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    Carrie Robbins, Costume Designer for Dozens of Broadway Shows, Dies at 81

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    She made a classic wig and poodle skirt for “Grease” (using a bath mat and a toilet cover) and turned actors into Spanish inquisitors, British highwaymen and more.Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Ms. Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as the syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie.Ms. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink poodle skirt out of her own bath mat and furry toilet seat cover.To prepare for designing the costumes for “Grease,” Ms. Robbins studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s.Betty Lee Hunt AssociatesThe poodle skirt practically became a mandatory feature of “Grease” shows. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a production of “Grease” backstage, she saw a man taking a red Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she told him that the wardrobe department surely could afford a high-end custom hairpiece. He replied that only a Magic Marker would be authentic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscar-Nominated Costume Designer for ‘Oppenheimer’ Shares Her Favorite Looks

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      The costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who is nominated for her first Oscar for “Oppenheimer,” is responsible for outfitting some of the most iconic films of the ’80s and ’90s.Everett CollectionEverett CollectionUnlike many designers, much of the work of the costume designer Ellen Mirojnick is contemporary. Her filmography is evidence of the impact she has had on the look and feel of some of the most iconic films of the 1980s and ’90s: Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct” (1992) and “Showgirls” (1995), Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and “Unfaithful” (2002), and Andrew Davis’s “A Perfect Murder” (1998). These films helped define the distinctly elegant yet dangerous aesthetic of the erotic thrillers that once dominated the box office.After more than 40 years in the industry, Ms. Mirojnick has received her first Oscar nomination for her austere, sharply tailored looks in “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic about the physicist who led the effort that produced the first nuclear weapons. While she has decades of expertise creating an eclectic variety of costumes, ranging in mood from the understated to over-the-top, her work does not span the many costume dramas that are typically favored during awards season. Instead, her most recognized characters often feel fashionable in a way that is more modern and real.In a recent video call, Ms. Mirojnick reflected on eight of her favorite looks from her career.Everett Collection‘Fatal Attraction’ (1987)“Fatal Attraction” marked the first of many collaborations between Ms. Mirojnick and the actor Michael Douglas. “What was fascinating about that particular moment in time was that Adrian Lyne, Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Anne Archer were all kind of at the same level,” she recalled. “It was a great way to begin a working relationship, because everybody had equal stakes in front of them.”The designer and Mr. Douglas originally had differing ideas of how his character should dress. Her interpretation was “much more classic, fashionable and monochromatic,” she said. After rounds of fittings and discussions about “honing his wardrobe to a place that felt very New York and very cool and attractive in a way that was different from how we saw a lawyer in New York in prior films,” she said, “we finally got in a groove that was simpatico, and we were able to create a character that had all of those aspects and felt very real.”Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ Costume Designer Talks Cast Wardrobe and Addresses Critics

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      Some people have roasted the outfits in the new film, but there were reasons the Plastics got a Gen Z spin. (Among them: social media, fast fashion and the pandemic.)When fans first glimpsed outfits in the new adaptation of “Mean Girls,” they were not shy with feedback on the film’s pink miniskirts and mesh bustiers.On social media, some said the costumes looked cheap, as if they had come from fast-fashion retailers. Others said they did not lean heavily enough on the Y2K style of the original “Mean Girls,” released in 2004. And one online commentator said the costumes seemed like an A.I. image generator’s clumsy response to the prompt: “What do trendy teenagers wear today?”The wardrobes for the film, which was released on Jan. 12, were not created by artificial intelligence but by Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” where he has worked for nearly 30 years. Mr. Broecker, 61, had no involvement in the original “Mean Girls.” He joined the crew of the adaptation after working with Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels — who were involved in both films — on costumes for “S.N.L.” and for “30 Rock.”Mr. Broecker said the criticism of his work had made him “super, super, super anxious” for the new film’s release. His goal was to reference — but not redo — the wardrobes from the original movie, which were created by the costume designer Mary Jane Fort, by imagining how its high-school-age characters might dress as members of Gen Z.He cited the “sexy Santa” costumes for a holiday talent show scene in both films as an example. In the adaptation, those outfits were influenced by Ariana Grande’s music video for the song “thank u, next,” he said, so he made them a little more sparkly than the plasticky red skirts in the original.More than 600 looks were created for the adaptation by Mr. Broecker and his six-person design team. In the edited interview below, he explains how they came up with the wardrobe — which, he said, should not be judged by trailers and teasers alone.“You’re only getting the bread crumbs,” he said, “when you really want to have the whole 10-course meal.”What did you think of the costuming in the original film?When I saw it then, I thought, This is fun, this is high school in 2004. Watching it now, I go, Oh my God, those poor girls were so sexualized. But that’s 2024 eyes looking at 2004. I know they didn’t feel that way at all, but you look at it now and realize that the world has changed.Where did you look to find inspiration for how Gen Z is dressing?We were very influenced by Instagram and TikTok, and by celebrities like Billie Eilish, Jenna Ortega and Sydney Sweeney. I have a niece who graduated from high school in Indiana last year. I looked through her closet and her Instagram. And I live near N.Y.U., so packs of students walk by my apartment all the time in light-wash, straight-leg jeans, white Nike sneakers and crop tops.What did those references reveal about how people dress now?The early aughts are very influential in the visual landscape of clothing right now. Sometimes I would show Tina certain things and she’d say, Oh my God, I think I wore that before.Other things have changed. Gender fluidity is a big thing for kids. And everyone wants to be comfortable, especially after the pandemic. So I dressed the high schoolers in the movie in athleisure, like North Face, Patagonia and Champion hoodies.Fast fashion has changed how young people shop. How much of that did you include?Probably more than we should have. Two brands we used were Cider and Princess Polly. I stayed away from Shein, but I did find a piece or two secondhand.I kept saying that we have to get into the mind of a high-school student, and that’s how they shop. The directors got rid of a mall scene that was in the original because kids don’t go to the mall anymore.After visuals from the new film were released showing Regina, center, in Isabel Marant trousers and a Bardot mesh corset top, some fans moaned that the film’s costumes looked like A.I.’s idea of how trendy teens dress.JoJo Whilden/Paramount PicturesHow did you differentiate costumes for the Plastics — the three popular girls — from those for the students they reign over?Everyone in the high school has big bags and sneakers, except for the Plastics, who have little purses and heels. They are different than the people who are weighed down by their books and grounded to the floor with their shoes.Did you spend more of your budget on clothes for the Plastics?Basically the Plastics got all the money. For Regina George (Reneé Rapp), we did Isabel Marant, streetwear like Off-White and a lot of vintage stuff. Tom-Ford-era 1990s Gucci was the inspiration for her homecoming dress.Regina’s black homecoming dress with a front leg slit was inspired by clothes Tom Ford designed for Gucci in the 1990s, a decade that has influenced Gen Z style.Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesWhy do you think people have reacted so strongly to the costumes in the adaptation?I didn’t realize the nostalgia for the original. It’s hard to have something stand on its own when something exists that people love. But this is not that, and 2024 is not 2004. We have changed how we feel about a lot of things. As the tagline says, this isn’t your mom’s “Mean Girls.” More

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      The Stories Behind Emma Stone’s Costumes in ‘Poor Things’

