costuming

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of putting on a costume or dressing up.

   Backstage, the costuming took longer than anyone had expected.

   Between costumings, the reenactor switched from a Union soldier to a Confederate drummer boy.

   Note

   As a count noun it marks separate occasions of dressing up, each costuming a fresh guise put on and taken off. Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings: 1 (1996) turns that into a figure. A subject "stands naked between his costumings," and the person shows in the gaps between roles. Used uncountably, it names the whole business of getting into costume.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of costume.

   She is costuming the dancers in period dress for the opera.

   The studio spent months costuming the principal actors.

   Note

   Here the word still behaves like a verb. It takes a direct object, the people being dressed, as in costuming the dancers or costuming a cast in period garb. That object is the quickest way to tell it from the act of dressing up, which shares the spelling but is a true noun. The noun can take an article and a plural, costumings, and needs of before anyone it names.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Fabric and other materials used to make costumes.

   Bolts of costuming filled the shelves of the wardrobe department.

   The budget barely covered the costuming for the lead's three outfits.

   Note

   A cloth-trade word, built like suiting: the -ing names the fabric a garment is cut from, not an action. Charles and Alice Mary Hadfield's The Cotswolds: A New Study (1973) sets a firm's "men's suitings and ladies' costumings" side by side. As a count noun, the plural costumings means kinds or ranges of such material rather than amounts of it.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3