2020 ICG Lifetime
Achievement Award

Sally Fink as “Dawn,’ Costume-Con 29 photo by Ken Warren.

Sally Fink is the recipient of the 2020 International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. ICG President pro tem Kevin Roche shared the announcement on March 14. The award is the highest honor the International Costumers’ Guild pays to costumers, and recognizes a body of achievement in the costuming art and service to the costuming community.

A very active costumer in the Seventies and Eighties, she is still participating today. From 2004 to 2011, one of her fantasy costumes, “The Iron Orchid,” was on exhibit in the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington. She has put on more than a dozen one-woman costume and art-to-wear shows at local venues in western Pennsylvania, raising the public’s awareness of the hobby.

The ICG’s citation page adds these comments:

Photographs from many conventions demonstrate the breadth of her design skills.  Originally recognized for glitzy science fiction and fantasy confections, her later expansion into historical garments and elaborate millinery means that she is an influence on a wide variety of “next generation” costumers.

…Sally is also active with her local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism under the sobriquet Mistress Charmaine of Falkensee where she acts as a consultant on Garb research, sewing, and sources for fabrics and period patterns. In addition to costuming for full sized humans, Ms. Fink is also noted for her dolls.

After many years concentrating on historical clothing, Ms. Fink returned to science fiction/fantasy competition costuming in 2009. These days she sometimes transfers her formidable skills from working on her own designs to the area of interpreting and constructing the designs of other costumers by participating in the Future Fashion Folio or Single Pattern Competitions at Costume-Con. Her entry in the Future Fashion Show at Costume-Con 30 [2012] in Tempe, “Empress in the Court of Jewels” not only won “Best in Show” for that competition, but demonstrated her continuing commitment to our craft; her steampunk hall costume at the same event shows that this veteran costumer is still taking on the challenge of new genres and putting her own stamp on them.

Her website has many photos of her work.