Happy Days
DESIGN
Happy Days
KEENE STATE COLLEGE*
Costume Designer, Stitcher
Director:
Jeannie-Marie Brown
Costume Shop Foreman:
Mary Robarge
*Premier cancelled due to COVID-19
In conceptualizing Happy Days, Jeannie-Marie Brown, the director, approached the design team with her vision for the show. She saw Winnie as Mother Earth, and wanted to use that and Winnie's story as a way to comment on the current state of the environment. By the first meeting I attended, the set had already been conceptualized as the base roots of a tree, with Winnie and her "mound" being the center, or the tree itself. With those ideas in mind, I dove into visual research, finding myself drawn to images of tree bark and decaying plant life.
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While the parasol is more of a prop than a costume, I had been asked to design it, as it is an extension of Winnie and it's design needed to match her. With that in mind, I decided to give the parasol dyed lace applique as well. Winnie's hat features limp, desaturated flowers to add to the feeling of a dying world.
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Designing Willie was simple. Inspired by the early sixties, the period in which the play was written, I pulled together a classic sweater & button-down combo for his Act 1 look. In the text Willie is described as wearing a "Morning Suit" in Act 2, so due to the director's request of keeping it modern, I put him in the most modern iteration.
In that first concept meeting, the director showed me examples of the kinds of garments she was most inspired by. They were very structured, and many had asymmetric necklines. In my first few sketches, I played around a lot with how I could suggest "tree", and specifically "dying tree" through Winnie's costume. My favorite idea was to dye lace applique in a gradation of colors to give the impression of dying leaves.
I drafted a mock-up of the bodice in collaboration with the Costume Shop Foreman: Mary Robarge. Once the mock-up was made and fitted, I arranged pieces of lace applique along the neckline. My goal was to map out the placement of both the lace and the color gradation. To do this, I traced the shape of each piece of lace onto the mockup. After tracing and labeling each lace piece, I used colored markers to map out on the muslin what I wanted the gradient to look like. I then transferred this "map" to brown paper for ease of use while dyeing.
From here, I was able to heat up a pot of boiling water and get to work dyeing the lace. I dipped each piece of lace in the boiling water, then laid it out on a clean surface, before using paintbrushes and several colors of RIT dyemore to "watercolor" paint the dye in the same colors and formation as the dye map I made previously. The result was exactly as I had hoped: a bodice (constructed by the costume shop), with gradient-dyed lace applique accents. I did this same process for the lace pieces on the parasol. After the dyed pieces were dry, I hand-stitched them to the final bodice, which was constructed by the costume shop.
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The final color of the bodice was changed due to the director's fear that the actress playing Winnie would get lost in the earth tones of the set. She felt drawn to the color of the muslin when I presented the first mock-up to her, so I tea-dyed a fabric with a bark-like texture to match.
Unfortunately, nothing ever goes as planned. When we put the finished bodice on the actress at first dress, the director was unhappy. After attempting to remove the asymmetrical side of the bodice, which had been attached in a way to allow it to be taken off in case it caught on the inside of the mound piece surrounding the actress in the second act, we realized that it was the color of the bodice that seemed to be the problem. With only two days to opening, we needed an alternative. Mary found a few dresses in stock she thought would work, and I chose this burgundy dress. I pinned some of my lace pieces to the neckline and we presented it to the director, who approved. On the day of the last dress rehearsal the show was postponed, and eventually canceled due to a positive covid case among the crew.
