NYCB seamstress copying a costume
The New York Times
June 14, 2010
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
The Fresh Tutu Brigade
“If there is a heaven for people in the costume industry, it surely includes an infinite walk-in closet: one-stop shopping no matter the fabric, historical period or one-of-a-kind button needed.
For Marc Happel, director of New York City Ballet’s costume shop, reality is somewhat more challenging. He and his staff are charged with rebuilding costumes made years or decades ago, sometimes with materials that have long since gone out of style or production. Meanwhile, shrinking budgets, rising costs and an imperiled garment district make it increasingly difficult to keep City Ballet’s vast repertory looking fresh.
With seven costume-intense premieres this season, Mr. Happel and his staff have been on creation overdrive. But the work of maintaining existing ballets never ends. Audiences will see one of the shop’s major rebuilds this week in Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” (1952), the costumes’ lush black bodices, originally designed by the illustrious Barbara Karinska, remade after years of wear and tear.
“Different variations of the velvet have been used to alter them,” Mr. Happel said, the repairs leading to a mishmash of not-quite-right fabrics. But replacing the bodices meant the sleeves and handmade trim had to be redone too, with special attention paid to Karinska’s detail work. “It just became a much bigger project than initially we thought,” Mr. Happel said.
In the best of times, securing the right materials is quite a task, and shoppers like Tracey Herman, Mr. Happel’s assistant, delight in the thrill of the hunt. But over the last 15 years or so, as clothing manufacturing has shifted overseas and rising Manhattan rents have forced small businesses out, she and her colleagues have had fewer places to look.
“It used to be there were 10 button stores you would go to, and now there are two,” she said. “What the stores are selling more of tends to be mass produced, imported, not as high quality, and maybe catering to a different fashion sensibility.”
You might think that the Internet would be a paradise for costume makers and that new technologies would yield ingenious ways to recreate extinct patterns and dyes. Digital printing does allow for the cost-effective replication of old hand-painted patterns on fabric, sites like eBay occasionally yield finds, and authentic specialty items can be found on the Web. But the industry remains a largely local, personal one.
“It’s a very 19th-century art form,” said Jared Aswegan, owner of Barbara Matera, which makes costumes for performing arts groups ranging from circuses to American Ballet Theater. There’s no substitute, he said, for holding material in your hands. “Actually being able to see it and feel it and understand what it is that you’re getting, you really can’t get a sense of that on the Internet.”
What you see online isn’t always what you get in person, which leads to further delays. And time is a luxury costumiers seldom have, especially midseason. Mr. Happel mentioned one business, on the brink of folding, that sells his shop many everyday supplies.
“We are a little freaked out by that, because that means now what we have to do is get stuff shipped from California,” he said. No more sending a staff member down to 36th Street.
Of course, resourceful shoppers have their secret stashes. Ms. Herman remains in touch with many of the merchants who closed their doors permanently, no longer able to afford Manhattan. Some of them keep stock at home. (Only a very few moved to other boroughs.)
“Now we just call them, and we either get a box in the mail or we don’t,” she explained, but only as long as those supplies last. And then? “That’s a good question,” she said, laughing. “Certainly you can always get things made, but it becomes at what price and are the tools and the material even available anymore?”
Trades go out of style too. Marcia Ceppos, who runs Tinsel Trading, which her grandfather started in 1933, said that younger generations aren’t particularly interested in running family businesses. (Ms. Ceppos has no children and is unsure of Tinsel’s future.) And Mr. Aswegan is beginning an internship program for skills like sewing and embroidery, which he says are “heading onto the endangered species list” as people look to more lucrative careers.
The sour economy has only exacerbated these trends. Many remaining garment district stores are reinventing themselves to stay afloat: Tinsel Trading has diversified its stock, while Mood Fabrics has benefited from its association with the television show “Project Runway” and started its own production company, Preview Textile Group, to better cater to the needs of small, belt-tightening designers.
