ABSTRACT
This brief postlude turns to etymology, exploring the links between the terms “custom” and “costume” to recap how the custom of costume changed over the century covered in this book. It takes up and expands Kenneth MacGowan’s claim that the stage designer is quintessentially “a modern product.” Writing in 1923, he meant that the designer as understood in this period was a relative newcomer to the theatrical process, compared to playwrights and actors. I examine the ways we can also see the costume designer as a key part of modernism, or key to the modernist project. Costumes ask us to pay attention to the body as site of self-fashioning and self-expression, to consider the relationship of inside and outside, and to question whether identity is fixed or mutable. In the change in the custom of costume design, I suggest, we can see refracted the revolution of modernism itself.
