The Hat Room:

Where, obviously, the hats, masks, and helmets are stored. Jeannine Patane, a former shop manager (1994-96), made racks that have horizontal strings with attached clothes-pins that hold the hats by the dozens on each row without crushing them.

The Hat Room also doubles as the dye and laundry room.

Beyond the Hat Room is: The Unisex Bathroom, which is also the interspecies bathroom since it houses the cat box. The Unisex Bathroom is equipped with a shower, where students and faculty who get so "into" the Alaskan thing that they decide to rent a log cabin without water or electricity can get washed. It's always funny to arrive "first" in the morning, only to discover that the real "first" arrival, one of your colleagues, is greeting you in the bathroom saying, "Um, ah, could you hand me that towel?'' On the opposite end of the Costume shop is the...

Shoe Room, that has, thanks to lots of local donors a pretty good collection of shoes, as well as other costume accessories like corsets, lingerie, aprons, purses, etc. It also has our fun (though not terribly valuable) collection of antique and vintage clothing used for study purposes in the History of Fashion and Dress Class.
Also in the downstairs area are the

Men's and Women's Dressing Rooms

which double as classrooms, student scene rehearsal space, and naturally, makeup rooms. These rooms were furnished by the Theatre Department itself, using old pipe and lumber, Formica countertops, and bits of old wiring mainly. Somehow the building never came furnished with mirrors or counters for makeup. The Women's Dressing Room has long been called The Passion Pit because of a Guindon cartoon poster affixed to the door, in which a nerdy older man yells "PASSION!" like Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, to the astonishment of his dumpy wife in the next room. Two years ago somebody did a cartoon on the Men's door of a lizard-man in a tacky suit trying to pick up a space-alien girl in a bar which declared The Men's Dressing Room to be "The Lust Lounge-dedicated to the memory of Brian Bennett" a former student actor. The Women's Dressing Room is also home to my series of Faces paintings which are used as instructional aids in the Makeup Class.

My Office and Costume Library... ....are also downstairs. Actually, when I was first hired at UAF I made it a condition of employment that the department would provide me with enough industrial shelving to hold my books. They were a bit amazed when I sent them up by mail ahead of me--all 40 padded boxes worth. My office has been recently moved from it's old home to a new space where I can keep all my costume books in the one room.  I even bought wooden shelves to make the place look civilized. 

I stopped having the patience to count my costume books in graduate school, when I got up to 1000 books, magazines and pamphlets. My "Costume Books" are not all costume books, but lots of things that do the same job: Sears Catalogs from the 1930's 1940's and 1950's, Mexican domestic magazines of the 1920's and 1930's with patterns, Vogues from the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, Peterman, Frederick's, and Banana Republic Catalogs, Victorian Photography books, pamphlets from Colonial Williamsburg, Xeroxed copies of 19th and Early 20th Century tailoring manuals, Medieval and Renaissance art history books, anything, in fact with pictures, diagrams, or descriptions of clothes. These books can be checked out by students and are a supplement to the UAF Library, which is already the largest library in Alaska. Community members may borrow my books also, by paying a refundable deposit. My collection is particularly strong in Indigenous American dress both Indian and Eskimo, Siberian and Russian dress, civilian clothing during W.W.II, 18th Century dress, Hippie dress, Diagalev ballet costume, and historical patterns. Two floors up is the...

Upstairs Storage Room, 

a nice big costume stock room with a truly odd collection of stock.

  The former designer Jayna Orchard had a real knack for complex and well made Victorian dresses, so we have a lot of those, we have donated clothes of the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's in such profusion that for my first big show at UAF, As You Like It, I talked the director, Lee Salisbury into letting me do it c.1973 with the bad duke as Nixon, and the good duke as a hippie guru. 

There are also all the bizarre one of a kind things I've had to make for my fun crazy directors, Tom and Anatoly, who do things like "I see the play as a cross between a heavy metal rock concert and the Republican Convention", or "It's a children's musical for Christmas, with Santa, set in a Stalinist Gulag." Another big part of stock is a lot of donated formalwear, much of which is white 1950's tuxes with stains that show---unless you paint or dye something bright and outrageous on top.

Costume storage is laid out for the costume history impaired, by sorting clothes by type (skirts, long dresses, short dresses, capes & robes, shirts, etc.) not by period or style. Within the sections the clothes are divided by color, with color tags dividing the groups, just to make things clearer. However, like with all stock rooms, if you don't look in on it for a week, you find hot pink women's pants racked in with the men's blue jackets. Practicum Students who neglect to do their hours till the end of the semester, get to swelter in the heat with me up there during Stock Week, sorting the pants, folding the sweaters, and generally wishing they'd done their hours when they were supposed to.

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This Page is part of The Costumer's Manifesto by Tara Maginnis, Ph.D.  Copyright 1996-2010.   You may print out any of these pages for non-profit educational use such as school papers, teacher handouts, or wall displays.  You may link to any page in my site.