify possibilities for meaning beyond the confines of the character’s own naturalistic understanding of clothes.

In addition to these diegetic and semiotic concerns, there’s also the production level to be taken into consideration. This is when the forces of practicality, business, and finance necessitate certain design choices more than any narrative interest. Occasionally this refers to when the vagaries of life get in the way of theory— getting clothes on the bodies of the actors, working within the budget, dealing with the physical reality of acting in the costume, what items are within the designer’s access. While in an ideal world designers make all their choices because they do the most to serve the story, there are always going to be practical concerns.

When I am analyzing costumes, referring to the reason for and significance of any given costume choices, I attribute it to forces acting on various different levels of the piece. I think it’s good to be clear on that before performing any examination, so that the lens of approach is clear.