Costume Design
With 30 years of professional experience, Melanie Bond has designed costumes for nearly 100 shows ranging from grand opera to modern drama to puppetry. Although she has a specialty in historic costume, she has designed all genres.
Click here for academic costume design.
Click here for professional costume design.
Costume Construction
45 years of stitching and 35 years of patterning and craftwork in a variety of contexts have included a broad range of techniques, from the historically accurate to the wildly theatrical. Melanie uses a combination of draping and flat patterning to achieve the best effect when creating patterns.
Specialties
Melanie specializes in 16th-century clothing research and construction and has also dabbled in the fantasy Victorian world of Steampunk.
Click here for 16th Century Clothing.
Scholarship
A focus on 16th-century clothing research has led Melanie along various avenues, usually involving the transcription and translation of wardrobe accounts. She is currently writing a book on the wardrobe of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Book
Dressing the Scottish Court: Clothing in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 1543-1553, Boydell and Brewer, 2019
Articles and Chapters
“Fashion and Material Culture in the Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins Attributed to Hieronymus Bosch,” with John Block Friedman, Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 16, 2020
“Treason and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Gregory 'Sweetlips' Botolf,” Refashioning Medieval and Early Modern Dress: A Tribute to Robin Netherton, ed. Gale Owen-Crocker and Maren Clegg Hyer, 2019
“Costume Design for the Stage in the United States," Documenting Costume Design, ed. Nancy E. Friedland, 2010
“French Hoods: The Development of a Sixteenth-Century Court Fashion,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 5, 2009
“Children’s Clothing in the Lisle Letters, 1533-1540,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3, 2007
“Fashioning the Middle Ages: teaching medieval culture through clothing,” The Once and Future Classroom, 2007
Learn More
Interested in studying costume design and construction with me? Join us in the Entertainment Design and Technology Program at Eastern Michigan University!