Dress the Show
A Basic Costume Book

by Daty Healy

Text, 9" x 12". 98 pp with 44 full page plates. Spiral wire binding. $ 9.95

Every group that puts on plays needs a book on costume. It should be filled with easy-to-follow patterns that can be adapted to fit many needs, a book that deals practically with fabrics and accessories, and tells you how to adapt commercial patterns to costume requirements, a book that illustrates period designs and tells how to achieve them without going bankrupt.

Dress the Show is the book. And its particular bonus for costumers working with young people is that includes not only the vests and jackets and capes that everybody needs, but also animals and flowers and other fantastic characters that are the special challenges of children's plays. Here's where to find precise instructions for making a comb for a rooster, fairy wings, and a headdress for a violet.


This is a most excellent and encouraging book for the costumer working in any and all branches of the non-commercial theatre. In simple, clearly ordered terms, Dress the Show offers a sophisticated range of information. Basic pattern-making, the essentials of painting, dyeing and ornamenting, the basic supplies necessary to a costume workroom, descriptions of the characteristics of fabrics--these are but a few examples of the help provided. I only wish I'd had this book when I was starting off in my own Off-Broadway, ad hoc workroom. It would have spared me much grief and loss of time that inexperience gets one into. Dress the Show would have been my Bible.
Patricia Zipprodt, Costume Designer
for Ballet, Broadway, Opera and TV