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      The designer Holly Waddington breaks down how Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter evolves onscreen, from her childish knickers to her cage-like wedding dress.The designer Holly Waddington had wide latitude in envisioning the costumes for “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s mad comedy starring Emma Stone.“The only brief really was that he didn’t want it to be overtly like a period drama” — the script is set in the 1880s — “and he didn’t want it to be overtly like a science fiction film,” Waddington said. In the movie (a Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival and now an Oscar contender), Stone is a scientist’s creation who evolves from a childlike naïf to a sexually and politically liberated woman.The Greek-born director Lanthimos, known for his surrealist vision, gave Waddington only one reference image: a young designer’s take on “inflatable trousers,” Waddington recalled. When puffed up, they “created this really exaggerated shape, just incredibly curvaceous.” She worked with other departments, like production design and hair and makeup, to finish the look for Stone’s Bella Baxter, whose life changes on a Grand Tour of cities like Lisbon.A lot snapped into focus when Waddington learned that Bella would have long, jet-black hair; an Egon Schiele painting was Lanthimos’s inspiration for that, she said, and it informed her color palette. Another thing to consider, in a movie with a lot of sex scenes: How the clothes come off. “I had many slightly awkward conversations with Yorgos about it,” she said. “He was asking me, how does she have sex in these? I was probably a bit embarrassed. But he’s not, at all.”Waddington knew her Victoriana; she spent years working in a costume house, specializing in archival ladies fashion. But for this film, she cut loose the corsetry — a scary prospect at first, she said, because corsets give period clothes their shape — and mixed eras and materials. Early on, Mrs. Prim, the medical assistant turned nanny, chooses Bella’s wardrobe; then she finds her own style. “The clothes needed to really change with her,” Waddington said.Beyond that, Lanthimos offered conceptual freedom. “He just doesn’t need to have a whole back story,” she said. If it looked good, it flew. Bella’s statement sleeves are already having a moment.In a video interview from her London home, Waddington discussed how, and why, she dressed Stone in three key moments of the movie. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Bella at HomeThe costumes Stone wore in early scenes that took place at home captured her in a more childlike persona.Searchlight PicturesThat look in the house is all based around the idea of her being a very young child at this point. And she’s being dressed by Mrs. Prim, who finds her really annoying. The clothes are not baby clothes, they’re womanly, but applied in this slightly ad hoc fashion, because she has the physicality of a child. Very quickly, things have dissembled and come off. And this is just based on my own observations of children that, even if you’re going to a smart occasion, the clothes, especially from the waist down, often come off. It’s just a slightly discordant, uncomfortable way to dress a woman — like an anxiety dream about going to a job interview wearing a suit at the top and nothing on the bottom, just knickers.The knickers are almost like 1950s nappy covers and they’re highly textured — seersucker. And then there’s this big bodice, a very thick moiré taffeta. The thickness of the cloth is almost too thick for human scale, which is what you get when you look at dolls. Often their fabrics look like marzipan — like cake decoration. Also, the striations in the moiré look to me like the organic marks that you get in flesh.She wears this funny little bustle — one of my favorite things in the film. It’s based on an authentic late Victorian bustle cage which would have been worn underneath the dress to give it volume. What struck me is that it looked super sci-fi.2. Lisbon OutfitWhen Stone’s character arrives in Lisbon, she starts to undergo an awakening.Searchlight PicturesDuring the pandemic, the producers arranged for me to go and meet Emma. I took many different renditions of sleeves with me — big sleeves, medium sized. I took lots of different kinds of knickers. I had an idea about how I wanted it to progress, but it was really in that fitting, trying all these shapes on Emma, that I was able to say, OK, we definitely need a bustle, we need these special 1930s tap pants, which I had just thrown in the suitcase at the last minute. They were a departure from the babyish knickers. In Lisbon, they’re silky and fluid — they’ve grown up and they’re sexy.I knew that I wanted her to step out of the hotel in something really discordant. And I was thinking of that scene in “Taxi Driver” when Jodie Foster steps out into the streets of New York in these hot pants.The ruffly top is based on a modesty piece for Victorian dresses — they filled in the décolletage, but on their own they’re just like a little dickey or bib. And I like the idea that she would just wear that, in its own right, as a blouse. What she’s actually wearing is bits of underwear as her clothes.The boots are a little homage to André Courrèges. In early development, I looked at late ’60s-early ’70s sci-fi costumes, and space age modernism fashion. So those boots are based on this idea of her having her toes free, because she’s just uncontainable — she’s exposing every aspect of her, including her feet. The peep-toe boot would never have happened in Victorian society. They didn’t even show their ankles.The gold, yellow and sky-blue colors are definitely a combination that