March 2020: Tartuffe

Costume designs for Tartuffe by Molière.

This project was part of my studies at Edinburgh College of Art. The assignment was to create a set of costume designs for a modernised version of Tartuffe using only premade garments and keeping to a strict budget. My focus was on effective costumes which would be easy to source second hand. Character designs were focused on general items and colour blocking, mapping characters' alignments and personality traits onto colour palettes.

A collage illustration of a young man. The collage is cut mainly out of close up photos of fabric. The man has a denim jacket, a yellow shirt, a blue scarf, blue trousers and yellow Timberland boots. His eyes are of two different colours. A collage illustration of a woman. She is sitting in a sporty wheelchair and wears a short yellow dress and yellow gloves, red tassle earrings and red high heels.

Above: Tartuffe, Elmire.
Below: Cléante, Orgon, Mariane.

A collage illustration of a man. The collage is cut mainly out of close up photos of fabric. The man is wearing a light blue paisley shirt, yellow trousers, dark socks with flowers on them, and brown leather monkstrap shoes. His arms are crossed. A collage illustration of a man. The collage is cut mainly out of close up photos of fabric. The man is wearing a dark red shirt with a red tie, dark jeans and low red sneakers. One corner of his shirt is untucked. A collage illustration of a young woman. She is wearing a sleeveless red dress shaped close to her body, with a large ruffle falling down from the top hem, finishing above her knees. She has yellow sandals, her nails painted red, and wears a pearl hairpin.

The play takes place over the course of a family gathering in the vacation home of a upper-middle class Swedish family. I played around with character interpretations to make a more dynamic and modern family. Tartuffe is here a much younger man, making his intentions more difficult to decipher and his relationship to Elmire and the other family members more complex.