I am doing my main research on ‘vestimentary communication’ in films. Vestimentary communication describes the nonverbal communication that is transported by clothes. When watching a movie the recipient receives detailed information of the character, the location and the time he is placed in, just by looking at the appearance of the actor - mainly by the costume he is wearing. Because this understanding is based on established conventions, like the use of stereotype clothes, there is a need to find a suitable way to describe and analyze clothes. Based on a lack of formal approaches in the media science I am trying to capture the knowledge stored in films by developing a pattern language for costumes. This pattern language provides media science with a better understanding on how vestimentary communication works in a film. On the other side, the costume patterns contain a large potential for reusing this captured knowledge in practical work on costumes at a film set.

Example for a composition graph of a costume: