Vision
Every costume created in harmony with people and planet.
Mission
Conscious Costume educates and empowers costume professionals by providing resources and community to galvanize a more ethical, inclusive, and circular world.
Values
Share with Abundance: We share what we have with artists and the public alike, keeping information accessible. To facilitate sharing for all kinds of artists, we are flexible on rates and fees to meet people where they are.
Embrace Circularity: Sustaining the current broken system is not enough, we strive for full circularity of materials. We value resourcefulness in using what we have instead of creating new. Costumes are living art pieces, they are meant to be used and changed over time.
Build Ethical Communities: We advocate for equitable pay and the value of paying for labor over stuff. We benefit from communal action striving for hope and justice in our climate future. We reduce harm locally and globally by making conscious, ethical choices in how we create costumes.
Cherish Experimentation: With shifting paradigms of art comes investigation, testing, mistakes, and sometimes failure. We embrace these opportunities to learn from our errors and cultivate compassionate but accountable room to stumble and grow.
Honor Pluralism: Conscious design and production has no single pattern and we recognize each artist’s path towards values driven work will be intersectional and holistic.
Address Past and Ongoing Harm: We acknowledge that the cornerstone to what we consider "sustainable" is based in practices that have been used for generations in Black, Indigenous, and Communities of Color. We pursue ways to learn from Indigenous Wisdom and Decolonize or Unsettle arts practices. This is foundational to ethical design and production.
Our Team
Kristen P Ahern
Founder
As the founder of Conscious Costume, Kristen is transforming norms in theatre and film with her open and accessible methods for circular production; ensuring that costumes are created and used in ways that are respectful to both people and the planet.
Throughout her decade-long career in Washington D.C. and Chicago, Kristen has not only designed dozens of performances, she has also advocated for greater impact awareness and systems change within the arts, responding to challenges with innovation. Kristen co-founded Artists Resource Mobilization (ARM) during the 2020 pandemic shut-downs to support arts workers, and in 2021, Kristen and her team won the San Diego Opera Hack with their app to facilitate regional production materials swapping. She also served as Artistic Director for Strange Bedfellows Theatre from 2014-2016.
Currently, Kristen is sharing her vision for a future where the arts contribute positively to societal change by hosting Conscious Costume events for community groups and universities around the world. Her developing recycled textile artistic practice is complemented by an ongoing study of permaculture and personal sustainability and carbon sequestration practices.
Kristen holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a BA from Western Michigan University, and is dedicated to merging artistic excellence with environmental and ethical responsibility.
Emma Rosemary
Rentals Manager
Emma Rosemary has spent the last decade working primarily in wardrobe supervising and dressing. She has always had strong convictions surrounding sustainable and ethical production and consumption.
Her current personal mission is to reduce reliance on fast fashion web shopping in the costuming sphere which was sparked after being hired to process nearly $5,000 of Amazon clothing returns for a single production.
When Emma is not backstage at a show or in the lab at Conscious Costume, she spends her time exploring museums and cemeteries, creating art, and spending lots of time with her very clingy cat, Zinnia (who thinks she is a pigeon).
Story
Founded by costume designer Kristen P Ahern
Most audiences don't get a sense of the full scale of the costumes that go into a given production so the scope and impact of our work is not fully understood. When I started, the average consumer did not understand the environmental impact of clothing and textiles. There is a future where every piece of fabric or supply used to construct a costume will exit that shop without going to a landfill.
Many people I talk to have a similar story to mine: ever since my first exposure to a costume shop environment in undergrad, I remember seeing piles and piles of fabric scraps in the trash and it broke my heart to see clean fabric scraps go into a trashcan and get destroyed by the remainder of someone's ramen noodles. I questioned how to improve the waste stream of a costume shop. However, I soon learned that controlling waste was not enough and in order to be truly ethical, I needed to radically reimagine my supply chain.
I searched for information specifically about sustainable costumes and was disheartened to discover that there was little to be found. Fashion industry models did not translate directly, I even considered leaving costume design for a profession in environmental policy. Ultimately, I chose my art and my voice as tools for aspirational change from within.
We, as a women led art form, can and should strive to support and empower the feminized labor in the global textile and fashion industry through ethical choices and circular thinking.
Our Community
Our rentals project works with local poverty alleviation organizations to provide clothing to the communities they serve. We are continually looking for new ways to use our skills and influence to benefit all of the communities we touch, not just costume artists.
We are a project of the Apparel Industry Foundation, Inc.
All donations are tax deductible, please specify if you want a receipt prior to donating.