we associate with many fairy tale characters. She stepped into the world and it opened up to her, sort of a Disney version of how you imagine Lisbon, all pastel. I wanted the clothes to reflect that joy and optimism.3. Wedding DressStone’s character wears elaborate sleeves throughout the movie, including when she dons a wedding dress.Searchlight PicturesI liked the idea of it being a cage, with bands of tubing in delicate silk. So hopefully evoking this sense of entrapment, but you could still see through to her and see her body — that felt important. And also these sleeves.We had this book of patterns from the 1890s, my assistant got it from an antiques dealer on Portobello Market. Patterns from the actual period are much more extreme than how we imagined them. This is a very brief period in fashion when there were huge mutton sleeves. I thought they should be even larger — really massive. And Yorgos was really up for the big sleeves. The wedding dress sleeve is probably about a meter all the way around. They look like balloons.I struggled with the veil because I didn’t feel like it was quite the right thing for this character. But then I took it to Emma on the morning of the shoot, and she grabbed it and got it wrapped around her face in a knot.I quite like the fact that it’s see-through and light and big, and it’s also her favorite costume, because her body felt so free in it. More

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      The Year of the Mega Sleeve

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      Raglan, fluted, leg o’ mutton, bishop, puffed, balloon — whatever you want to call them, we wore them.When Holly Waddington, the costume designer for “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s much heralded phantasmagorical film about a young women’s psychological and sexual awakening that opened on Friday, began thinking about what her heroine would wear, she said she was thinking “skinny arms and these kind of straight skirts with the big bustle.”The film, which is based on a 1992 book by Alasdair Gray and stars Emma Stone, is set in an unidentified time period that is sort of like the 1880s — if the 1880s took place in an alternate dimension in which time folded in on itself, so the past was also the future. In part, that’s why Ms. Waddington was drawn to a silhouette that was slim on top and exaggerated at the bottom.Also, it’s “quite phallic,” she said, “and that felt right.” Mr. Lanthimos had other ideas.“He said, ‘It’s about the sleeve,’” Ms. Waddington recalled. And so, indeed, it is.Ms. Stone amid a sea of ruffled sleevage.Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight PicturesPuffed, ruffled and ruched to bulbous extremes, the sleeves worn by Ms. Stone’s character, Bella Baxter, are impossible to ignore. About 15.5-inches wide, they bounce across the screen in every scene like giant hot air balloons or supersize mammaries, bigger than her head, absurd and weirdly alluring, dainty and dominant. They are “vast,” Ms. Waddington said. “Huge.”But monumental as they are, they are also utterly on trend. “There’s something in the air,” Ms. Waddington said. “Yorgos was very tuned into that.” It’s not the marketing tsunami that was Barbie pink; it’s merely one of those cosmic moments when fashion and culture collide.Forget the power shoulder: 2023 was the year of the power sleeve. No matter the exact style — puffed, bishop, fluted, belled, leg o’ mutton, statement, mega, dramatic — all that really mattered was that it was big. Off screen as well as on.We have, said Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, “hit peak sleeve.”Sleeves, Sleeves, EverywhereStyle watchers began talking about a sleeve sweep at the end of 2022. “Forget what you knew about the statement sleeve,” the influential Italian boutique Luisa Via Roma proclaimed on its website. “This season, the style is more dramatic and bolder than ever.” The fall ready-to-wear shows were filled with sleeves — brushing the floor at Balenciaga and Rodarte; bowling ball-size at Thom Browne; rounded and sculptural at Schiaparelli.By Oscar time, sleeve mania had migrated onto the red carpet thanks to Florence Pugh, who wore a palatial puff-sleeve Valentino taffeta robe atop shorts; Jessie Buckley, in a Shakespearean-sleeve black-lace gown by Rodarte; and Mindy Kaling, whose white Vera Wang dress had detachable gauntlets-cum-sleeves.Puffed up: Clockwise from top left, Florence Pugh in Valentino; Kendall Jenner in Marc Jacobs; Jessie Buckley in Rodarte; and Michelle Yeoh in Lagerfeld. Nina Westervelt and Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAt the Met Gala in May, Kendall Jenner wore a sequined Marc Jacobs look in which the designer seemed to have taken all the fabric from what would have been the pants and transferred it to the sleeves. (Also joining the statement sleeve set: Michelle Yeoh, Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne.)Then Vogue put Carey Mulligan on its November cover in a peachy gown from the Louis Vuitton 2024 resort collection that had such