“Mama,--song”
I’m Devon Horn.
I’m the costume designer for Cabaret and I worked in the costume shop since Freshman
year.
I’m a theatre/studio art double major with a concentration in costumes.
I started doing costume design for international thespian society in middle school and I absolutely
felt in love with it and I have pursued it as a passion.
I realized that it could be a career when I was watching Project Runway and I decided
that was what I wanted to do and so I’ve been following that path ever since I got
to college.
So now it’s my senior year and my thesis is costume design for Cabaret which I’m
very excited about.
I love the sort of ridiculousness of it and the fact that you have this really contrast
between the harshness of the real world and this distraction of the show and you get kind
of be silly and have fun and also be serious at the same time.
It’s a really good combination and I love the era.
All of it is kind of gut reaction in terms of colours and everything but there’s a
ton of research that goes into the historical context, the era.
Over the summer, when I was doing my research, I read, I think, 16 or 17 books about the
era and the Weimar Republic and, then like Sear’s catalogues from the time, and various
other things that kind of get you into the feeling of the era and the shape of everything
and that sort of deal.
Collaborating with all of the other designers plays a really key role because, you know,
the choreography has to match what they’re wearing because if they can’t move in the
costumes then the choreography doesn’t work.
And if the colors of the set clash with the colors of the costumes then that would be
visually disorienting.
So, you really have to communicate with each other and make sure that everything is matching
up and meshing in a way that’s visually appealing and also practical for the actors
and the production as a whole.
Other factors that influence my design are definitely the perspective of the modern audience
because there’s a lot of symbolism, specifically in a show like Cabaret where they’re referencing
these cultural atrocities that happened.
There’s a lot of imagery that’s used that has been used in later times again and again
– in other shows but also in the real world and you have to keep in mind what that imagery
meant at that time and also what it could mean now.
So, it’s really important to make sure that the show is still coming across to the modern
audience as it was intended to come across to the audience of, say, the ‘60s when the
show was first produced.
Suzanne is the costume shop manager.
She’s amazing.
So, Suzanne runs the costume shop which means that all the wonderful employees and volunteers
that we have at the costume shop are the ones that end up actually creating the costumes
that I design.
I’ve been working at the costume shop so I’m able to have an indepth knowledge of
what we are able to produce but Suzanne is the person that’s sort of like the liaison
between the design and the final product.
A lot of the process in costume design involves using what we already have and using what
we can find.
It would be absolutely ridiculous for me to ask the costume shop to build the entire show.
There are things that just make more sense to buy like men’s suits and overcoats and,
you know, Nazi uniforms.
Those are pieces that other people have in stock that we can access or we can rent or
there’s a lot of things that we can buy or that we already have in our own stock from
past productions that make it into the show, kind of get a new life that way.
“7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Happy New year”
So, during my time at Pomona I’ve learned so so much about costume construction and
the way things work backstage.
There’s been some really fascinating things that I’ve learned just from working in the
costume shop and being able to be wardrobe head backstage has really helped me as well
because that was definitely a learning experience as well and I think that it’s really given
me a lot of lot of experience.