The invisible war between fashion and theater and why nobody is talking about it.
- erika
- Jul 6
- 4 min read
I spent years working on both sides of a line that shouldn't exist. Here's what I learned from standing in the middle of it.
I always knew I wanted both.
Fashion and theater. From the beginning, before I had the language for it, before I understood what either world actually looked like from the inside; I knew those were my two things. The construction of clothes and the construction of stories. They felt, to me, like the same impulse expressed in two different rooms.
It took me a long time to understand that a lot of people in both rooms would very much disagree with that.
It started in school. I went to get my theater minor approved; a completely reasonable thing, I thought, given that I was studying fashion design and wanted to understand performance and costume and the relationship between clothing and character. My advisor looked at my plan and told me that fashion and theater were not a practical mix.
Not a practical mix.
I did it anyway. And I spent the next several years navigating what I can only describe as a cold war between two disciplines that share almost every fundamental skill and refuse to acknowledge it.
In my fashion critiques, my work was too costumey. Too expressive. Too much story, not enough market. In my theater classes, my work didn't have enough expression. Too refined. Too commercial. Not enough character.
I sat with that for a long time. Because here is what I actually believe, having now spent years working professionally in both worlds:
They are the same thing.
"Both can start with a mood board. Both tell a story. Both are built around a character: a person, a body, a life being expressed through cloth. The only real difference I have ever been able to find is that fashion serves a mass market and theater serves one specific character on one specific stage."
The construction techniques are the same. The problem-solving is the same. The relationship between silhouette and identity, between fabric and feeling, between what a person wears and who they become in it — identical. Fashion didn't invent any of that. Theater has been doing its own version of that for centuries.
The war followed me out of school.
I have been working in theater for nine years. Good work. Real work. The kind of construction that has to survive eight shows a week, under stage lights, under the full physical demands of performance. Costumes that have to move, hold, breathe, quick-change in forty-five seconds, and still look intentional from the back row.
And when I showed up in theater rooms with a fashion design background, I felt it. The slight shift. The assumption. They knew I came from fashion. It was in how I pressed a seam, how I thought about fit, how I talked about silhouette. People said they could tell.
So I stopped listing both sides of my resume. I learned to speak each language separately. When I work in theater I am a theater sewist with nine years of experience. When I work in fashion I am a trained fashion designer with bridal and performance garment experience. Same hands. Same skills. Different rooms.
Here is what I want to say to both sides of this invisible war.
You are standing in two workrooms with the same tools on the table, arguing over who invented the needle.
Fashion designers who dismiss theatrical work have never had to build a gown that survives a full eight-show week and still photographs beautifully for the press night. Theater costumers who dismiss fashion training have never seen what a rigorous understanding of construction and fit can do for a character's presence on stage. Both disciplines would be stronger; genuinely, practically, technically stronger; if they stopped treating each other as lesser.
The students who cross both lines are not confused. They are not impractical. They are not wasting their time. They are building a range that neither world alone can give them.
I am living proof of that. And I am done being quiet about it.
"We will always find something to criticize. But if we stopped — if we actually stopped and helped each other — think of what we could build. Think of all the possibility we are leaving on the table because we are too busy defending the border."
Fashion and theater have been feeding each other for as long as both have existed. The runway has always borrowed from the stage. The stage has always borrowed from the street. The line between costume and clothes has always been thinner than the people drawing it want to admit.
And honestly? Who cares how much expression is in a garment.
When did being whimsical hurt anyone.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
— Erika
Founder, ELE · Fashion designer · Theater sewist · Keeper of both sides
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