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Our costumes: What Goes into the Design Process?
Apr
Costumes play an essential and integral part of any performance. It complements the music and movements and makes the performance more exciting and interesting. Try to imagine a Lion King performance without any animal costumes. We know how important costumes are to your performance. And so, our costumes take our designers countless hours to design, perfect and produce.
To get an idea of what the process looks like from inception to completion, we invite you behind the scenes for a quick overview of Children’s Costume Specialist’s design process.
Even with over 1,000 unique products already available in their system, CCS is constantly designing and producing new items. The first step to creating a new product – say a sequin performance dress, for example – is to “forecast” one to two years in advance.
Everything starts with the fabric. We look at what the current trends in fabrics are and then forecast what the trends might be then. We also take into consideration colors, prints and silhouettes, and try to incorporate that into our costumes as well.
Traveling to tradeshows around the world, the CCS team keeps a tab on global color trends and overall fabric options. Once the research is complete, then the fabric selections are made. Fabric selection itself is a huge part of the process. Experience and understanding of not only trends but children’s likes and dislikes is an integral part of fabric selection. For example, pink is generally lovely for girls, but boys tend to shy away from that colour. Yet matching boys and girls costumes have to.. match! We solve this by using special colour charts and meticulously curating complimentary fabrics that are suitable for both boys and girls.
Once selections are made, the design process begins and our team of designers begin to sketch and brainstorm different looks. Once a new design is conceptualised, we make some alterations and improvements. We ensure that both the boys and girls costumes match perfectly. Once a design is finalized, it moves on to the sample phase. A sample is manufactured and if we are not pleased with the product, we will make alterations again. This process is repeated as many times as necessary so that the look of our costumes is exactly how we want them to be. Once the samples and design is perfect, we move forward straight into production.
Our production lines are all over the world. We have, or work with production facilities in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Vietnam. Different facilities specialise in different fabrics and designs. This way, we bring you the best quality and workmanship in our costumes.
So teachers, the next time you view our costumes, be sure to appreciate all the work and expertise that goes into each piece! We at Children’s Costume Specialist really put a lot of love, sweat and glamour into each of your performance pieces!