Costume shop prepares for upcoming play

This week and next week, the CSB+SJU theater department premieres Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — and costume designer Dayna Wiley is behind the leather corsets.

Ahead of the show’s premiere on Nov. 9, Wiley and her coworkers at the costume shop remain busy making mock-ups, fitting patterns and working on alterations.

This is her fifth semester with the shop, so she’s been tasked with creating a more difficult item: the leather corsets that the characters of the fairies Moth, Cobweb, Peaseblossom and Titania wear. It’s Wiley’s first time working with leather as a material, and it hasn’t been without its struggles.

“The fabric doesn’t usually bend. It’s been a very big learning curve,” Wiley said.

The CSB junior double majors in biology and classical studies and has been sewing since she was five. Wiley once spent four months making her own prom dress.

She also has a background in theater tech, which involves building the set, adjusting it to the lights and blocking. Now, as student supervisor of the costume shop, Wiley has enlarged her skill set both with “hard” skills like clothes alteration and “soft” skills like problem solving and patience.

“The costume shop really exemplifies the liberal arts experience… it provides you [with] a bunch of different opportunities in all walks of life and brings together such a diverse group of people,” Wiley said.

Wiley works two to three hours a day with both hand sewing samplers and machine sewing samplers. Machine sewing holds the upper hand in efficiency, but hand sewing allows for greater autonomy. Wiley uses both methods equally but chooses to hand sew items when she wants more control with the final product.

“When you do the stitching by hand, you can make it almost invisible,” Wiley said.

Employees must go through training where they learn different hand stitches. Many of these stitches center around attaching buttons, snaps and hooks. The costume shop attracts students of all skill levels.

“We have some people that come in who have made a quilt in the past, some people who have made a dress in the past and some people who have never held a needle or thread at all,” Wiley said.

Wiley is one of three designers who will be working the wardrobe crew for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” this semester.

This involves helping the actors quickly change between scenes. Two people help one person undress, redress and change hair and makeup. The process, Wiley describes, is akin to dressing up a Barbie doll.

Other than fitting and fine-tuning, Wiley has learned another valuable skill: sustainability. The theater department typically puts on two shows a semester, one of which they’ll rely heavily on costumes already in storage. Then, for the second show, the costume shop modifies or makes a lot of clothes, which can also be reused in the future. Wiley also occasionally uses the costume shop to alter clothes that she thrifts.

“Generally, society is going in a direction where people don’t make things for themselves, specifically with fast fashion,” Wiley said. “Everybody consume[s] things, but when something breaks or tears, they throw it away because they don’t know how to fix it. If everybody learned how to do the basic sewing to fix a button or fix a hole, then we could decrease the waste.”