How can we secure broad, deep, relevant and advanced competence for the costume designer of the future? This question has been a key question for me during the past six years. I started teaching as Professor in Costume Design at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO) in 2013, the same institution at which I myself had studied ten years earlier. In Norway, costume design studies are part of a joint programme with fashion in the design department of KHIO.Upon starting my new role in 2013, the costume design part of the study had been on hold for some time: there were very few students interested in costume and no mandatory courses. My work instructions were: ‘your responsibility includes everything concerning costume design on both the bachelor and master level’. I set to work. 

At that time, fashion and costume studies at KHIO were artefact-based with emphasis on aesthetics, i.e. value judgments connecting material, form and techniques. My fashion design colleagues often said: ‘Clothes are clothes’. By this, they meant that a garment is primarily a designed object and how the garments are used is not the main question. The argument was, that the competency requirements for the two types of designers (fashion designers and costume designers) were the same. I expressed my disagreement here, as I see costume as a complex, dynamic entity consisting of four components: body, garment, action and context (Figure 5.4.1). This was the start of the process of defining what kind of competence elements a costume-design education should provide. In order to do this, I needed a tool: a list, accessible to everyone, that would make visible the competencies required by a costume designer. I called it the ‘Golden List’ of Competence in Costume. In this article I present the list and the discussions on the content of the list, taking place both in natinoal and internationally contexts.

Description of the book: 

Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance.

This anthology draws on the experience of a global group of established researchers as well as emerging voices. Below is a list of just some of the things it achieves:

1. Introduces diverse perspectives, innovative new research methods and approaches for researching design and the costumed body in performance

2. Contributes towards a new understanding of how costume actually 'performs' in time and space.

3. Offers new insights into existing practices, as well as creating a space of connection between practitioners and researchers from design, the humanities and social sciences.