William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been performed all over the world for over 400 years, yet it has never been studied exclusively from the perspective of appearance studies. This lack of research increases the difficulty of costuming the play faithfully, and ignores the substantial correlation between language referring to appearance and the thematic content of the play itself. The researcher and advisor focused on filling this gap by auditing all references to appearance used in the play, using Hillestad’s definition of appearance as an umbrella term for dress and the body as the foundation for data extraction. After auditing and calculating reliability, the researcher and advisor met to discuss and complete axial coding to determine the dominant themes that could be taken from the data. The researcher discovered the dominant themes to be Destruction, Beauty Ideals, and the Hidden or Transformative Body, and the minor themes to be violence, physical disability, the disappearing body, fairness, physical attributes, disguise, and fantasy. With these themes decided on, the researcher built on the project through a complete design process that spanned from preliminary renderings to finished garments in order to make costume designs for the principal characters of Romeo, Juliet, and Mercutio. The finished garments utilize digitally printed textiles, innovative patternmaking, and hand finished techniques. The results from the research enliven and enrich readings of the text, set a foundation for original costume designs by the researcher, and reveal a new way for designers to interpret and analyze texts for the purposes of costuming; the designs themselves allowed for expansion of the researcher's construction and design skills, a key development in the researcher's further career.