For one Bruin, world-building through costume design is an essential form of storytelling.

Lyle Marley, a fourth-year theater student and costume designer, said developing costumes allows him to uncover the personality and identity of various characters while discerning how each subject perceives themselves within a story. With a strong director, the support of a collaborative team, a budget and script, Marley said he can find ways to bring costumes to life by buying, making and renting the necessary clothing and materials.

“I create clothes, but I’m not a fashion designer,” Marley said. “I am a costume designer that creates looks that communicate character personalities and how they want to portray themselves within the story.”

Marley said he was involved in stage plays and musicals throughout his childhood and was an actor in high school productions, but he delved into costume design to support the low-funded high school theater program. Designing a stage production for live theater became a passion for Marley, and he said he realized when looking into colleges that costume design could be a career. Even though his personal interest in memorizing lines and being on stage had waned, Marley said he discovered the ability to communicate with clothes and create characters in a different medium.

Openness as a costume designer is crucial, Marley said, and has allowed him to work on projects ranging from dramas to comedies to musicals. He said examples of the costume designers who inspire him include Mandi Line, Lou Eyrich and UCLA lecturer Jane Ruhm, who are known for their work on projects such as “Pretty Little Liars,” “American Horror Story” and the film “Matilda,” respectively. With his own artistic approach, Marley said he focuses on practicality to be aware of the logistics of a production and how a garment moves on stage. The majority of being a costume designer is paperwork, construction and logistics, he added.

“I want to know that these ideas in my brain are actually obtainable in the practical world,” Marley said. “Yes, we can make pretty pictures and design beautiful costumes and make things look pretty. But how does it actually work on stage? How does it actually work on screen? That is a big part of the job that no one talks about.”

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Chrisi Karvonides, a professor and the head of costume design for the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, said Marley is one of about 25 undergraduate students pursuing costume design, and she first met him on Zoom when he started taking her classes before other students in the program. Marley has assisted with designs on eight or nine projects over the past four years, Karvonides said, which is more than the four projects expected of most students. She added that it has been fulfilling to train Marley because of his positive attitude.

As a costume designer who won an Emmy for “American Dreams” and received nominations for other projects such as “American Horror Story,” Karvonides said being a professional designer is multi-disciplinary and requires perseverance, resourcefulness and stamina. These skills, she added, are necessary in order to successfully illustrate, research, work with actors and communicate ideas. The costume design program at UCLA splits its training into thirds with equal emphasis on theater, film and television, Karvonides said, which can make it difficult to predict where students like Marley will go in their careers. However, Karvonides said she thinks Marley might become a costume design teacher.

Marley’s roommate for the past three years, Cole Sitilides, said Marley can be intimidating at first but is one of the most considerate people he knows at UCLA and has been a delightful person to live with. The fourth-year theater student said it has been a fun task to serve as a mannequin while Marley tests how different ensembles fall on a body, as Marley brings in “a mountain” of Amazon packages full of possible looks at least once a quarter.

In addition to Marley’s talents for costume design, Sitilides said his roommate is an amazing chef. His favorite of Marley’s dishes is shepherd’s pie, but Sitilides said the costume designer can take any food in the refrigerator and transform it into an excellent meal.

Sitilides said Marley uses similar skills when sourcing and developing the costumes for a production on a tight budget. Through time spent tagging along on sourcing trips to Ross Dress for Less or seeing Marley in action using materials from people’s wardrobes to complete outfits, Sitilides added that Marley has always been a coveted team member.

“When the student theater companies band together to put on shows of their own and they need costume designers, Lyle was always the number one pick,” Sitilides said. “Everybody wanted Lyle to costume design their show.”

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While working directly with Marley in an assistant designer role during a production in which he was an actor, Sitilides said he saw Marley not as a roommate but as a collaborator. During quick costume changes before the next scene, Sitilides said Marley would help him while wearing a headlamp and carrying an apron full of supplies from rulers to scissors to pencils. Sitilides said this experience allowed both him and Marley to excel in their creative element.

“Before I went back out on stage, I give him a look, and we knew that we had each other’s backs, and I was going to go out there and make his work look good,” Sitilides said. “I could trust that he was always going to make me look good when I went out there.”

One of the challenges Sitilides said he has observed Marley face is limited funding when working on productions. Sitilides said Marley’s meticulous ideas and sketches would require more money and time than is usually available, leaving Marley to compromise so parts of his vision can still be executed successfully. With additional resources, Sitilides said Marley’s imagination and creativity would be able to produce more incredible designs than he has delivered so far. Marley also said budget constraints can be difficult, but push him to be a better designer and communicator.

Reflecting upon his time at UCLA as a whole, Marley said several of the productions he has worked on stand out. For instance, he said it was a fun challenge to design simultaneously for the 1980s-meets-Renaissance jukebox musical “Head Over Heels” and the 1930s fairytale musical “Bright Star” last year. Another rewarding large-scale project came with “RENT,” which he said required ensuring nearly 100 costume pieces for about 20 actors looked grungy and distressed to fit the musical’s 1990s aesthetic. Other shows – such as “Goodbye Billy the Butterfly” during his first year or “Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center” during winter quarter – also presented opportunities to showcase beautiful and immersive designs, Marley added.

“The best thing that a costume designer can hear is from the actor themselves,” Marley said. “As soon as they realize the character and they’re natural with the character with the costume on, that is when my job has been done. That is when it’s a good moment for me.”