"We have a huge moth problem at the moment. The clothes are all organic and moths love wool. The Elizabethans used things like wormwood, which is a herb that we've got hanging up here - moths don't like anything smelly.
"There's a story behind everything. The clothes have all got names. This is Olivia's dress from Twelfth Night. We're repairing it because it's going on tour in America this autumn and it's already done 120 performances. And this is Bassanio's hat. Somebody else might get to wear it one day - but it'll always be Bassanio's hat.
"At the moment, because we're in rehearsal, I'm here 15 hours a day. We generally start making things six weeks before a play opens. My first appointment today was with a milliner to talk about the hats for Edward II.
We looked at fabrics and pictures in history books. Then I met with a dyer who's dyeing some silk velvet we managed to buy from a weaver in Genoa. Silk velvet's the hardest thing for us to get but we found some in pink and it'll be dyed a deep burgundy.
"We get to know these clothes very well. We're basically doing clothes from the 1570s to the 1640s and as a designer it's very unusual to keep doing the same period. These clothes are real, they're not theatre costumes.
"We talk about original practices of Shakespeare's actors. The Elizabethan theatre companies always had a small core of actors, called sharers, who owned a share of the company and they used to dress themselves. What you got on stage then was much more varied.
"This year I'm working with a co-designer and for each play we're dividing the actors between us. Richard II has an incredibly rich look: it has the feeling of seeing a society on stage.
"Everything is made by hand and the doublet and hose have got handwoven silk braids. We've had the buttons made in exactly the same way that buttons were made 400 years ago. We bombast the piece cods with cotton wadding and the britches are being held out by horse hair. There's nothing phoney about these clothes.
"The best thing of all is seeing an actor being a character and knowing that the clothes have helped. And you can also see character in the costumes themselves.
"I don't often dream about work but when I do, they're anxiety dreams. My worst nightmare is always about actors appearing naked on stage."
· www.shakespeares-globe.org tel: 020-7401-9919
