By Raquel Laneri
Catwoman’s latex bodysuit. Mrs. Robinson’s leopard-print lingerie. The handmaids’ red capes and oversized bonnets.
These are just a few of the memorable looks created by FIT alumni for the silver—or, in the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the small—screen. And like all great costumes, these ensembles represent much more than the clothes on an actor’s back.
Raissa Bretaña, Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice ’18, has worked professionally in film, television, and theater and taught the history of fashion in film. Now the education and collections assistant at The Museum at FIT, she says that costumes are “crucial” for storytelling and character development.
“Costumes play a really important role in communicating the setting, but also what the society is,” Bretaña says. “They immediately tell your audience who the character is. They help show the journey that they go on throughout the course of the narrative.”
Costume designers are, therefore, more than designers or stylists. They are storytellers, historians, technicians, and psychologists. Edith Head—the Hollywood legend who dressed Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Cary Grant in Notorious, and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, among many, many others—called herself “the dress doctor.” (It was the title of her first memoir.)
A costume designer “without diplomacy—or worse, without a flair for psychoanalysis—is sunk,” Head declared.
“It’s an inherently collaborative discipline,” Bretaña says. “You have to serve the director’s greater vision. You have to communicate with the producers, who are in charge of the purse strings.” Balancing the budget is, Bretaña says, the costume designer’s biggest challenge.
“And of course, you have the actors, who often have opinions on what they think their character should wear,” she adds. Costume designing is “an exercise in problem solving where you really have to try to accommodate as many different viewpoints as possible on a very short timeline.”
Jeriana San Juan, Fashion Design ’04, agrees. Every choice the Emmy-nominated designer makes—from the color of a garment to the silhouette—is “driven to support the story” and “enhance the director’s vision.”
San Juan was costume designer for the series Halston and The Get Down as well as the Jennifer Lopez film The Mother, all on Netflix. She learned how to transfer her dressmaking skills to the stage and screen at FIT, where she started the FIT Theater Ensemble and interned at the costume house Parsons-Meares, which provides clothing and accessories for Broadway shows.
There, San Juan observed how professional costume designers did their work. “I would watch them in fittings, watch what kind of notes they were giving and where their eye was traveling,” she says. “I noted what was important to them, how the assistant functioned—I really was a fly on the wall, trying to understand how that all worked.”
San Juan further honed her skills at Saturday Night Live, where she worked as a costume designer and stylist for five years. “I really learned to think on my feet and trust my gut, because you have to act so quickly,” she says. “The clock is ticking from the moment you get there Wednesday evening until midnight on Saturday.”
Once, she had 24 hours to procure five California Raisins costumes for a sketch. Little did she know that the California Raisins’ likeness is copyrighted, and that only specific performers are allowed to don the costumes.
That’s how she ended up on the phone with the president of the California Raisin Board Association at 11pm on a Friday, explaining how she needed the costumes in New York the next evening. “I must have sounded so crazy,” San Juan says with a laugh. “And then I had to call [SNL producer] Lorne Michaels to get his direct approval to pay for a private plane to fly five California Raisin costumes and their performers to New York!” But she did it: the raisins made it to the Big Apple by 4pm Saturday.
San Juan faced an entirely different challenge for Halston, starring Ewan McGregor as the late disco-era designer. “As the costume designer of this show, I would not only be creating Halston’s image, but I would be, in many cases, designing in his voice—creating Halston collections that didn’t necessarily happen,” she says. “I met with many of his contemporaries in my research who had such a profound affection for him, so I wanted to honor them and honor the person they all loved so dearly.”
The process required an incredible amount of research, as well as technical skill. A costume designer, after all, not only has to hunt down the impossible, but to create clothing whole-cloth.
San Juan constructed caftans and slinky dresses that mimicked Halston’s style and coached McGregor on how to convincingly hold a pair of scissors, pull out fabric from a roll, and cut a dress on the bias—all things she mastered at FIT.
“FIT gave me an unparalleled tactile relationship to clothes,” San Juan says. She could whip up a sequined jumpsuit for Maya Rudoph playing Donatella Versace on SNL in no time flat or embellish a graffiti-splashed denim jacket for The Get Down, which takes place in The Bronx in the 1970s. “To know how to knit on a machine, to create patterns, to drape—that’s invaluable.”
Charlese Antoinette Jones sewed her own going-out clothes as a teenager in suburban Maryland. After studying fashion merchandising and marketing, she moved to New York City and signed up for a styling course through FIT’s Center for Continuing and Professional Studies. She dressed models backstage during New York Fashion Week Fashion Week before landing an internship in the costume department for 2009 comedy Solitary Man.
“I was getting coffee and picking up and dropping off clothes,” Jones says. “It was basic but really essential. I’ve done almost every job in the costume department, so I really understand how much work goes into every position.”
Jones continued working on films while taking courses in drawing and pattern-making, among others. “As I got further into my costume design career, I wanted to acquire skills so I could communicate with my tailors and with my team better,” she explains. “Those FIT courses were awesome.”
Jones has a keen eye for sourcing vintage styles for period movies like 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah, about the Black Panther activist Fred Hampton, for which she earned a Costume Designers Guild nomination. She also builds many of her costumes from scratch, including Ben Affleck’s loud 1980s track suit (worn with wraparound sunglasses) in 2023’s Air.
