A Pattern Language for Costumes in Films - IAAS

Degree of
Stereotype
in Clothing
(Stock Characters)
Pattern
Focus
Authenticity
(by Creativity)
Role Understanding
(by Categorizing through
Media Socialization)
Degree of Individuality
in Clothing (Main Cast)
Figure 1: The costume pattern approach aims at fast role understanding through usage of established conventions of
clothing in films.
Figure 2 depicts an overview of the interrelations between concrete costumes and costume patterns. The
interrelations are originating from a set of concrete costumes which have been used in films which had
significant impact on the establishment of clothing conventions for a particular genre. In other words, these
are costumes which have been used for famous roles, like ‘Sheriff John Chance’ in the film ‘Rio Bravo’
(1959). In this paper we show how a set of concrete costumes can be abstracted into a costume pattern by
identifying commonalities, similarities, and multiple occurrences of particular costume primitives. Through
abstraction, the concrete costumes become ‘known uses’ of the costume pattern. Going one step further, the
identified costume pattern can be applied as conceptual basis for the design of a new Sheriff costume. The
creative aspect of applying a pattern is to create a costume design which reflects requirements derived from
the characteristics of the role, actor, screenplay and desired authenticity. Many decisions need to be made
when applying a costume pattern. Concretization refers to these decisions, which includes for example
deciding on concrete fabrics of costume primitives.
Concrete Costumes
(Sheriffs in Western Films)
Costume Pattern
(Wild West Sheriff)
Abstraction
Known Use
Applying and
Concretization
Pattern‐based
Costume Design
(New Sheriff)
Figure 2: A costume pattern originates from abstraction of concrete costumes; vice versa, the concrete costumes
become known uses of the costume pattern.
The paper’s further structure is the following. In Section 2 we illustrate different scenarios which show the
benefits of the approach in different application areas. In Section 3 we present the literature survey we
conducted and the research design that we applied to design the overall costume pattern language. In
Section 4 we discuss the format of costume primitives. Afterwards, in Section 5 we describe the costume
pattern format that we use as formal model to describe costume patterns. Then, in Section 6 we elaborate on
the composition operators we propose as grammar for describing the composition of complex costume
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