Unraveling Psychologically: Knitting in Performance Costume and the Themes of You Got Older (2015)

Abstract

The act of knitting within the practice of performance costume design and making remains largely unexplored within scholarship and yet hand-knitted garments feature regularly as key items of characters’ costumes in stage, television and film productions. While providing a pleasing esthetic dimension to a production’s look as well as conveying feelings of comfort and domesticity, seeing a character knit on stage can also point to themes of mental breakdown and a character’s attempts to order their world. This article explores not only these thematic concerns within Clare Barron’s play You Got Older (2015), but how the act of designing and knitting costumes for a text-based theatrical performance can support actors’ work to highlight a play’s dialogue and writing. It also discusses how hand-knitted costumes and props can allow audiences to make sense of the symbolic and material worlds of a play and provides designers with greater insights into how the systems and processes of knitting can help to create and represent these worlds.