Biography

Costume Shop Manager Susan Davis grew up abroad—Japan, Ethiopia, Egypt, among other places—and inherited her mother’s love of beautiful textiles. By her college years, she had taught herself to sew, got her first job in a costume shop, and a career was born. She first came to seattle in 1989 to work in Seattle Opera’s costume shop as a cutter. Several years later she co-founded her own company, Period Corsets, which sold handmade undergarments designed for use in theaters, and it was through this work that she learned the nuts and bolts of running a sustainable costume business. Since 2002, she has run Seattle Opera’s costume shop with the same eye for detail and an amazing capacity for coordinating her extraordinary team to make a bolt of fabric into the exquisite symbol of a character.