complicated sleeves it looked as if she’d stuck her arms elbow-deep into two giant cream puffs. And then came “Poor Things” with what Ms. Waddington called its “commitment to sleeves.”Little wonder that in January, the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology will kick off its 2024 programming with “Statement Sleeves,” an exhibition of almost 80 pieces from the permanent collection that will focus on how sleeves serve as “signifiers of status, taste and personality,” according to a news release. And though they cycle in and out of fashion, so it has always been.Arms and the WomanBig sleeves have been a part of dress for almost as long as there has been dress. Colleen Hill, the curator of costume and accessories at FIT, who is behind the museum’s sleeves show, said the world’s oldest woven garment — a V-neck linen shirt from the fourth millennium B.C., now in the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London — includes knife-pleated sleeves. During the Renaissance, sleeves were often the most elaborate part of a dress, as well as detachable; grooms often gave sleeves to their new brides.Sleeves became even more prominent in the Elizabethan, Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the 1830s there were so many different sleeve shapes and names, Ms. Hill said, that a woman’s sewing guide from the period stated, in effect, “we’re not going to give you all the styles of sleeves because it is impossible.”Carey Mulligan got big sleeves for her Vogue cover in November. VogueMs. Waddington said that when she was researching these periods for “Poor Things,” she went into fashion archives and discovered sleeves so extreme they were almost unbelievable. “This is the thing that fascinates me about historical dress,” she said. “The shapes are wild.” What looks like science fiction, she added, actually comes from “a 19th-century pattern.”Sleeves got big again in the 1940s thanks to designers like Adrian, the Hollywood couturier whose giant ruffled sleeves were a favorite of a young Joan Crawford and a precursor to the equally giant shoulder pads of World War II. And sleeves made a famous return in the 1980s, thanks in part to Princess Diana and the enormous fairy-tale-on-steroids sleeves of her wedding gown.It’s probably not an accident that the episodes of “The Crown” that focus on Diana, including the recreation of her wedding dress, have coincided with the return of big sleeves. Simon Porte Jacquemus specifically name-checked Diana as the inspiration for his fall 2023 show, which featured inflated sleeves. He said he was obsessed with her “dramatic round puffy sleeves.”“It shaped her silhouette in a sensuous way, but still with a poetic and naïve ’80s touch,” he said.What’s in a Sleeve?At first it may have seemed that pandemic lockdowns and the ascension of comfort clothing would kill the big sleeve. But the way that altered reality shrank our interactions to the size of a computer monitor may actually have turbocharged the trend.“We’re so often seen onscreen these days from the waist up, and sleeves are a way to stand out,” Ms. Hill said.Ms. Waddington said much the same, noting that the torso “is what the camera sees most of the time, so the information needs to be happening between the waist and the head.” And how much better when it is conveyed at volume. Or, rather, in volumes.Indeed, Mr. Roseberry said, sleeves “draw the attention upward to the face and the person wearing the garment.”Maximalist sleeves at Thom Browne. Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesSleeves like a giant circle at Schiaparelli.SchiaparelliSleeves to the floor at Rodarte.Kessler StudioNo matter what, Mr. Lanthimos said, “they really make an impression.” Sleeves are inclusive: They can be worn by myriad bodies in myriad ways and exist at myriad prices. They are theatrical. (Forget talking with your hands; talking with your arms is much more effective.) And they can be resonant of sexuality, safety and strength.That makes sleeves the rare design element that is equally showy and swaddling. Simone Rocha, whose balloon sleeves walk a fine line between childlike and sensuous and have become something of a design signature, said she was drawn to the way “the proportion sculpts around the body almost like a cocoon, creating a sense of security.” Also: big, puffy sleeves are old-fashioned and contemporary at the same time, speaking to history and, she said, “the pragmatic feeling of a work-wear bomber.”Whatever the association, however, the result is universal: “In an upside-down world, emphasizing your physicality in space, taking up room, is a way of asserting yourself,” Mr. Roseberry said. “Of giving yourself importance.”Ms. Waddington agreed. “I think that they’re about empowerment,” she said. Which is, in the end, the hero’s journey of “Poor Things,” and the heart of its emotional appeal.“I feel like I’d quite like to wear big sleeves now,” Ms. Waddington said. More

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      Who Is Meg Bellamy, Who Plays Kate Middleton in ‘The Crown’?

