All of these individuals are extremely ambitious people, for, just as clothes make the man, so does the theatrical tailor’s shop imagine that it makes the actor. “I can’t cut M. Vydra a low waist like that,” cries the tailor to the designer of costumes, who has just gone a little out of proportion. The greatest pleasure is derived from manufacturing the most impossible flute-shaped trousers, swollen backs and fronts, coats too short or too long, tight-fitting or quite loose, just as the character may need them. And if the comedy of the play demands it, the finest sartorial wit and ingenuity is expended on making these clothes fit as badly as possible. Here, silk is made from cheap lining material, and brocade from cheap sacking material, and old Austrian military coats are transformed into jerkins for both nobles and servants in some play by Shakespeare or Molière.
And when the play is being dressed partly or entirely from old materials, then the theatrical wardrobe man is delighted if he
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