Costume design starts from the written character, then chooses colour, texture and silhouette so that person can be found in the frame. That is the argument of a Victoria and Albert Museum gallery panel for the exhibition Hollywood Costume. The PDF of the panel text was read on 15 October 2026. The photograph here is folded cloth on a rail. It is not a film still and it is not a portrait.
The 2012 Broadway revival record shows what a costume credit looks like on a stage database: Paul Tazewell, costume design, and a 2012 Tony nomination for Best Costume Design of a Play. The museum panel explains the kind of decision that credit is meant to cover.
The screenplay comes first
The panel says costume design in film has a narrative job and a visual job, and that it begins with the screenplay. Fashion, it says, is made for a three-dimensional room. A film costume is seen inside a flat moving image. Colour, texture and silhouette are the pieces of that image.
The panel quotes MGM designer Adrian in 1938. Adrian’s point, as the panel prints it, is that a gown can be planned to mirror a definite mood and to belong to the play as much as the lines or the scenery do. Viewers may only notice that the dress is attractive. The planning is still there.
The designer has to know who the character is before the clothes exist. The panel says the designer draws on art, literature, nature, music, memory and other films, and works with the director and the actor. Nothing on screen is casual. Every accessory is a deliberate choice. Period films, modern films and fantasy films all need research, because the audience is asked to believe the people had a life before the first scene.
Colour that hides or shows
The panel uses Jason Bourne as a composition example. The people in the story stay in the centre of the frame, and the colour of the costume lets the audience find the actor. The director chooses whether to conceal or reveal. Bourne’s survival, the panel says, depends on being hard to see, so the costume is camouflage grey and is designed to disappear into a crowd.
A second checklist on the same panel is practical. Costumes have to fit the weather, the location, the date and the genre. The panel also quotes designer Ellen Mirojnick on contemporary clothes: because everyone gets dressed in the morning, audiences think they already know modern dress, and the designer has to work harder so those clothes disappear into the story.
A close-up can make a cuff, a lapel or a piece of jewellery do the explaining. The panel calls those details social and emotional signposts. Opulent fashion, when it does not belong, can wreck a serious scene. When the clothes fit the character’s past, the audience believes the mood, the taste and the aim.
A stage credit beside a film panel
The museum text is about film. A stage costume credit is a different document, but it answers a similar question: who decided what the characters wore. On the IBDB page for the 2012 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, read the same day, that name is Paul Tazewell, with Sara Jean Tosetti as associate costume designer and Sarah Cubbage as assistant costume designer. The Tony line on that page is a nomination for Best Costume Design of a Play, not a description of any garment.
This note does not describe a fitting, a measurement or a private conversation. Those are not in the panel text used here, and they are not in the IBDB credit line. The style section stops at the published method: start from the character on the page, then let colour, cloth and silhouette do a job the audience can see.