What is a Costume Technician on a ship. And what does the job actually look like.
- erika
- Jul 7
- 4 min read
Part Project Runway, part Amazing Race, entirely something nobody prepared me for. Here is what I actually do.
People ask me what I do on ships. I tell them I'm a Costume Technician. They nod like that explains something. It does not explain anything.
So let me actually explain it.
The job has a huge range depending on the ship, the production, the contract. But the version most people don't know exists, the one I want to tell you about, is the cast changeover. This is when an existing production is already running on a ship and an old cast leaves and a new cast comes in. A full production team boards to make it happen. I am part of that team.
Here is what that looks like from the inside.
It starts before I even get on the ship. The production team and I board as independent contractors working as guests. This means I get access to guest areas, restaurants, common spaces, and crew areas while working. It is a genuinely strange existence. Not crew. Not guest. Something in between, arriving with extra bags full of costumes, ready to work the moment I step on board.
The port city where we join the ship can be anywhere in the world. Namibia. Singapore. Alaska. Cyprus. Italy. Uruguay. Yemen. Places I had no plan to visit that became part of my story simply because that is where the ship happened to be. You board as a professional. You arrive as a traveler. You have to be both at once immediately.
Once we're on board, coordinating rooms and getting everyone settled takes most of the first day. Then there is a production meeting. This is where I sit across from people and discuss fitting schedules for Show One. A show I have not seen the costumes for yet. Performers I have not met yet. A ship I have just boarded.
I find this meeting deeply funny every single time.
That night, half asleep, still in the middle of figuring out which bag is which, I go backstage and start unpacking. Setting up the workspace. Figuring out what equipment we have and where we are actually going to sew. This is an all-night situation. One in the morning is optimistic. Two is more realistic.
Then I wake up at six. Coffee. Get ready. Meet the cast.
All day the performers come through for fittings for Show One. In between fittings there is lunch and dinner and organizing for the next morning's sewing. Then we get up early and sew. We usually have two days before the costumes are needed for the dress rehearsal. Two days to fit, alter, repair, and sometimes make things from scratch for an entire cast of performers.
"Most of the time it feels like I am simultaneously on Project Runway and the Amazing Race. Except the runway is a stage on a ship and the race has no finish line."
We do the dress rehearsal. We prep. We clean. We get everything ready for opening night. Then the show runs. We go watch it. Or at least whatever part of it we can catch between finishing last minute alterations. There is an after-show moment with the team. And then we get up the next morning and start Show Two.
Ships usually run four to seven shows. A contract can be anywhere from two to four weeks. We work twelve to eighteen hour days for most of it. This is standard.
Here is the thing about this job that nobody tells you before you take it.
You are always missing something. Always. The specific thread color. The right interfacing. The boning that would fix this bodice perfectly. The button that matches. On land you would drive to a fabric store. On a ship in the middle of the ocean you problem-solve with what you have, what you can find, and what you can make work well enough to survive eight shows a week under stage lights and sweat and the full physical demands of performance.
There are language barriers. There are time limits. There are moving parts. The ship is literally moving. There are political dynamics between departments and last minute costume changes and performers who need alterations the morning of a show and equipment that breaks at the exact wrong moment.
There are also ports. Gorgeous, extraordinary, completely unexpected places that the ship stops while you are on board. Days off are not really part of the deal. Sometimes you get a lunch free. Sometimes a dinner. But when you do get a moment in a port city you take it fully, because the ship will leave whether you are ready or not. Markets and streets and food and culture that you would never have found any other way.
I have also done this job in a completely different context — working in a shipyard as a vessel was being built, staying on for over a year, building brand new shows from nothing. That version is its own story entirely. A longer one.
"The job asks everything of you. Your skill, your problem-solving, your patience, your ability to function on very little sleep in a very small space moving across a very large ocean. And somehow it is still one of the best things I have ever done."
A Costume Technician on a ship is part seamstress, part engineer, part detective, part diplomat. You are making beautiful things under impossible conditions for performers who need them to work perfectly every single night. You are doing it somewhere new almost every week. And you are doing it with a team of people who become, very quickly, some of the most important people in your life.
That is the job. That is what it actually is.
Now you know.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
— Erika
Founder, ELE · Costume Technician · Ship person · Owner of a very good extension cord
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