costumier:

(also ‘costumer’; plural: ‘costumiers‘; pronunciation: the letter ‘c’ is said with a ‘k’ sound; for the two different pronunciations, please click here)

‘costumes’ = clothes of certain type or period, and also in general the clothes people wear

a person whose business is to make, rent or deal in costumes, especially for stage or film productions;

a costume designer,

a costumier (L) making costumes for a medieval knight character (R)

e.g.

A costumier is an expert who knows about past history and the costumes the people wore in those days, and makes clothes that dancers, stage artists, royal brides who wish to keep us the age-old tradition of their royalty, etc.

Costumiers or costumers are in great demand in show business, mostly stage, TV and film, where the actors and actresses need to wear the clothes the people they represent wore in the past.

Though both a ‘costumier’ and a ‘costume designer’ are professionals that make clothes and can be used as synonyms, there is a subtle difference in terms of the actual job they do; for instance, a costumier is the one who mostly makes clothes for the artists who represent historical stage characters, such as Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or Mosses in a Biblical story, and also for ballet dancers; and a costume designer is the one who makes fashion clothes for contemporary fashion models or for celebrities to wear on social occasions, such as evening parties, celebrations, interviews, etc.

a costume designer with her latest fashions

For the right pronunciation of costumier, please click here, and for the right pronunciation of ‘costumer’, please click here. For an advertisement of a historical costumier, please click here. For a blog post in which we see these two professional names, costumier and costume designer, used interchangeably, please click here.

a costumer or clothes tree

Note: ‘Costumer’ is also used for something that we hang clothes on, especially a straight wooden or metal pole with pegs or hooks on which we hang coats or jackets, usually kept in a corner of a room or near the main door so that we take them when we go out and hang them there when we get back, but not for drying after washing, also called ‘clothes tree’, or ‘coat tree’, e.g. a coat rack. To hang wet clothes, the clothes that are washed, such as towels, socks, kerchiefs, etc, to dry indoors, people use a metal frame which can be folded, called a ‘clothes horse‘.