Will R. Barnes designed costumes for numerous Broadway productions between 1898 and 1924. Born in Australia, he came to the U.S. in the late 1890s and began designing costumes for a number of Joe Weber and Lew Fields’s Music Hall shows. Later he worked with the designers Cora MacGeachy and William Henry Mathews on the Hippodrome spectacles until the final show there in 1922.

Barnes specialized in costumes for the lighthearted musical entertainment that was extremely popular at the time: musical comedies, operettas, revues, vaudeville productions and burlesques.