The costume shop where Catherine Bradley teaches Costuming for the Theatre is tucked away in the basement of the busy McCall MacBain Arts Building.
“It’s not a well-known course, but the students that figure out that it’s here, find it to be really precious,” says Bradley, a faculty lecturer and head of wardrobe at Moyse Hall Theatre.
Students have been finding their way to Bradley’s Costuming for the Theatre I and II since she began teaching the courses at McGill in 1988.
The Department of English offers the courses in its Drama & Theatre stream, but they are open to students across the University. “I’ve had students in dentistry, or in theoretical math,” Bradley says. In fact, one of her former students, Linda Cho, BA’95, a psychology undergrad at the time, is now a highly accomplished costume designer with two Tony Awards to her name.
The courses cover a range of topics from fabrics and textiles to millinery (hat-making), costume breakdown, and draping techniques. Over the years, her students have typically prepared costumes for the fall and winter theatre productions staged by the Department of English. But this semester, Bradley has put a sustainability spin on Costuming for the Theatre II. “It’s quite different from usual,” she says.
With the garment industry among the worst polluters – and students concerned about fast fashion – the class aims to encourage sustainable fashion practices. By the end of the semester, each student will design and produce an eco-friendly fashion line. “Everything has to be either thrifted or repurposed, or sustainable in some way,” Bradley explains. If they dye clothes, they should use natural dyes.
They’re also learning the basics of machine and hand-sewing for their “Repair & Renew” assignment, which Bradley describes as a World War II-style project. During the war, the British government launched a campaign called ‘Make do and Mend,’ encouraging people to make their garments last, given the clothing shortage.
What appeals to students about the costuming course?
“I know exactly what it is,” Bradley says without hesitation. “They’re really starved for something creative and hands on.”
The course offers a chance to “exercise your creativity, learn a practical skill that you can actually use for the rest of your life, where it’s not only about costuming. It’s about how to use a sewing machine and how to make things and think in three dimensions,” says Bradley. “There are a lot of transferable skills that we can keep for our lifetime.”
‘A very welcoming environment’
Josie Strik, who is studying biodiversity and conservation in the Faculty of Science, loves to sew and is taking the course as an elective.
“It’s all practical hands-on work, which is the way I learn,” says Strik, “And the projects that we’re doing, they’re very tailored towards sustainability, which is also what I’m studying.
“I just love showing up to the classroom. It’s a very welcoming environment,” says Strik, who calls Bradley approachable, knowledgeable and invested in each of her students. “I have learned a lot from her.”
Avis Petrie, a psychology student with a minor concentration in theatre, has taken a few costuming courses with Bradley, including this semester.
Petrie wants the University to get the word out about the course, convinced it would be of interest to many more students. “I think that costuming is a very unique course at McGill,” they said.
“I remember in our first course together, which was about design, she talked a lot about period costuming, different eras and costuming details. And also, what do you use historicity for: so, when is it a good idea to put your actors all in historical dress and when do you decide that’s not needed,” Petrie says.
“[This is a course] where you can exercise your creativity [and] learn a practical skill that you can actually use for the rest of your life, where it’s not only about costuming.”
Catherine Bradley, head of wardrobe at Moyse Hall Theatre
If a director wants the costumes to be period accurate, then research is important, notes Bradley who would go through her PowerPoint on the Victorian era with students and sometimes seek out the help of Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill Libraries. “The people in Rare Books are fantastic and they’re willing to do things like pull out the Harper’s Bazaar catalog from 1880 and let the students look at it.”
Period costumes are the most technically complex, Bradley acknowledges. But the hardest assignments, she adds, are the highly conceptualized ones, like the time her class was asked to design a costume to portray God for a student production. “Directors will say those things: ‘Design God but not like anything we’ve ever seen before,’ those kinds of prompts.”
In that instance, the same actor had 27 seconds for a ‘quick change’: from a turtle costume into his God garb – a fisherman’s vest and hat.
Swan song for Bradley, an ‘unsung hero’
When she joined McGill, Bradley had carved out a successful freelance career as a costumer, working at the Stratford and Shaw theatre festivals and L’Opéra de Montréal, among other places. She has also done millinery work for film and TV productions.
The Faculty of Arts honoured Bradley in 2023 with the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, while a colleague nominated her as an unsung hero during McGill’s Bicentennial Celebrations. This semester will be Bradley’s last at McGill.
“It’s very important to both me and the Department that we maintain this course. I believe that somebody young, new and fabulous is going to come in and make it their own…I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t know that could happen.”