The strategy, said Eric Sauma, one of the owners of the family-run Mood, is to focus “on our smaller designers, who just need small yardages, and be able to grow with them.” He noted that many of his smallest customers were bringing production back to the United States — cause for hope, he said.
Costume shop budgets are shrinking too. Ballet Theater, which outsources all of its costume work, started the Costume Fund in 2003 for restoration purposes. Mr. Happel said he was hoping for big donors for ambitious rebuilding projects like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which still has its original 1962 Karinska-designed costumes.
Meanwhile, the show must go on, and costumiers have many masters to please. Beyond designers and choreographers, balletomanes have long memories and strong ideas about what a costume should look like. And dancers often become attached to, and even slightly superstitious about, old costumes, preferring to deal with disrepair and sweat stains than to break in new versions.
Yet they can see the difference. On a recent Thursday morning the corps member Faye Arthurs, who was being fitted for a new “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” costume, exclaimed with pleasure over the subtle range of colors in her new tutu.
Mr. Happel nodded in somewhat harried agreement before hurrying off to a storage closet, where row upon row of diaphanous, bejeweled costume hung.
“I walk through here a lot by myself,” he said. “It’s exciting, you see the history of this company in all its costumes. It’s also frustrating, because I see all there is to do.””
Personal comment: Our costumiers have a lot of the same problems with sweat and wear, but we have only had a ballet Co for 8 years and for most of that time rented costumes. It’s been only in the last three years that we opened our own costume shop to make costumes rather than to do minor repairs on rental ones. We have some really talented costumiers we lured away from Hollywood because they wanted a more stable career and the big studios were shedding most of their costume shop capacity. Even with the dip in revenue from the recent recession I’ve been able to hold on to the talent and not had to skimp on the materials for costumes, though many of the showgirl costumes themselves are pretty skimpy. Only rarely do we have a costume disaster where a girl bleeds through her tights and tutu. One nice thing about a strippers costume is that the outer costume; coats, skirts, tops etc come off early in the performance so there isn’t really that much wear and the performance lingerie that gets soaked in sweat - or ripped off if the girl is working the house - isn’t that expensive to repair or replace.
The New York Times
June 14, 2010
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
The Fresh Tutu Brigade
“If there is a heaven for people in the costume industry, it surely includes an infinite walk-in closet: one-stop shopping no matter the fabric, historical period or one-of-a-kind button needed.
For Marc Happel, director of New York City Ballet’s costume shop, reality is somewhat more challenging. He and his staff are charged with rebuilding costumes made years or decades ago, sometimes with materials that have long since gone out of style or production. Meanwhile, shrinking budgets, rising costs and an imperiled garment district make it increasingly difficult to keep City Ballet’s vast repertory looking fresh.
With seven costume-intense premieres this season, Mr. Happel and his staff have been on creation overdrive. But the work of maintaining existing ballets never ends. Audiences will see one of the shop’s major rebuilds this week in Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” (1952), the costumes’ lush black bodices, originally designed by the illustrious Barbara Karinska, remade after years of wear and tear.
“Different variations of the velvet have been used to alter them,” Mr. Happel said, the repairs leading to a mishmash of not-quite-right fabrics. But replacing the bodices meant the sleeves and handmade trim had to be redone too, with special attention paid to Karinska’s detail work. “It just became a much bigger project than initially we thought,” Mr. Happel said.
In the best of times, securing the right materials is quite a task, and shoppers like Tracey Herman, Mr. Happel’s assistant, delight in the thrill of the hunt. But over the last 15 years or so, as clothing manufacturing has shifted overseas and rising Manhattan rents have forced small businesses out, she and her colleagues have had fewer places to look.
“It used to be there were 10 button stores you would go to, and now there are two,” she said. “What the stores are selling more of tends to be mass produced, imported, not as high quality, and maybe catering to a different fashion sensibility.”
You might think that the Internet would be a paradise for costume makers and that new technologies would yield ingenious ways to recreate extinct patterns and dyes. Digital printing does allow for the cost-effective replication of old hand-painted patterns on fabric, sites like eBay occasionally yield finds, and authentic specialty items can be found on the Web. But the industry remains a largely local, personal one.
