Kathy Udaondo Lennon

 

"This project investigates the intricate connection between belonging and identity, exploring how environments shape our sense of self and thinking about the boundaries between the individual and others. It questions belonging as an ideal, presenting it instead as an embodied process of craftsmanship, repetition, and return. Additionally, it examines how identity is reconstructed after leaving a place of belonging or breaking long-held beliefs.

The themes are explored through The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir, which follows Silvie and Andrée, two girls in post-war France navigating societal expectations. Silvie ultimately reconstructs her identity by rejecting these norms, while Andrée remains confined by them, leading to her gradual decline. At its heart, the story reflects the tension between living for oneself and living for others." Kathy Udaondo Lennon

Kathy Udaondo is a costume designer and maker originally from the Basque Country. She completed an MA in Costume Design for Performance in 2025 at the London College of Fashion and won the Linbury Prize, after working primarily in wardrobe departments for film. She is now focusing on live performance, her practice explores the intersection between costume and set, focusing on the dialogue between people and their surroundings. She designs with functionality at the core, ensuring that garments are embedded in the action of the character and that aesthetics emerge naturally from purpose. She works with deadstock fabrics and zero-waste patterns, approaching each project with sensitivity to both materials and context. 

Rien Bekkers

Rien Bekkers is one of the most renowned costume designers in the Netherlands and, for forty years, has worked as a costume designer for a.s. ‘Toneelgroep Amsterdam’, the Nederlandse Opera and a large number of foreign productions. Since 1980 is an independent clothing designer for large and small subsidized groups in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany with prominent Dutch directors.

He has worked on more than 150 theatre, ballet, opera performances and film productions.

The most fascinating thing about Bekkers’ design is the tension between the past and the present: it’s always on its way to the new, the unknown and unprecedented, while still being seduced by beauty and enchanted by the imagination. It is inspired by several historical styles that reflects and interprets in its own way guided by the love of craftsmanship. He never just copies. The garment of a particular era serves only as a starting point. Bekkers doesn't think it's dusty to design costumes that often have to look like they were worn hundreds of years ago. On the contrary, he looks for ways to update historical garment.

"My job is to give the actor a feeling that fits his role." “I use beautiful, high-quality fabrics, combined with good panties,” Bekkers continues.

His creativity flourished on the fashion course at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. There, during an internship at Toneelraad Rotterdam  (the precursor to the current Ro Theatre) he discovered his love of costume design. "I am an inventor. I find inspiration everywhere. In a flattened aluminium tube I see a collar.".

After forty years in the profession, Rien Bekkers is far from finished and has shifted his attention to objects of art. “Now I’m making my job my hobby again.” Although he hasn't stopped making theatrical costumes, he now focuses mainly on his costume objects, as he calls his works. This has a big advantage about theatrical locker room: Bekkers isn't restricted by director or actor.. “A singer must be able to hear well. So such an outfit couldn't cover the ears. And with a necklace you have to consider someone's moving larynx. It doesn't bother me anymore.”

Amidst their latest designs: a series of 25 costumes on child-sized mannequins that could theoretically be worn, but are thought of as an object of art.

“Theatre is not a fashion show. There clothes must support an actor. Even the grand and monumental costumes. Now I'm free and all attention can be directed to my designs as an object.” 

"From my experience as a costume designer for theatre and opera, I create costume objects." Without an actor, singer or dancer in motion, a costume acquires the characteristics of a monumental sculpture, it becomes an object."

From fantasy, interest in the material and love for craftsmanship, a shape, an atmosphere and a silhouette, which I hope evoke wonder and intrigue, gradually emerge through modeling and experimentation. Different artistic traditions of my own country and other cultures are a source of inspiration. There is no substantive link between the source of inspiration and the final object in which it appears. It's purely about the shape and atmosphere it creates.From relatively simplicity in lines and tones to very lush.

"There's always something sculptured about it, and a little absurd always stimulates my imagination, seeking timelessness."

Katarzyna Konieczka II

One of the costumes by Katarzyna Konieczka for her "Mascarade" costume collection. 

Marta Jiménez-Salcedo I

The fatal psychological journey made by Lady Macbeth from temptation to suicide, where the costume itself is a means of expression, created by Spanish costume designer Marta Jiménez-Salcedo. A costume of raw pathways of zips, mapping contours to a concealing ruffle of expressive flamenco soft pleats.

Deborah Cook

Deborah Cook is a costumier for our favourite tiny actors and actresses, the costumes for stop motion animations including Box Trolls, Fantastic Mr Fox, Coraline and The Corpse Bride. 

This is a fascinating film sharing some of her working processes from the costume conception, through colour and fabric choices, pattern cutting, animation testing and the final fitting. Deborah studied sculpture at Central St Martins working on sculpted textile installations. Then set up her own studio and started working for theatre and film before moving into costumes for animation.

"The fabric in animation is very subtle and finer and has to pass as ‘real’ within its own smaller world. People-scale fabrics look very chunky and thick and impede and mask the tiny movements and gestures the puppet characters make as well as looking very unreal and colossal on their tiny bodies. Their movements need to be reproduced akin to people and made possible within the flexibility of their costumes. To create a believable environment in miniature, the fabrics need to fit in too." Deborah Cook

Kat Murray I

I spent yesterday evening at the ECA degree show. I had seen Kat Murray's granny at the fashion show last month, but I really enjoyed being able to see all of the details on the costume and her wonderful illustrations and designs. Kat Murray's granny is grotesque and full of humor and observation, a strange hunchback loaded with sweets and treats, the best granny you could wish for.

Ivana Lazarević

Ivana Lazarević's graduate collection of 2011 with beautiful quilted folded textures.

Nino Cubinishvili I

“My designs are where fashion crosses art. It’s more than fashion and not total art. I believe in the idea of expression, the expression of divinity in different forms, languages and creations." Nino Cubinishvili

Nino Cubinishvili is a Georgian creator who has worked extensively within costume design. Nino's sculptural forms with extremes of silhouette create expressions of the human condition, making emotion into forms of fashion and costume. Nino Cubinishvili seeks and pushes boundaries in clothing using materials such as wood, leather and metal to realise her creative goals.