Dressing the Past in Measure for Measure

Can you tell us about the key cultural references that inspired your costume research?

With our production being based in the South, I really wanted to channel the intensity of that world. I made playlists of blues singers from the 1960s, listening to the deep, guttural feelings in the music.

I’ve been inspired by Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With of Ruby Bridges: a proud young Black girl walking between four white officers with a smashed tomato on the wall and hateful graffiti behind her as she goes to school.

I was also looking a lot at Gordon Parks’ photography, especially his documentation of everyday life in Mobile, Alabama for Life magazine in 1956. There’s a photo by Parks called Department Store of a Black woman in a beautiful light blue dress and above her head, outside the store it says, “Colored Entrance.” The fabric just looks so light and delicate, and the construction of clothing back then was just beautiful. You really admire the elegance of this woman, and the way Parks captured her grace under the circumstances is marvelous.

Up North at this time, you tend to see what we think of as modern silhouettes. But in the rural South, the clothes skew back toward the early 1950s and even the ’40s. The South was also more colorful. That contrast really informed the world of the play.

Measure for Measure has several different worlds populated by different characters. How are you distinguishing them through costuming?

I wanted the characters who exist in the tavern or brothel world—the everyday people—to have more of that true Southern feel: vivid colors and a sense of movement in their fabrics.

The people who have political power have a more modern and reserved Northern feel to their clothes. They’re closer to what we think of as the Mad Men era: fitted suits and muted colors.

The 1950s and ’60s were also a period of huge change in the Catholic Church, especially around Vatican II. Nuns used to be extremely covered up in heavy wool garments with very elaborate headpieces. Around this time, things became a bit more relaxed in their apparel—still modest, but more responsive to the times and the environments they lived in.

The nuns had a greater transformation than the Franciscan friars, who still wear the same religious garb after centuries: a simple brown garment that lays out in the shape of a cross, with a rope belt and sandals. It’s all about not getting caught up in the materiality of the modern world. Even their facial hair is interesting: during this time, some friars shaved because having a beard was seen as impolite, while others held onto older traditions and still shaved a tonsure on their heads and wore a beard. In our production, you’ll see both.

You used the word “elegance” to describe the look of the show. How do you think about and convey elegance in a world marked by inequality and disparity?

I think it’s hard to kill people’s spirit. A lot of that spirit is expressed in how people present themselves to the world. Even under a lot of oppression, especially in Black communities, there’s a strong sense of pride in dress—particularly on Sundays.

People might not have a full closet of hundreds of looks, but the looks they do have carry a lot of care and integrity. They’re kept up beautifully. A dress might not be expensive, but it’s pressed and makes the woman feel elegant; the man’s pants are perfectly tailored to fit him well.

And this is a time when many people had the skills to sew and alter clothing. You could buy something from a Sears catalog or a dress pattern, and then put darts in it, tailor it to yourself, and make it really yours. Even if you couldn’t afford the most expensive fabrics, you could make something fit beautifully—which elevates it to another level. That joy of expression, even under repression, is really important to me.

What fabrics and textures evoke the South in this period?

A big fabric for this period is rayon. It’s artificial, but it has a cotton‑esque feel with more softness and flow, and it doesn’t get wrinkled like cotton. That makes it a great material for summertime in the South—you’re not fighting wrinkles, and it moves beautifully in the heat.

They also used cotton voile, a very thin cotton that almost has a translucency to it. In images from the time, you’ll often see shirts or dresses that look solid but when they catch the light or get wet, it becomes sheer.

For this show, we’re building garments mostly out of rayons, polyesters, and lightweight wools. I’m hunting for period-accurate shirts and dresses, which is getting harder. You used to be able to find 1950s and ’60s pieces pretty easily, but now there’s more people that try to reenact these styles but the fabric choices are not accurate.

You’re also here at the Folger as an Artistic Research Fellow. Can you talk about your fellowship project and how it connects to this work?

I’ve titled my project Changing Facings. It’s an exploration of how different Shakespeare characters are represented in costumes depending on what’s happening globally and where people are socially and politically—how those contexts shape our understanding of a character.

It really grew out of my work as a costume designer working on Shakespeare plays. His plays are deeply human and, in many ways, universal, but he doesn’t always tell you exactly who a character is in terms of race, culture, or background. Take Othello, for example: he’s described as a Moor. In Elizabethan England, that term could mean anyone from the African continent—a huge diversity of cultures and peoples. Shakespeare was probably thinking of someone from places like Morocco, but the term was broad, and the roles were often played by white actors in a costume of what they imagined that identity to look like.

Now, with the context of dramaturgy, we think about those characters differently. I’m interested in how the visual understanding of a character like Othello has transformed over time, and how productions today reinterpret those ideas onstage.

At the Folger, I’m excited to dive into historical costume references: sketchbooks, renderings, photographs, and documentation from past productions. I’m curious what’s there, especially resources no one has looked at in a while. My initial proposal was to create some kind of digital catalog of costume images and references in the collection, possibly paired with an installation comparing how certain characters have been visually realized over time, in different political and social moments.