Last week I went on a little excursion with my sewing class to Zurich, where we were given a behind the scenes tour of our teacher’s other workplace – the costume department at the opera house! I was blown away by the amount of work that goes into a production. Each costume is designed and sketched by hand, then patterns are drawn up from scratch and sewn, fitted, adjusted and sewn again. The sewing is almost all done by hand. Amazing. I had expected that the actual sewing would be done as quickly as possible to make sure the garments look good from a distance, but that isn’t the case at all. Every garment is painstakingly made to ensure it will survive numerous costume changes, as well as look good in film footage or close up photos. The variety of different costumes and the care with which they had been sewn was incredible.
Another thing that surprised me was the number of people it takes to put a show together. There are separate teams for mens clothes, womens clothes and ballet costumes. There’s an art department where they design and make accesories, or transform clothes to fit the particular storyline and a hat/wig/mask department. Last, but definitely not least impressive, is the costume storage area for all the shows that are currently being played. There are another 3 or 4 staff who work full time just to make sure that the costumes are properly organised and that everything is clean and in perfect order ready for the next evening’s numerous costume changes. When you start thinking about the set design, musicians, choreography, actors, etc etc it is not really surprising that the opera house employs 600 people!
Sounds incredible!