“It’s a very 19th-century art form,” said Jared Aswegan, owner of Barbara Matera, which makes costumes for performing arts groups ranging from circuses to American Ballet Theater. There’s no substitute, he said, for holding material in your hands. “Actually being able to see it and feel it and understand what it is that you’re getting, you really can’t get a sense of that on the Internet.”
What you see online isn’t always what you get in person, which leads to further delays. And time is a luxury costumiers seldom have, especially midseason. Mr. Happel mentioned one business, on the brink of folding, that sells his shop many everyday supplies.
“We are a little freaked out by that, because that means now what we have to do is get stuff shipped from California,” he said. No more sending a staff member down to 36th Street.
Of course, resourceful shoppers have their secret stashes. Ms. Herman remains in touch with many of the merchants who closed their doors permanently, no longer able to afford Manhattan. Some of them keep stock at home. (Only a very few moved to other boroughs.)
“Now we just call them, and we either get a box in the mail or we don’t,” she explained, but only as long as those supplies last. And then? “That’s a good question,” she said, laughing. “Certainly you can always get things made, but it becomes at what price and are the tools and the material even available anymore?”
Trades go out of style too. Marcia Ceppos, who runs Tinsel Trading, which her grandfather started in 1933, said that younger generations aren’t particularly interested in running family businesses. (Ms. Ceppos has no children and is unsure of Tinsel’s future.) And Mr. Aswegan is beginning an internship program for skills like sewing and embroidery, which he says are “heading onto the endangered species list” as people look to more lucrative careers.
The sour economy has only exacerbated these trends. Many remaining garment district stores are reinventing themselves to stay afloat: Tinsel Trading has diversified its stock, while Mood Fabrics has benefited from its association with the television show “Project Runway” and started its own production company, Preview Textile Group, to better cater to the needs of small, belt-tightening designers.
The strategy, said Eric Sauma, one of the owners of the family-run Mood, is to focus “on our smaller designers, who just need small yardages, and be able to grow with them.” He noted that many of his smallest customers were bringing production back to the United States — cause for hope, he said.
Costume shop budgets are shrinking too. Ballet Theater, which outsources all of its costume work, started the Costume Fund in 2003 for restoration purposes. Mr. Happel said he was hoping for big donors for ambitious rebuilding projects like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which still has its original 1962 Karinska-designed costumes.
Meanwhile, the show must go on, and costumiers have many masters to please. Beyond designers and choreographers, balletomanes have long memories and strong ideas about what a costume should look like. And dancers often become attached to, and even slightly superstitious about, old costumes, preferring to deal with disrepair and sweat stains than to break in new versions.
Yet they can see the difference. On a recent Thursday morning the corps member Faye Arthurs, who was being fitted for a new “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” costume, exclaimed with pleasure over the subtle range of colors in her new tutu.
Mr. Happel nodded in somewhat harried agreement before hurrying off to a storage closet, where row upon row of diaphanous, bejeweled costume hung.
“I walk through here a lot by myself,” he said. “It’s exciting, you see the history of this company in all its costumes. It’s also frustrating, because I see all there is to do.””
Personal comment: Our costumiers have a lot of the same problems with sweat and wear, but we have only had a ballet Co for 8 years and for most of that time rented costumes. It’s been only in the last three years that we opened our own costume shop to make costumes rather than to do minor repairs on rental ones. We have some really talented costumiers we lured away from Hollywood because they wanted a more stable career and the big studios were shedding most of their costume shop capacity. Even with the dip in revenue from the recent recession I’ve been able to hold on to the talent and not had to skimp on the materials for costumes, though many of the showgirl costumes themselves are pretty skimpy. Only rarely do we have a costume disaster where a girl bleeds through her tights and tutu. One nice thing about a strippers costume is that the outer costume; coats, skirts, tops etc come off early in the performance so there isn’t really that much wear and the performance lingerie that gets soaked in sweat - or ripped off if the girl is working the house - isn’t that expensive to repair or replace.
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