How do you design a costume?
Costume designer Whitney Anne Adams explains how you get your first job with Baz Luhrmann, how to prepare for blood, and how a skirt is not just a skirt.
First, a few things I enjoyed this week:
• I recently read that Steven Spielberg had directed the features Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind before he first worked with a costume designer. He’d employed a costume supervisor for those films—the person who oversees wardrobe and makes sure it’s prepared for each shooting day—but never a designer. I found this a little surprising, particularly for Jaws, where it feels like every costume—though simple in looks—feels utterly iconic and appropriate for each character. (Perhaps that supervisor had taken on some “invisible” job duties outside of their description to make the boss look good.) Either way, he self-corrected when he found himself doing his first period picture, where a rumpled Everyman button-up wouldn’t cut it. Deborah Nadoolman Landis hopped on board for the farce comedy 1941, then moved on to Raiders of the Lost Ark with Spielberg, where she began designing a costume for Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones. Everything was set until Selleck dropped out last-minute, which forced Nadoolman Landis to improvise. Here’s her side from a Deadline interview:
I love how a now very famous hat and leather jacket came together on the fly, but I also think about how incredibly difficult it must have been for Harrison Ford to come into a film last-minute without all the character preparation he’d typically get working with a costume designer from the start. He simply walked in, put on the costume, and became Indy, something he credits to Nadoolman Landis’ incredible costume design.
[I apologize, but I’m still laughing at this VF typo and imagining his name really is Hans Solo.]
• The hat got me thinking about this very funny quote I’d read from costume designer Ann Roth a few months ago in Vanity Fair. She was being interviewed about her role for Barbie when she got into talking about dressing Nicole Kidman for The Hours, a movie Kidman filmed right after her public divorce and for which Kidman donned a sizable fake nose. From Ann Roth:
The rest of the piece goes on to explain how Harvey Weinstein hated the nose, because it uglied up his beautiful star and how Scott Rudin employed hard-nosed [sorry] guards to keep Weinstein off the set, so he couldn’t touch the damn prosthetic. But amid all this is Roth’s role in guiding Kidman to a place where she could deliver her best work, where she could get out of her own skin and just act. Whether or not the nose was the best idea for the production, it certainly was the best idea for Kidman and helped her win an Oscar for her performance.
Now all this talk about costume design and hats and Nicole Kidman is a neat little segue into my interview today with costume designer Whitney Anne Adams, an Atlanta-based designer who began her career on Broadway and got her film start working alongside Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, before designing costumes for beloved indies like The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing, then hitting the studios with Freaky, Happy Death Day 2U, and the upcoming The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat.
I find that costume design is one of the under-sung crafts on a film set, and I wanted to know more, so I had Whitney answer all of my questions about wardrobe. Her answers, believe it or not, also somehow includes whether or not you should put Nicole Kidman in a hat, along with a handy tip for getting the most out of a jacket that will be soaked in blood (hint: make sure it’s easy-to-clean red leather).
What got you into costume design?
I grew up such a movie fan. My family loved watching movies. We’d eat dinner in front of the TV and watch movies all the time, so I grew up a huge lover of film. I did drama all through elementary and high school, but I was a terrible actor and hated being on stage, but I loved theater in general. When I went to college, I was a pre-med major, and after two weeks of chemistry and calculus, I was like, Oh no this is not for me. My one fun class was Intro to Theater Design, and within three weeks I knew I wanted to be a costume designer. I couldn’t even explain it to anybody. I switched my major to theater after three weeks and later moved to New York to do Broadway and fell into film when I met Baz [Luhrmann] and Catherine [Martin]. My first film was The Great Gatsby.
How does one just meet Baz and Catherine? Were they actively recruiting from Broadway?
I actually won a costume design contest as part of their movie Australia. When I was finishing college, Apple had a partnership with their film, and they did all these behind-the-scenes videos, and half of them had contests attached to it, so I entered the costume design contest and found out nine months later I won the grand prize and a trip to the Australia. For the contest, I had to design a costume for Nicole Kidman’s character, Lady Sarah Ashley, when she arrives in Australia, and the costume in the film is this beautiful blue and white tailored suit, and I did a version of that. Because it was an Apple contest, you had to do it on an Apple computer. I had a PC at the time, so I did it on the school’s computers to make sure I fulfilled the parameters, but I remember being so terrified after I sent it in, because I didn’t put a hat on Nicole Kidman’s character. They uploaded everybody’s costumes to the contest website so you got to see everybody’s work, college and high school students, and I remember seeing so many people had put hats on her, and I was like, Oh no did I forget to do a hat? But it didn’t feel right, so I’m glad I went with my gut instinct.
