Classes

Students attending a lecture classIt would not be Costume College without classes. We offer as many learning opportunities as we can jam into 5 days and one hotel. Our classes break down into several types, including lectures, workshops and tours. A brief description of those types is below:

Lectures

Lectures are the main offering at Costume College. Our lectures are scheduled Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 9am and 5pm. Most last between an hour or two. While it varies slightly depending on available hotel space, we have 7 rooms for lectures, including a larger room for popular speakers. Lectures are open seating, which can be challenging if your lecture is in a small room and you arrive late. At that point, we are limited by local fire code and room capacity -- so if a lecture is important to you, try to arrive early.

All classes have a 15 minutes turnover time, so a one hour lecture is really supposed to be 45 minutes. We encourage students and teachers to be respectful and take lingering conversations out into the hallway to allow the next class to setup.

WorkshopsStudent in sewing workshop class

Workshops can be similar to lectures, but have a hands-on component that requires the teacher to keep a fixed head count. They usually involve considerable preparation on the part of the part of a teacher and will include a fee for a kit that involves supplies. Because of this extra need for organization and the fixed head count, workshops have a separate registration that will occur in early May (exact date TBD). It's important to keep in mind that workshops and lectures are just different styles of classes and the limited head count should not imply any sort of superiority. Please see the Workshop Registration FAQ for more information on these classes.

Tours

Tours are off-site visits to areas of interest to costumers. This includes industry costuming facilities, local museum exhibits and similar related activities. Tour usually vary from year to year, depending on availability. The one constant tour is our famous Monday Fabric District Tour. Tours, like workshops, are limited in spaces (usually based on the size of the bus). The exception is the Fabric District Tour -- because of it's popularity we get a very big bus (or two).