“That was a challenge, because a lot of those athletic performance fabrics from the 1980s just don’t exist anymore,” she says. “We had to do a lot of running around and color-matching to find that windbreaker material!”
Jones says that all this is done in service of the character—and to help the actor find the character’s voice. She makes sure her fittings are places where actors feel comfortable improvising, playing, and offering suggestions. “It’s really cool to watch someone become the character,” she says, recalling her first meeting with LaKeith Stanfield, who played an FBI informant who infiltrates the Black Panthers in Judas and the Black Messiah. “He put on this trench coat and all of a sudden he’s walking differently, he’s swinging his arms. And then of course that led to him wearing this coat and it flying behind him when he jumps over the car and getting this cool, iconic shot.”
Costumes give actors confidence and insight into the soul of the characters. They capture the imaginations of the audience as well. Costumers have the power to change the way we dress in the real world. The 1967 gangster film Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a wave of 1940s-inspired fashions (including berets and fedoras), while the 1970 weepy Love Story sparked a craze for knitted hats like the one its star Ali MacGraw wore. More recently, between the Fleabag jumpsuit and Barbie pink, costumes have more power than ever.
“I am pleasantly surprised by how many trends I see that are rooted in films or TV shows,” Bretaña says, noting the uptick in goth-inspired garb on FIT’s campus after the Addams Family spinoff Wednesday debuted in 2022. “I think we are living in a world where perhaps the greatest fashion influencers are actually costumers.”
LEGENDARY LOOKS
Many of the most iconic costumes for film and TV were
created by FIT alumni. Here are some of our favorites
Johnetta Boone, Fashion Buying and Merchandising ’84, spent decades styling still-photography images for editorial and commercial projects before she got her first costume-design break, for 2008 indie The Great Buck Howard. She now masterminds the clothes worn in the Western drama series Yellowstone, which in its five seasons has helped popularize “yee-haw” style: authentic country boots, Pendleton coats, and cowboy hats, which Boone mixes with European high fashion and Native American designs. “I learned how to sew at a very early age from my mom—a skill that I’m always evolving,” she says. “But as a costume designer, it’s very important one understands the business aspect,” which she learned at FIT. “We are, in fact, merchandising.”
Juliet Polcsa, Fashion Design ’81, has worked with directors Gus Van Sant, Stanley Tucci, and Antoine Fuqua. But she will forever be associated with The Sopranos, which she styled for its entire six-season run, from 1999 to 2007, and for which she received four Emmy nominations. That groundbreaking series launched an ongoing obsession with New Jersey mob aesthetics, thanks to Polcsa’s flashy ensembles—from mafia boss Tony’s novelty ketchup-print button-down to wife Carmela’s “cooked shrimp” nail polish. Polcsa went to stores where actual gangsters shopped, studied police surveillance videos, and went to several strip clubs to outfit the strippers and staff at the Bada Bing. “Whether the camera sees it or not, the outfit has to be complete,” she told FIT in 2002 of her meticulous commitment to authenticity. “The actors know the details are there, which is important in establishing their character. Then all they have to do is act.”
Before Polcsa joined The Sopranos, Ane Crabtree outfitted James Gandolfini in a tan bathrobe and shorts for the series’ pilot. Yet it was the scarlet capes and white bonnets she created for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which premiered in 2017, that would transcend the small screen, becoming a pro-choice symbol worn by feminist protesters across the globe. “I have found ways to scream via my work, creatively, in my art,” Crabtree—who studied Fashion Design at FIT—told Ms. magazine. “I think other women have felt that—that’s what they’ve told me—that’s why they don the costume, because you don’t have to say a damn word.”
Mary E. Vogt, Illustration, has had a hand in designing the otherworldly costumes of movies like Hocus Pocus (1993), Men in Black (1997), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018). After studying at FIT, Vogt went to California and worked as a sketch artist for MGM. The legendary costume designer Bob Ringwood then hired her to help him with the sci-fi looks in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), and the pair reunited on Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992), where Vogt oversaw the construction of Michelle Pfeiffer’s now-iconic Catwoman suit. “I feel I’m there to help the actors create the characters in the story,” Vogt told students at Woodbury University in 2019. “You can have the most beautiful design, but if the actor doesn’t feel the character in it, you have nothing, and you need to start over.”
A trip to the ballet inspired Patricia Zipprodt, Fashion Design, to enroll at FIT to learn the craft of fashion and costume design. She quickly made a name for herself on Broadway, winning Tonys for Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, and Sweet Charity. But she’s probably best known today for the 1967 classic The Graduate, for which she transformed Anne Bancroft into a frisky cougar and Dustin Hoffman into an avatar of Ivy League style.
Kasia Walicka-Maimone began making her own clothes when she was 5; when she moved to New York City, she enrolled in Fashion Design courses at FIT. Walicka-Maimone has worked in every genre, from crime (2014’s A Most Violent Year) to sci-fi (2018’s Ready Player One), and frequently collaborates with the director Wes Anderson. Lately, she has won acclaim for her spectacular period costumes in the HBO series The Gilded Age. “I always say that I don’t choose subjects by the period, I choose them if they are a good story,” she told “The Film Experience” blog in 2015. “I don’t really care if it’s the 1800s or 2010. If it’s a great character-driven thought process, it’s engaging.” —R.L.