So, yeah, I got connected to them through the contest. Then I was in New York when they’d just moved to New York, and they were looking for someone to assist them on a workshop of The Great Gatsby to get the movie greenlit, so it was just me and the head assistant and Baz and Catherine doing everything. Very intense. They knew I wasn’t coming from no background, because I had been working in New York for three years. I was a tailor at a Broadway costume shop and designing shows on the side. Even still, that they took a chance on me, I’m very grateful for them believing in me—I did work my butt off, though.
Having your first film be a Baz Luhrmann production seems insane. What did you get to learn about process from them?
I was completely thrown into everything with them, because they’re also married on top of being collaborators, and with Catherine doing both sets and costumes, it was all hands on deck for everything. I did things for art department, even though I was mainly in costumes. It was a master class that I was getting paid for, which is the best foundational learning one person can get. A lot of it was just making stuff happen. Even though it’s a giant movie and giant budget, every dollar is allocated, and every minute has been assigned to all the things you need to complete, so it was a big challenge to keep everything organized, and that was my main job. My technical position was costume design assistant, which is not a technical term in America. We filmed in Australia. It was all-encompassing of all the things we needed to get done. And it was super theatrical, so it was a great for me being a theater costume designer transitioning into film. Once I was on set for Gatsby, we were filming the first party scene, and ten months of work to see everybody in costume… our temp track was “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO, and we’re filming in 3D, so I’m wearing 3D glasses watching everyone dance to LMFAO, and I’m like sobbing in our tent watching all our hard work embodied by all these amazing actors. It was that very moment I decided I needed to be a film costume designer. That exact moment.
What do you see as the major differences between costuming for Broadway and for film?
What I love about film is you see both the big picture and the tiny details. One of my favorite things about costumes and clothes are, like, the weave on a fabric and the tiny jewelry details, and you can really show those so well on camera, whereas, in theater, it’s hard to see that level of detail. In theater, you can decide where to look, and in film, the camera tells you where to look, and I love the process of working with department heads to come to that final realized product. That’s why talking to the DP is so important and having open communication there. You want to know how close we’re going, how much are we seeing. At this point, as a film designer, I just dress everyone head to toe no matter what. On Gatsby Baz could pull any member out of the crowd and feature them, so you had to make sure every person of those hundreds of background actors were dressed impeccably because you never knew who would get pulled up for the closeup. Ever since that experience with Gatsby, I try to have every single thing done just in case, because you never know what’s going to happen on the fly.
What happens when you don’t have the time or budget or support to get that level of detail?
The number of corners I’ve had to cut have been many, but starting in theater—and also starting as a tailor—I know which corners can be cut to make the final product still look really good. Having that foundation in theater prepared me to be a good film costume designer, because I know how not to sacrifice the quality. I can tell, but most people won’t be able to tell, and sometimes you just have to throw it up there. Perfectionism is not a good thing in this business. Nothing is ever going to be perfect or what we have in our heads, but it’s going to be the best it can be. All I want to know I—and my team—have done our very best.
Are most costume designers coming from a tailor background, or is that rare now?
It’s more prevalent in theater than it is in film. I find it extremely useful to know how costumes are put together, how I want something to be built. I have more knowledge speaking with my tailors and construction artists, because I know exactly how long something should take and how we can appropriately get things done so we don’t overwhelm the team. If something isn’t possible I know how to pivot and do something different. It’s not super prevalent to have the tailor background, but it serves me very well in every project, especially when I was starting out on low-budget features. I was a one-woman department. I did all the alterations myself. My second movie, it was me and one other person, and I built the costumes myself, because I was free labor, essentially. I’m glad I have a huge team that can handle that for me now, but I know in a pinch I can get something done. Even on my last movie, a studio film for Searchlight Pictures, I still was sewing things last minute to make sure it got on camera in time. I also never want any person on my staff to not get paid. Every person on my staff needs to get paid for every minute that they work. If that’s ever in question, I make sure they’re off the clock and they get to go home. I want to make sure my team feels respected and is paid properly and not overworked. My job is, in those last-minute cases, to take on the work myself.
I imagine there was a bit of whiplash going from a huge budget for something like Gatsby to much smaller budgets when you became your own department head.
