Backstage in Blue

When the Riverside Theatre announced that it needed volunteers to organise its costume store, nineteen-year-old Nia expected a few weekends of folding clothes. She had recently started a design course and thought the job might give her ideas for future projects. On her first morning, however, she discovered three rooms packed from floor to ceiling with boxes. Labels such as “Victorian?” and “possibly 1970s” offered little guidance. The theatre had kept almost every costume used since the 1960s, but records were incomplete because different directors had stored items in different ways.

Nia’s first task was to photograph each costume and enter basic information into a new database. She soon learned that identifying clothes was harder than it looked. A jacket made for a play set in the 1920s might actually have been sewn in 1985; another costume might combine an old coat with modern buttons added for a later production. At first Nia wanted every entry to contain a precise date. The theatre’s costume manager, Marta, persuaded her to record uncertainty instead. “If we only write down what we can prove,” Marta said, “future people can make better decisions than if we pretend to know more than we do.”

The work became more interesting when directors started using the database. Before, they often asked staff to search physically through boxes for a red dress or a military-style coat. Now they could begin online, comparing photographs and measurements before visiting the store. This did not make the costume rooms unnecessary. Colours looked different on screen, fabrics had to be touched, and actors still needed fittings. But the database reduced wasted searching and made it easier to notice items that had not been used for years.

Nia also discovered that costumes changed when they returned to the stage. One plain black dress had appeared in four productions, each time with different belts, sleeves or jewellery. Seeing the photographs together made Nia rethink her idea of originality. At college, students were often encouraged to create something completely new. In the theatre, by contrast, success frequently came from adapting an existing object intelligently. Nia began to see this not as a lack of creativity but as a different kind of design skill, one that depended on understanding what an object could become.

Not every discovery was useful. The team found several costumes that were beautiful but too fragile to wear safely. Nia initially argued that they should be repaired for future performances. Marta disagreed. Restoring them heavily would remove much of the original material, while continued use might destroy them. They eventually placed the most delicate items in acid-free boxes and marked them “study only”. Nia was disappointed, yet she accepted that preserving a costume sometimes meant preventing it from doing the job it had been made for.

By the end of the summer, the store was still far from perfectly organised, but Nia no longer judged the project by how many boxes remained. The database had become useful, directors were borrowing forgotten pieces, and the team had established clearer rules for future storage. Nia had also changed her own plans. She still enjoyed designing clothes, but she now wanted to learn more about conservation and theatre history. What began as a practical volunteering job had shown her that designing for performance involves not only inventing new things, but understanding the lives of old ones.

The volunteers also began attaching short notes to unusual items: which fabrics were sensitive to light, which fastenings had been replaced, and which productions had altered a costume significantly. Nia found that these notes often answered questions photographs alone could not.