Can bad costumes do good things?
Written as a short afterword to the book:
This book offers a thesis on costume as insubordinate; as a denial of the prevailing authorities of costume, performance and fashion. By way of an afterword, I ask can bad costumes do good things? Any notion of ‘bad’ (as unwelcome, incorrect, harmful) is of course conceptualised in relationship to a judgement criterion. Bad is always bound to scales of good. Good is a success, the planned, or a desirable outcome. Good costumes behave well. Bad costumes enable behaviours that are unwelcome, undesirable, or outside of quality standards. Costumes can behave badly when they either perform in unexpected manners or solicit actions from the wearer that are read as ill-advised or even criminal. Badly assembled costumes result from a perceived failure of technique or selection of materials, which may even result in collapse, breakage or malfunction. Any discussion of bad costume is therefore a discussion on how costumes are judged to behave in line with expectations, whether agreed or implicit. Yet, I want to suggest that bad costumes can reveal the work of costume that may have otherwise been unseen or dismissed as frivolous. Bad costumes can offer a method for investigating how costumes are judged, understood, and politicised.