After Gatsby, I assisted on two indie films with an amazing designer, which helped me understand a different size scale. After that, I started being my own department head and doing these small non-union films. It was super important to have lower stakes for me to build up my knowledge base. I didn’t want to be thrown into a giant thing, where I don’t have the proper experience. I liked be where I can get more confident and comfortable gaining those skills before things got bigger. Half of the job then becomes being a manager and being good at delegating things.
What about working with actors to develop their character? I’ve read a lot about how someone like Ann Roth is so beloved by actors like Meryl Streep, because she’s the first person they come to when they’re developing a character.
I think what is so incredible about Ann is the care she puts in, because she asks all these questions about who these characters are, but it’s so important to make the actor know that they are going be fully taken care of. They have to become the character, but they’re still themselves. The relationship between an actor and a designer is so intimate. We’re like, Hi, nice to meet you, can you take your clothes off? You’re thrown into an intimate relationship from the get go, so it’s about being able to impart to an actor that they’re in a safe space, and they’re going to be taken care of, and their needs will be met, and they’ll be listened to. We’re creating this character together, along with the director and writer. it’s the four of us creating the character, and the actor has to embody it. As soon as I’m able to contact an actor, the minute their deals are done, I call them to start chatting character. If they have specific thoughts about the character, I need to know right away before I start heading down another road.
Probably my favorite relationship I’ve had with an actor is with Jessica Roth, who’s now one of my closest friends. We met on Happy Death Day 2U, and we clicked instantly on the phone. Once [director] Chris [Landon] and I decided that her character Tree was not going to be in the same outfit the entire movie, I started talking with Jess about what influence her mom’s character would have on this alternate universe Tree was in for the sequel. Jessica has such a close relationship with her mom like I have with my mom. We connected immediately, and now she’s one of my closest friends. It was an amazing experience to build this character together and take it even further in the second installment.
I know some department heads like to be on set and others who designate their right-hand person as their surrogate. How do you work?
It’s a mixture of both. I am on set for every single new established costume, so the first time you see it on camera. I can’t always do 100 percent of them, because I need to be in three places at once, and you have to choose. A lot of times I’m in fitting, and I can’t be there. But I have a great crew, I’ve been lucky to work in so many different places, so I have crew in so many different cities, but my main squeeze is my costume supervisor Kristin Morlino. She and I met randomly at Sundance at a dinner party. We liked each other so much where we wanted to find a way to work together. So I take her with me everywhere, and we usually get most of our crew locally. There are great local crews all over the country. If we can bring in some of our crew from Atlanta, we do. I love working in Atlanta. I’ve never actually worked in LA. But I definitely prefer Atlanta to New York. Logistically, New York is the hardest place in the entire country to work by pure logistics alone. Some people feel the opposite. I’m not one of those people. I like having a car and an easier time with parking, whereas, you’re on foot in New York, and my body has taken a beating after so many years.
So if you’re on the subway and see some poor person lugging crates of clothing around, you should have mercy on them. What’s your first step in designing a costume?
My first step is two separate things happening concurrently. On one side, I’m trying to crew up as quick as possible. On the other side of it, I’m reading the script multiple times. I’m doing my research—either I’ve already started researching boards in order to get the job, or I’m starting as soon as I’m officially hired. The research is my favorite part. I love digging into the world that’s on the page, and there’s so many questions you have to answer. I love getting into the specifics of who each character is, talking with the writer, talking with the director. The minute we have actors cast and deals signed, I talk to them. I did a movie in the fall that was set in 1950, 1968, 1977, and 1999, so I had four separate time periods to do really heavy research in. Getting to research not just the visuals but where the story is set, the time and place, the socioeconomic background of the characters, how they treat their clothes, it’s really fun to start building who this person is. It’s so much more than the clothes.
The best time I had researching, though was for Gatsby. We had so much access to everything—museums, magazines, books. The amount of data we had on our hard drives was pretty immense. I still have everything from every film I’ve ever done. I have a giant Dropbox account, and I have multiple hard drives in my house. But I have to become an expert in every time period I work on.
What research do you do for a contemporary-set film?
It’s really digging into social media. Instagram and TikTok and every public facing account I can find, in addition to modern photography street photography. What are the kids wearing these days? I also look at what exists in stores, because often everything in those movies is found and source as opposed to built. I try to shop local brands of whatever city I’m filming in and find local artists and small businesses. There’s a great service called the Black Designer’s Database, created by a costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones, connecting black businesses and designers with costume designers, and I love using them to try to infuse more unique, interesting pieces into everything I do.
