Resources for Students and Academics

[labricoleuse]

A quick update to point out a couple of resources of interest to those in costume careers or those wishing to pursue higher education in costuming:

Of particular interest, a resource that would have saved me SO much trouble as an undergraduate, is the Survey of Costume Programs. It lists all the school in the US and a few abroad that have costuming-oriented degree programs, both undergraduate and graduate. Each school's entry has the types of degrees offered, areas of focus (i.e., design, tailoring, history, etc), faculty/staff, contact info, and links to the programs' websites. My only criticism is that at present the programs are listed by region and alphabetically by school, but no search function by which one might, say, look for every school listed that offers an MFA in Costume Technology, or a BA with a costuming focus, etc.

The Costar Vintage Clothing and Costume Archive is an online compendium of the antique and vintage clothing in the collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Playmakers Repertory Company. It's a searchable archive of actual vintage clothing from 1800 to the present, each entry of which has detailed interior photographic documentation of construction methods, and some of which have accompanying research papers about the garment written by students in the UNC-CH Masters program in Costume Technology. I know they've got about 10 times as much stuff waiting to get entered into the database as is already in there, but the site's fun to surf through and the structure is one that other organizations wishing to create web archives of their own collections may wish to study.

Comments

[thedeathrockgrl.livejournal.com]

Wow-you just saved me a bunch of time-I was looking for the phone number for the woman in charge of permission to take costuming classes at Mason Gross, with little success, on the Rutgers website. And there is was, on that survey site! I wish it was more searchable, as well, since I want to find a costuming history program. For the theorectical future, anyway.

The second site was helpful too, since I know the museum I volunteer at is looking to, eventually, better catalogue and display it's massive collection of clothes and sundries. None of the 'links to text' seemd to be working for me though.

Anyway-Thanks!

[thatjazz.livejournal.com]

While the USITT site is good in thought, it isn't really the best. I know the stuff about my school is really inaccurate. As for "Areas of Focus", we don't do ANY pattern making, and there's one really basic stage makeup course that's geared more towards actors. Additionally the 500 seat theater is almost never allowed for student use, and there hasn't been an equity summer program in 3 years (it has since been moved to another school).

So I encourage people using this site to pick a school to go straight to the source and find out if these facts are correct.

[labricoleuse.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing that out! Yes, a major caveat to the USITT site is that they leave it up to the individual schools listed to make sure their information is current and correct. Sounds like no one's revised the info for your program in some time. Of course, if they had a "last updated" section for each school as well, that'd at least help with knowing how current the info is.