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A changeroom (in Australia, Canada, and other areas, including some parts of the USA, and also known as a changing room, change room, lockerroom, or locker room in the United Kingdom or USA) is a place where people go to change their clothes. Usually this is for privacy so that they can be away from other people, or away from people of the other gender.
Changerooms usually either have individual changing cubicles, stalls, etc., or they have open spaces that are excluded to persons of the other gender. Sometimes washrooms are used for changing clothes, since a person can readily change in a toilet cubicle. Many changerooms include washrooms and showers. Sometimes a changeroom exists as a small portion of a washroom. For example, the men's and women's washrooms in Toronto's Dundas Square (which includes a waterplay area) each include a change area which is a blank counter space at the end of a row of sinks. In this case, the facility is primarily a washroom, and its use as a changeroom represents only about one sixth of the space, since only a small percentage of users bother to change into bathingsuits.
Larger changerooms are usually found at public beaches, or other bathing areas, where most of the space is for changing, and minimal washroom space is included. Beach-style changerooms are often large open rooms with benches around the outside, and some have no roof, providing only the minimum necessary barrier to prevent persons of the other gender from seeing in.
Various kinds of changerooms include the following:
Locker rooms are places where clothes can be changed and stored. Locker rooms usually have lockers for locking the clothes in, but they may also have a locker room attendant who receives clothes from users, and then gives them back when the user desires. Locker rooms are usually open spaces where people change together, but there are separate areas, or separate locker rooms, for men and women. Lockers in locker rooms have traditionally been key or coin lockers, or lockers that are secured with a combination lock such as a dudley or Master lock. Newer locker rooms are automated, with robotic machines to store clothes, with such features as a fingerprint scanner to enroll and for later retrieval. Locker rooms in some waterparks, such as Schwaben Quellen, use a microchip equipped wristband. Thus the same wristband that unlocks the lockers can be used to purchase food and drinks and other items in the waterpark. This system was adopted because bathing suits are not permitted in Schwaben Quellen, and there is thus no place for a person to put keys for a locker.
Fitting rooms or dressing rooms are rooms where people try on clothes, such as in a department store. The rooms are usually individual rooms in which only one person tries on clothes. People do not always use the fitting rooms to change (to change implies to remove one set of clothes and put on another). Sometimes a person just wants to try on one set of clothes over their other clothes, but would still like to do this in private because they choose not to put clothes on and off over other clothes in public. Thus fitting rooms may be used for changing, or just for fitting without changing (i.e. trying on additional clothing).
A green room is a room in which people change clothes for performance, theatre, or the like. The term green room originates Green rooms are usually located backstage, but sometimes under the stage, or to the side. When they are located under the stage they are often also called "trap rooms" because many stage setups, especially for magicians, involve a trap door that goes to a room under the stage. In a magic trick, a performer may drop down into the trap room, through the trap door, onto a padded surface like a mattress, to "disappear" and change into another outfit. Green rooms are usually not separated by gender, because performers often operate "like one big happy family" and help each other change. For example, a husband and wife team of circus performers might need to "rig" each other up with various wiring, cabling, safety harnesses, and the like. The green room at Canterbury Theatre in Canada's Wonderland is a large co-ed space in which large numbers of people are usually in various states of undress, including being completely naked at times. Although there are often small gender separated spaces in some green rooms (to meet building codes, etc.), the changing activities of a green room typically spill out into the main area back stage, where there are dressmakers, tailors, and other staff, frantically working on getting everyone ready for the next production. There is little or no time or place for modesty in a green room where "the show must go on" and everyone works together like a team to help each other get dressed, regardless of gender differences. A green room is one of the few changerooms in which nakedness of mixed-gender groups is usually acceptable.