Let’s use the movie my friend Michael Kennedy wrote, Freaky, as a case study in contemporary costuming, because that’s how I first became aware of your work.
The costume we did for Kathryn Newton as The Butcher in the red leather jacket is one of my favorites, because so much went into making that final product. It started out as a dress in the script. And immediately Michael, Chris [Landon], and I were like, Oh that’s not going to work for all the action sequences. As we started building Kathryn’s character Millie’s wardrobe, we decided The Butcher wouldn’t like anything in Millie’s closet, so where would he go? [For reference, a teenage girl named Millie body swaps with a serial killer named The Butcher.] He would go to Millie’s mother’s closet. Even though her mother was a cop, we imagined that to let off steam, she probably goes to the club to have fun, but it would still be a structured, androgynous look. We started looking at leather jackets. My two references were the end of Grease—Sandy’s look at the end with all black and the pop of red—and James Dean in Rebel Without a CauseI. And then I was thinking about what The Butcher would pick for himself? He is a dude who happens to be in a woman’s body, but he still has the brain of a serial killer guy. His stuff is very workwear, so we thought he would pull those workwear high waisted blue jeans and black basic top and red leather jacket, because it’s cool and attention grabbing. Also, it was an outfit that the mother character could conceivably afford. It’s a $200 jacket from Amazon. We must have tried on like 50 leather jackets both in red and black.
Do you ever get annoyed when you watch something and find yourself thinking that a character could not afford their outfit?
Sometimes it’s just a choice to do that high-fashion look and not worry about the details. For most of my work, I want there to be storytelling behind every single piece we see on camera and feel true to the characters. I like justifying every single piece and keeping the world grounded.
Have you ever designed a costume that doesn’t look like it would take much work but was a huge undertaking?
Yes. My second movie I ever designed. It’s called Piercing, starring Christopher abbot and Mia Wasikowski, and in the third act of the movie, Mia’s character changes into her at-home outfit and it’s just a top and a skirt, but I made all the skirts myself. I made nine of them, because there’s a lot of action and blood that happens in the third act, so we needed a ton of them. I made them myself, because I had no money for labor. The shirts I bought from a store, but I couldn’t find the color I wanted to match the skirt, so I hand-dyed all seven of those shirts after I altered them. I dyed to not quite the right color so I re-dyed them again, and this is all with no money and no washer or dryer in my New York apartment, so I was dyeing them on a stove in a big pot and lugging them down to the laundromat to dry in the dryer and then lugging it back up my three-story walkup and looking at the color in the light and being like, Ugh this color is wrong again. So it just looks like a skirt and top, but the amount of hours that went into them was a lot of time.
You’ve done several movies with blood or gore, which presents a lot of problems.
You need a million multiples. But it’s really how many multiples you can afford. It depends on how many times you’re doing each stunt, too. In Happy Death Day 2U, Tree, our main character, is in one outfit for a huge chunk of the time, so figuring out what stunts are happening in that outfit—is she wearing a harness or getting wet or getting bloody—is first, and I think I had 18 of that outfit. Freaky for another example, the red leather jacket, Katheryn had ten copies of that costume for both her and her stunt double. That wasn’t even enough. I could only afford ten of that jacket, so I had to keep wiping it off. Luckily it was red, so less issues with wiping blood off, especially because the leather jacket was the most expensive part of that costume. And all the jackets needed to be altered, slimmed. Each one had to be specially altered with a special leather machine, in addition to everything else.
People don’t think about how in contemporary movies, almost every outfit has alterations on it. Most things just don’t go on. Off-the-rack clothes fit almost nobody perfectly, so everything needs to be altered for every single actor, even if it’s just a little nip in the back or a hem. it’s all that invisible labor that people forget. You can’t just fit someone the morning of and throw them on camera. You can do it, but you’re going to have to use a tag gun to do a hem real fast and it’s not gonna look the best.
As long as there’s no closeups. Where do the clothes go when the show wraps?
When it’s done by a studio, it almost always goes back to studio storage until the movie is picture locked, because they might need it for reshoots. And then they can do whatever they want with it. They can pay to keep it like they did with Happy Death Day, because they were going to do a sequel. I got all the costumes when I did Happy Death Day 2U, but on independent films, producers have the final say. They tell me who they want me to box up, and we box it up, and we send it off to them. Sometimes they don’t want to keep anything. I do have costumes from a couple of my independent features, but I wouldn’t use them again. I think they’re so particular, especially The Eyes of My Mother costumes, I still have those, except for the ones that were covered in blood. I had to throw those away.
