The thrum of sewing machines, the scrape of pattern drawers and the rush of students looking through designs help make the Texas A&M costume shop feel busier than some of the stages its work appears on. Hidden in plain sight beside the entrance of the Liberal Arts and Arts & Humanities Building, the shop operates quietly, yet its costumes reach nearly every corner of the arts on campus.

The shop supports the growing College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, or PVFA, serving theater, dance, visualization and even non-arts departments when their projects call for costumes. The wide reach has transformed the costume shop into a creative crossroads — one that connects students across campus through fabric, problem-solving and shared design.

The costume shop does not puts a price on its work. It is run by student workers and frequently takes requests from student projects about various costumes they need for events such as theater or dance shows, however, any student is free to borrow one of the existing outfits the shop has. Recently, though, the shop has begun to create costumes for extended parts of the school.

As the number of departments working with the shop have grown, so have the responsibilities. According to accounting graduate student Ashleigh Rokey, one of the student workers at the costume shop, the expansion has been dramatic.

“So I was hired there back in the fall of 2021 … and the schools have certainly changed a lot, too,” Rokey said. “So it used to be just performance studies. … But now that it’s PVFA, we take care of performance, theater, dance, music. We help everyone out.”

Much of that growth comes in the form of collaboration, as different programs turn to the shop for different needs. Theater productions require detailed, story-driven garments, while the dance department leans toward clothing made for movement.

Costume Shop Manager D’Mya Tabron said that the wide variation is part of what makes the space unique. After working at other universities, she said she has never seen a costume shop that has served this many specialties at once.

“Here I get to work with all of PVFA, so [performance], [visualization], dance, theater, music,” Tabron said. “It’s very interesting to get to work with all these different things and figure out what I can do to assist them.”

That assistance extends far beyond the performance stage. Visualization students occasionally borrow garments for painting classes where models need specific fabrics for assignments. Engineering students once asked the shop for help attaching electronics to furniture. Communication graduate student and Costume Shop staff member Charlie Cooper remembered the project clearly.

Requests like these come in alongside the shop’s regular workload which includes crafting and altering 20 to 30 costumes per semester depending on the type of shows scheduled. Visualization senior Diego Gonzales said that even within PVFA, the needs vary widely. For dance productions the focus is flexibility and abstraction, while theater garments emphasize character and narrative detail.

“Dance costumes are motivated by what looks good in movement,” Gonzales said. “Theater costumes are more something you would traditionally see … because it’s so story-driven, you’re able to kind of help build a character in it.”

That character building begins long before the first stitches are sewn. Productions start with concept meetings where designers share their ideas, themes and reference images. From there, the shop moves into patterning, mockups and fittings — a process that can begin as early as eight weeks before a show opens. Tabron said her first priority is helping designers find a realistic path from the idea to the final product.

“I tell the designers, ‘Think as big as you can,’” Tabron said. “I will help them get a realistic version of their dream.”

The shop’s physical space reflects that creative focus as drawers packed with patterns line the windows, fabric fills shelves and specialized machines sit ready for anything from finishing edges to building new garments from scratch. According to Cooper, since the requests the shop receives are diverse and varied, the room needs to be equipped with the tools and materials needed to tackle anything that comes their way.

Cooper said the variety keeps the work interesting and encourages staff to solve problems in different ways.

“We basically run all of the costume design, preparation and production … and each performance, dance or play, we are working with students and faculty to help design and craft all their costumes,” Cooper said.

That mix of projects means the shop sees a number of unusual pieces. Some have become local legends: a hand-sewn Sugar Plum Fairy tutu covered in sequins, an A&M wrestling student who needed to become a cockroach and a theater production that required a giant green worm costume. Rokey said she still laughs when she passes it.

“As soon as you turn in that door, like immediately on your left, the big green thing, that’s a worm,” Rokey said. “And we had to make the worm.”

Though the workload changes each semester, the student workers said the community inside the shop is a constant. Gonzales said joining the shop helped him connect with programs he never would have crossed paths with otherwise.

“I feel like working in the shop is one big hotspot for all the different collaborations and viewpoints,” Gonzales said.” “I’ve made a lot of really good friends just by where I work.”

Tabron, who oversees both the shop and its collaborations with faculty, said that sense of openness is what makes the work meaningful.

“We’re all in the arts, we all help each other,” Tabron said. “We’ll just bounce ideas off of each other and we’ll go from there.”