Thursday, November 25, 2021
How a Tube of Mascara Gave Costume Designer Mitchell Travers Inspiration for 'The Eyes of Tammy Faye'
Awardsdaily - The Oscars, the Films and everything in between.: Dressing Tammy Faye Bakker is a dream job, and it’s one that costume designer Mitchell Travers was excited to dive into for Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The time period lends itself to near parody (shoulder pads, chunky jewelry, and pastels–oh my!), but Travers wanted to honor Tammy Faye as much as he could with her wardrobe. I posited that this particular time period was great for fashion, but Travers put it into clearer focus for me. “An incredible time for confidence and risk-taking,” he said.
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I have always wondered how costume designers transform the visions in their minds to tangible pieces of clothing. I have a feeling that all design elements go through the same process of visualization through execution, but somehow costumes is the one that I have never been able to wrap my head around. I am sure that part of it stems from my general lack of knowledge about costumes. But I feel like costume designers have something different in the way they approach their designs. Like, for example, I cannot imagine how they imagine a look of a character in the first place. Is it something that they understand because of the story or is there some relation between the story and their own views of the character that influence this first vision. With that first vision, how they make it a reality and put it down in tangible objects is another mystery to me.
One small line that stuck out to me here was the way the costume designer talked about fun playing the characters off of eachother. Firstly, that idea of having fun while designing and figuring out those problems and those interactions between characters. Experimentation is part of that, when I’m doing this just going out on weird limbs and seeing which ones are productive yields the results that I’m often happiest with. Another thing in those lines that I want to ay more attention to in my designs is this idea of interaction, a lot of my outside of theatre work is personally based, and that’s fine, but it does mean that I’m usually dealing with internal feelings rather than the interactions of characters, those are two very differing skill sets and tasks to accomplish setting out. The world I create in theatre is not solely my own, both in terms of who is working on it and because it belongs to the characters just as much rather than my experiences and how I want to talk about the themes I see in the show.
I do wish the author had taken the time at the beginning of the article to give us a brief overview of who Tammy Faye was. I at least, wasn't familiar with her, her work, stances, or life. For the first 6 paragraphs I assumed she was probably part of the LGBTQ+ community and was in the public eye for being both Christian and LGBT. That is not who she is. I had to stop reading and look her up to understand where this was going. That being said, t was really good to see a little bit more into the thought process and work that goes into creating a wardrobe for a non-fictional character. By trying to represent someone who lived, who has living relatives, you have a responsibility to not only do their style justice but their thought process behind it when you have to create looks that cohesively go with what they were seen wearing in the press. It has to be time period, personality, and socio-economic status specific to that person. Getting in their head and recreating them is an intensely difficult and time consuming feat.
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