The Eyes of My Mother brings me to something I found fascinating about that project. Because it was shot in black and white, you couldn’t just style like you typically would with colors.
Completely. That was so fun and was also my first movie I ever designed, so a lot of things were happening at once. The first thing was to talk with [director] Nic [Pesce] and our DP Zach [Kuperstein] and figure out which type black and white Zach was going to use. We found the right camera filter on my phone of what would be closest to the black and white he was doing, and then when I was out shopping, I would run my camera in black-and-white mode over all the racks, so I could see what everything looked like in black and white. Fluorescent pink is going to look like nothing in black and white, for instance, so my priority was picking high-contrast patterns and textural things, as opposed to flat colors, because those would do nothing in the black and white. When you look at it in person, there were a couple moments where I was like, I’m glad this was in black and white, because it looked totally wild.
I have a funny anecdote from one of my movies I designed last year. We were shooting some stills of one of the characters as a showgirl in the ’30s, and I was under the impression that the photo shoot was going to be in black and white. I was able to source these showgirl pieces, but they came from different sets, so the colors did not go together. We did the shoot, and I walk into set, where they’ve put the photos of this young woman’s character all over this house… in color. And I was mortified, because I did not intend for any of those photos to be in color, but the set decorator loved the color clash so much that they decided to make them color instead. But they didn’t tell me, so I walk into set and my jaw is on the ground. Like Oh no. But everyone is happy. I had to get over it in my brain, because it’s not what I intended. It was a good lesson for me to let go, because it was not at all what I intended but it worked better for the production. Sometimes I can be wrong and that’s okay.
How do you ensure you get all the information you need to do your work?
The biggest thing I learned is to communicate more than you think you need to. Asking every question possible and sharing all the information I have and continually checking in, because the more I make sure I’m on the same page as my colleagues, the less surprises there will be down the line. It’s not just you in a vacuum designing things. Ideally, my production designer and I are sharing everything. One of my favorite production designers is Freddy Waff. I did a movie called Killerman with him, and he walked me through every single location a couple of days before we were filming, so it was almost ready. As a costume designer, I can’t go on tech scouts. I am in the middle of all my principle fittings then. I’m the one person who’s super bummed out I don’t get to go on tech scouts, because I miss seeing all the locations in person until literally the moment we’re filming. So getting to have him walk me through every location in person really changed the game.
Have you ever had any surprises when you get to set? Like you dress a character in red, and there’s a red wall?
Surprises come with, like, sofa colors or camera angles. That’s why it’s really helpful to look at storyboards. It’s the other thing I miss out on. I don’t get to be there with the DP having them tell me where the camera is going to be and where every shot is going to be looking from, so not knowing what the angles are really affects my work. Both the lighting and where a character is standing has a huge effect. It’s helpful to know what the wall color is, but maybe we want the character to blend in and maybe we don’t. So talking to the DP and the gaffer to know what the lighting is going to look like is key. Knowing what’s going to be in frame and what they’re standing by really affects what I’m going to do. It’s a lot harder to change a background and wall color than it is a costume, but it’s still really hard for me to change a costume, too.
What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?
How truly hard my team and I work to make every single costume come on camera, because a lot of our work is invisible. The costume department is often in another place or another wing, so no one sees us working. Also, costumes are physically smaller than sets, but they’re just as much work. There’s all the sourcing and procurement and tiny stitches. Costumes to me are just as important as production design and cinematography, I want to make people respect us as an equal department, because we are busting our butts every single day. Oh, and sourcing something. Say you found the perfect thing, but the only multiples are in a different country. You have to get them there in time. We deal with so many logistics that aren’t seen by anyone but us. So I’m on my soap box on my social media with pay equity and the respect issue when it comes to costumes, because we work so hard and we should get respected the same.
If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, it’s important to know it’s tough, tough, tough, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I try to watch one or two movies a day, so I’m constantly building film references. This career is all-encompassing. It has taken over my life for my entire life. But I think the number one thing I’d advise people to do is to stretch every day, morning and night. It’s the thing that’s saved me. Doing stretches every night before bed and when I wake up. This job is so physically brutal. I wish I’d taken that advice sooner.