Interview: Michelle J. Li, Costume Designer for Shiva Baby
Posted on March 28, 2021 at 8:00 am
Copyright Neon Heart 2020“Shiva Baby” mostly takes place at a reception following a Jewish funeral, which means costume designer Michelle J. Li had to find a way to make a lot of characters dressed in black look distinctive. An except from our interview for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists:
NM: It must be a challenge to do a movie where pretty much everybody is wearing black but you still have to make these characters distinctive and visually interesting.
MJL: Of course, at a shiva, the main color is going to be black. Emma and I spoke about it a lot. We as the consumer, think of black as one color. There are many, many different shades of black. There are warmer blacks, there are cooler blacks, and depending even upon the type of fabric, black absorbs light or reflects light.
When you put black in front of the lens, it becomes such a dark void, and you can lose a lot of definition from the silhouette of the character. I was really conscious about making sure that the texture and the pattern of whatever costume piece I was using really was the defining point that could help bring more interest into making it black, but interesting.
My Interview with the Costumes Designers of Amazon Prime’s The Boys
Posted on May 14, 2020 at 11:19 am
Many thanks to The Credits, the website of the Motion Picture Association, for publishing my interviews with Carrie Grace and Laura Jean Shannon, costume designers for the Amazon Prime superhero series The Boys.
In part one, they talk about constructing the look for the only member of the Seven who actually qualifies as wholesome—Starlight, played by Erin Moriarty, and how her look was shaped both behind-the-scenes and in the show itself.
When this project happened, it was right on the cusp of MeToo, when we were getting greenlit. What we’ve done with the series is we’ve taken some of the aspects of the original story and brought them to light in a way that really does show the woman’s struggle in the workplace. A lot of times as a costume designer, you are promoting a fantasy, as well as a reality. I think it’s really interesting, watching that scene, it’s the two men sitting on the couch who are selling the story, selling the pitch to Starlight. Telling her how this is the development of her character, and how she’s owning her sexuality and stepping out, showing any skin that she wants and everything. It is a costume that the character wears in the comic book. It’s a variation because what the comic book character wore when she wore the sexy outfit was kind of impossible to actually create.
In part two, they explain all of the different techniques that go into creating a superhero costume:
I always say: They play superhero suits on TV. But in real life, they’re actually unconventional materials and custom fabrics fused together in interesting ways, in innovative ways. We start by creating a design that not only takes into account making it look like a badass superhero suit but knowing that this is not a massive film where we have a giant CGI budget, where you can basically paint everything in we need to. This is a TV project that has a limited amount of time and money and resources to get each episode, and each episode is chock full of fighting and violence. So, we really need to make these suits wearable, and the actors and the stunt people really need to be able to wear these suits comfortably enough that they can facilitate all of this action.
It wasn’t just the flow of costumer jobs that stopped. It was a halt in momentum for her dream agenda: to be a fully dedicated costume designer. Last fall, that momentum had begun when she was hired for her first feature film as a designer. Operating with “a quarter of the money it should have had,” it was a challenging shoot. But for Apatoff, the experience was “was astonishing, exhilarating, thrilling, even in the most frustrating and hair-tearing moments. You’re working 100 hours a week, you’re not getting paid anything, and your project is impossible and it’s still the most fun to be able to say, ‘Okay, this character feels sad and lonely in this scene and we’re going to show that by having her wear her dead dad’s old sweatshirt because, you know, she wants to feel more loved and safe.” You get to dive so deep into the little nitty-gritty details of how people feel about their situation and about themselves, and how they present themselves as a result.”
We are very, very proud of our brilliant, beautiful, accomplished, and kind-hearted daughter.
Copyright Disney 2019Costume design is just as important in animated films as it is in live action. The New York Times has a great article by Robert Ito about the costume designers working on new looks for already-iconic characters Anna and Elsa in the upcoming Thanksgiving release “Frozen 2.” An excerpt:
Elsa is the queen, so her travel dress has to communicate her exalted position. In many ways, it also functions as a uniform, with military-style epaulets. Adorned with snowflakes, the pale blue dress is set off by a flowing cape split in two in the back. “We got a little pushback from the directors, who were skeptical about how it might perform,” said Lee, but her husband, David Suroviec, a character technical director on the film, vouched for it. Onscreen, the halves of the cape look like wings. “We wanted something that would play in the wind, because fall wind was going to be a big element in the movie,” Lee said.
Pay attention — you’ll be seeing these new gowns next year at Halloween!
The movie places an African and an African-American in opposition. “I’m an African-American male born in the 1980’s in Oakland,” he said, “and there’s a dynamic between being African and African-American that’s very interesting.” This is a key element he explored in the film, with African characters from the fictional country of Wakanda, which has never been colonized or even had any trade relationships with western countries, and African-American characters, who reflect the stress of living in a country still confronting racial divides.
“The question for me is what does it mean to be African? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I first knew I was black, since my parents sat me down and said, ‘You’re black and that’s what this means. You’ve got to navigate the world in a certain way.’ That’s the conversation every person has had to have because of the way the world works. If you don’t have that understanding you could be in a situation that costs you your life,” as Coogler’s first film, the fact-based “Fruitvale Station,” showed. “Nobody who was telling me what being African means had ever been there. My parents had never been, my grandmother had never been.” So it was essential for him to spend time in Africa, researching the cultures that Wakanda would represent.
“The African culture the world knows best is the African-American culture,” he said, citing the worldwide dominance of hip-hop. But working on the film and spending time in Africa helped him realize that the African culture he thought was erased by bringing Africans to the United States as slaves was much more intact than he thought. “I grew up thinking the African culture had been taken away from us, that it was lost. But the truth is, we didn’t. We hung onto it.”
And as the mother of a costume designer, I was especially excited to speak to Ruth Carter, whose costumes play such an essential role in the film. She talked about the African inspirations for the traditional tribal attire of the Wakandans, and the way African patterns are even reflected in the iconic superhero suit.
Actual African fabric as we know it is Dutch and Dutch-inspired and brought to Africa. Africa liked it and adopted it so all of their African fabrics come from Holland or from China. Wakanda was never colonized, so I didn’t want to use them. Every time I started to use the African fabrics I felt like it was not this movie so I created my own fabrics, based on the sacred geometry of African art. Usually it’s a checkerboard or it’s pyramid shapes or it’s striations of horizontal and vertical strikings so I use that and we created prints. Lupita’s green dress in the casino is one print that we created based on the Nigerian kente cloth. We just extracted the line work and we printed the fabric the same way we printed T’Challa’s superhero suit.
Once I get the illustration of the super suit I can’t change it; I can’t give him a Shaft coat, all of a sudden. I have to stay within those confines because they have already been working with merchandisers and all kinds of other people. The one thing that I did do which was my contribution was the Okavango pattern, a triangle shape.
That fabric is completely made up. The triangle is definitely a big part of African artistry. It’s a mystery within the African culture what that triangle shape actually means and everybody has their own theory. So the panther suit was printed with that triangle shape all over it so that when you’re looking at it, it’s this superhero suit that has this Wakandan language traveling through it; veining throughout it, and you also see an Okavango pattern and which makes it feel like he’s in the place of Wakanda, he’s in Africa and he’s an African king and gives it texture.
Vanity Fair posted a scene analysis with Coogler explaining what was going on in one of the film’s striking action sequences.
More commentary about this brilliant, groundbreaking new film coming soon.
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