Catherine Charpentier is a member of the Motion Picture Costumers union who has worked on major productions like Man in the High Castle, American Idol, Epic Rap Battles of History, A Christmas Story Live, and at one of Los Angeles’s largest costuming houses. We spoke to her about her work and fashion in general.
Tell us about your job.
I am a costumer. I like to call costumers translators. We usually work with a costume designer, and we are the people who bring the costume designer’s vision to life by finding fabrics. Costumers are also sometimes the illustrators—the illustrator for Black Panther is in the same union as I am.
It’s our job to physically build the clothing that you’ll see on TV and film. Some costumers get sketches and fabrics and build the custom clothing to fit the actor and bring that vision to actual life.
What do you focus on?
A lot of what I do is on set. If a strap breaks, I help stitch that up or put a piece of double stick tape on it.
I also help shop for a lot of clothing. That’s my real focus: to be more of the shopping side of things. Eventually, I would love to start sourcing fabrics, but that is definitely a role that you have to kind of work your way up to.
How are all those costumes created? What’s the process like?
The director will work with a production designer, who is the person in charge of the entire scene. When you watch anything on TV or film, everything from any pencils or pens on somebody’s desk to the eyeglasses they might be wearing is something that has been discussed prior with the production designer, and usually the costume designer as well.
And then we have somebody in our world, who’s usually our costume supervisor, whose role is to read the script and and say, Well, to find 150 head-to-toe outfits from the 1920s, here’s what you’re looking at for that budget. And then the discussion can ensue from there. Sometimes, the director will actually change the script or CGI people instead.
And then we, as costumers, get our marching orders from both our supervisor and the designer. We’ll scour all of our resources here in Los Angeles.
Where do you find all those costumes, especially the ones that have to be historically accurate?
We have a number of very large costume houses. One of the ones I worked at is nine square miles of clothing. And it is our job to then scour these costume houses and pull pieces that fit the costume designer’s vision.
Most of the things that I’ve done have been in period and vintage clothing. That is where my background is and that’s where my passions lie. So sometimes for work I get to go to vintage shopping fairs and make connections with vintage dealers around the Los Angeles area.
Sometimes we go to some of the fabric houses, too. Los Angeles has an entire area downtown called the Fashion District and there are certain fabric houses that only work with professional designers and productions. We can get fabrics there that are genuine from the 1950s—or sometimes you can find bolts of fabric from the 1940s or ’30s. It’s definitely more rare.
It kind of all turns into a treasure hunt.
How do you make sure what you’re buying is historically accurate?
This is where some of background knowledge comes in. We will do a lot of initial research.
One of the things that I did with Live By Night, a gangster movie that Ben Affleck directed, was to spend a week looking at images of 1930s gangsters and looking at the way they were dressing when they were down in Florida versus the way they were dressing when they were in Boston versus Chicago gangsters.
We actually looked for a lot of those mundane images like people sitting on a couch holding their dog, or any really good nuggets that may show the way that somebody tied their scarf, or the way they might have left a button open, especially if you’re doing a true story. With something like The Queen [about England’s Queen Elizabeth II] or Darkest Hour [about England’s 1940s Prime Minister Winston Churchill], we really try and become detectives, where we’re looking at every single tiny little aspect of the way that person presented themselves.
Why are those details important?
I like to think it also helps the actor to also embody that clothing. That’s something that Jacqueline West, the Designer of Live By Night mentioned: when she puts the clothing on the actor, she’s seen them stand differently. She’s seen they walk differently. Sometimes they’ll even start to talk differently. And some method actors will not take their costume off. They might just keep it on and spend a little extra time walking around and just becoming that person.
Since you work with fashions from different historical periods, what have you learned about how fashion changes over time?
It’s definitely cyclical. One of the things that we also have to pay attention to and try to learn is how not to confuse when fashion repeats itself.
One of my favorite examples that I always go back to is,the way that the 1980s fell in love with the 1940s. When you watch movies like The Mask or Dick Tracy, they wore fashions that emerged in the 1940s originally. When you look at comparisons side by side, men’s suits have very large, exaggerated shoulders. Think of MC Hammer and his double-breasted jacket, where there are buttons on both sides and the lapels [the part of the jacket that folds over on the front] are very pointy: that is a style that originated in the 1940s.
What often precipitates this is what’s happening culturally. People start to either rebel against what’s happening politically and sometimes it means that they can become more conservative in trends and styles.
In the 1980s, you started to see fashion that became much more buttoned up, at least in the upper middle class. There were far fewer colors or variations in colors. In the 1970s we think of paisley, we think of this explosion of bolds and metallics.
But then, of course, in the street fashion world, you had the emergence of hip hop and music culture. And I think street fashion, on the other hand, was kind of rebelling against what we might have been seeing in the common, or in the more upper-class, buttoned-up world.
How does picking a clothing style help bring out someone’s personality?
This is a difference between styling and costuming.
In costuming, we are trying to bring the psychology of the character to light. You might leave a shirt untucked. Or you might actually mess the clothing up—taking it down, we say—to make it look like the character’s favorite shirt that he wears every day.
With styling, you’re working with who the people are, but also trying to broaden their horizons. On American Idol, we were trying to build the contestants a persona that fit the type of music they’re playing. I like to figure out what kind of stores they like to shop at and then maybe try and take it up a notch, because most people don’t have the money to go out and buy their fantasy clothes all the time.
And so it’s a little bit of a Cinderella moment where we get to say, Hey, why don’t you try this stuff on. And I think it can be kind of scary. It can be kind of hard.
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