On her time at Beaver …
I was at Beaver from 6th through 12th. At some point very early, like in 6th or 7th grade, I was in an afterschool play and realized that I could be a stage manager or I could run sound. I could not be on stage but still be involved somewhere else. By the time I was in 7th grade, I designed costumes for the winter musical and I was able to boss around a bunch of parents and it was amazing.

It became much more serious when I got to the upper school. My advisor was Jen Yolles. I was very close with her and am still close with her. I worked on a ton of things with her. I think I was a freshman or a sophomore, I was working with the advanced drama students and we went to a theater competition. There was a costume competition as part of this larger thing and I was competing in that.

Essentially Beaver taught me that you could be a costume designer as a career. Jen Yolles was like, “This is a job. This is a thing you can do with your life.” And I’ve had that in the back of my head since I was really young.

On her professional path…
When I applied to colleges, I was not yet ready to study costume design as an undergrad. I was very academically invested. I really liked school and I wanted to keep receiving a liberal arts education so I applied to a handful of liberal arts schools. New York was my goal because I knew that I could be working in theater as I was in school.

I kind of got the lay of the land of what New York felt like—who was making stuff, what were the theaters, who were the tiny little theater companies who might hire me, who were the big directors that I want to someday meet. I sort of dipped my toe in all of that while studying art history, which, from a really deliberate research and design point of view, gave me a huge base of understanding of the history of art. I’ve been exposed to all of these visuals that I might not have found had I actually micro-focused on costume design as an undergrad because I was writing papers about things like Middle Eastern Art in the ‘70s, which then lets me see what everybody is wearing and what the culture looks like.

I still work in theater a little bit. I work with performance artists who I met years ago, and for film, it has truly been about meeting people. Some of my friends went to grad school for film and needed a costume designer for a short film. I did that and then all of their classmates made more movies and I worked on them. Then all of a sudden I have a career in film.

On R+D in her profession…
My entire process, no matter what the job is, is researching and then designing. The research changes shape based on the project itself. I get a script or a piece of music if it’s a dance piece or choreography, any base thing that my collaborators have to share, and then I dive really deep into research. It ranges from the sort of gut feeling things when I’m reading something, and then I have to find the research to back it up because I can’t present something to the team when we’re meeting if it didn’t exist, to making list upon list upon list of things that I need to research because I don’t know anything about them.

You go down all of those tunnels and gather as much as you can and then you start to shape it based on the subject of the script. “Brittany Runs a Marathon” had sixty-something changes, so we had a giant spreadsheet, essentially, that has a space for every single look that she wears in chronological order and you start to slot in ideas that you know need to live in certain places. Sometimes that’s slotting in research and reference images and the clothing itself manifests later, sometimes it’s slotting in actual fitting photos because you found clothing and you put it on her and you decided you liked it and you take pictures. And sometimes it’s just ideas or even a sketch, like you know it’s kind of like this, or it could be like this; when we know what room we’re in on the day let’s have three or four different shirts available because if the wall is this color blue then the shirt should be this color.

On creative habits…
As I go back and re-read the script, I usually make notes in a notepad that is always a grid. I write notes by character and/or by scene that are not conclusive, I’m not worried at that point if every look is annotated, it’s just things that I’m flagging as I’m reading, so I could read twenty pages of the script and people are going to be wearing clothing for all of those twenty pages and I might not write anything and then there will be one moment or one scene that ticks something off and I’ll write it down.

What worked for me is that I never left the very academic mindset of taking notes in a notebook to start to map out a project and understanding that a creative process can still happen in tandem with a rubric or a grid.

On utilizing resources …
I go to the library regularly. The Fashion Institute of Technology has a fashion library that has a lot of amazing historical references and also a pretty significant art reference section. I go to the Columbia Library, Avery, from time to time, and the New York Public Library. I go to a library when I can because I’ll have the shortlist from my notepad of terms to look up and then that will send me to a section of the library but on my walk from my computer to that section of the library, I’m going to pass a bunch of things that I didn’t even know I wanted to think of. And then I’ll reach that section and to the right and to the left of that book I need are going to be 15 other things that are actually even more useful for me.

The internet is an amazing resource for costumes because you can get to people’s personal lives on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr. The goal is always to find a primary source, so when I can find a Flickr feed of somebody who has put their first-day-of-work outfit up every day for three years, that’s like a goldmine. You get what real people wear. Obviously, as you get to more elevated design research, you get different things from it, but an editorial shoot in Vogue is going to inspire you in a very different way than what an actual waiter wears in the back of this restaurant. Which is probably not the apron that we think it is, it’s probably an old t-shirt. The Internet is great for that.

On collaboration…
I gather so much research that the next phase is usually a meeting with all of the creative department heads. In order to have a voice in that meeting, I need to have visuals ready to go that I am prepared to talk about. If I have an idea in my head and I don’t have something to show for it, it’s like the idea doesn’t exist. It’s challenging for me. But if I’m trying to communicate a visual idea using just language, I will always stumble and I will almost never succeed.

I have a film called “Chained For Life.” It is very near and dear to my heart, and I co-designed it with a friend who is also a costume designer. We worked together for a handful of iterations, she would work for me, I would work for her, she would build something for me, I would help her. Very New York theater scene—nobody has money so let’s just help each other. When this movie surfaced, I was like, “I need to do this with someone else. I need another brain to help figure out the creativeness of this, but also how to execute the creative within a really, really minuscule budget.” The whole experience was very, very fulfilling. I want to figure out more ways to do this moving forward because essentially at every turn you had another person to bounce an idea off of. What’s better than that?

You’re not in a bubble, the more inspiration you can get, the more successful your design will be. Obviously, the people that you’re collaborating with have to be in the same sort of mindset or world as you because you ultimately need to land on one answer. You can’t have six costumes for one outfit. But if you can have six ideas for every one outfit, that’s better than only having one. Often what happened in our collaboration is that in the beginning, we would each have six ideas for every one costume and by the time we got to the end, we had sort of created a visual language for the piece by bumping against each other and eventually we’d have the same idea.

On advice for current Beaver students…
The most successful people across the arts that I’ve ever worked with and ever met all have a grain of business person in them. You’re being hired because your brain is special and unique and if you can present that brain in a way that people will give you money for it, then you will have a career. If you can’t present it, you can be a genius and nobody will come knocking at your door.

“The most successful people across the arts that I’ve ever worked with and ever met all have a grain of business person in them. ”

– Stacey Berman ’05