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There's a ceremony, to taking on and off clothing. In theatre, it's very ritualistic, always has been. Everybody has a ritual: the putting on of a costume is a ritual, the taking off of a costume is a ritual, because it helps you to get in and out of a character. So, once you're in costume, you're in character. And once you're out, you can be yourself.
-Peter Brown
Clothing can seem easily distinguishable from the person that wears it. This seems largely due to the material differences between embodied self and cloth: one being flesh, the other made by human hands, an artifice added to the surface of the self.1 As much is suggested by British actor Peter Brown's recollection of wearing theatrical costume, in the epigraph beginning this article: he describes the putting on and removal of costume as a ritual facilitating entry into and exit from a character. Clothing and character are here enfolded, a collapse signified by Brown's subsequent remark that "you do not want to take [certain characters] home with you. It's best to leave them in the dressing room" (2016).
Yet how extricable are clothes from the embodied self and, by extension, costumes from the performers who wear them? Sociologist Joanne Entwistle, in her pivotal work The Fashioned Body, argues that dress is a "situated bodily practice," one in which the social, cultural, and personal significance of dress intertwines in the habitual wearing of clothes (2015, 29). This foregrounds the ways in which the embodied self is a clothed self, and why therefore, a consideration of embodied being-in-the-world should also include the ways in which clothing structures and shapes experience. As Stella North argues, "body and clothing not only partake of materiality but, being inseparable, partake of it jointly" (2014, 10).
Considering clothing as an integral aspect of embodied experience can be usefully brought to bear on the under-researched area of costume. Whilst on stage, a performer must negotiate dual states of experience: fulfilling the requirements of their role-playing their character; performing with efficacy, focus and intention, and so on-demonstrating what anthropologist and folklorist Richard Bauman calls "communicative competence" (cited in Fitzpatrick 1995, 51); and attending to the needs, limits, and perceptions of their embodied self. Costume, in ordering...