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      When Meg Bellamy got the call that would change her life — the one telling her that after months of auditions, it was she, among thousands of hopefuls, who would play Kate Middleton in the final season of “The Crown” — she was already standing in the shadow of Windsor Castle. But she wasn’t looking the part of a royal just yet.“I was crouched in costume among the bin lorries of a delivery car park at Legoland,” Ms. Bellamy, 21, said at a London hotel suite last month. “Until that point, my most regular acting gig had been playing a red plastic brick.”In 2022, and with no professional acting experience, she was working as a performer at the theme park when she spotted a casting call on Twitter for the role of Kate Middleton. Competition to play one of the most famous women in the world during her college years was fierce. Thousands of young actresses were posting videos about their auditions. But after a neighbor remarked on her resemblance to Britain’s future queen, Ms. Bellamy, crushed after several drama school rejections schools, decided to try out for the part. Three weeks after sending a tape, she got a call — the first in what would be a several monthslong casting process.“I never really believed I would get the role, not in the beginning anyway,” she said. “But then with every round, I started to feel like I had a real chance, and that it might actually be mine to keep. When it was, I was completely shellshocked.”Now, more than two years after that call, Ms. Bellamy’s trajectory from obscurity to the brink of stardom appears to be well underway. Last week, she appeared on the front of The Daily Telegraph, which used a still from the series that recreated the moment in 2002 when Ms. Middleton, on a charity fashion catwalk in a daringly sheer dress, was rumored to have first turned the head of Prince William.This week, ahead of the release of Part 2 of “The Crown” on Dec. 14, Ms. Bellamy was on the red carpet at the London premiere in a creamy Valentino column gown — 24 hours after attending the Fashion Awards, where she wore a blazer dress with a suit and tie by Huishan Zhang.And for months she has been courted by big fashion names like Gucci and Dior — she attended Dior shows in Paris in July and September — which have a habit of snapping up emerging talent with juicy contracts before they ascend to heights of celebrity. After all, if a fashion house can’t hire the Princess of Wales to sell lipstick and handbags, perhaps the unknown actress playing her to an audience of millions is the next best thing.Ms. Bellamy at a finale celebration of “The Crown” in London this month. “Until last month I’d never been to Hollywood,” she said. “Then I was not just there, but on a red carpet with people shouting my name.”Lia Toby/Getty ImagesMs. Bellamy at the annual Fashion Awards in London in December.Dominic Lipinski/Getty ImagesShe attended the Los Angeles premiere in November.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOver its six seasons, the casting of “The Crown” has largely been anchored by a constellation of established performers, though it has also boosted the sparkly careers of several new faces, including Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in Season 4. What was it about Ms. Bellamy that prompted executives to take a chance on her for this role?“We found that there was an openness to her, an intelligence and a sweetness to her, and a chemistry between her and Ed McVey, who plays Prince William,” said Robert Sterne, the casting director for “The Crown.” “You wanted to go on the journey with Meg. You wanted her to tell you the story.”Doing Kate JusticeMuch has already been made of the parallels between Ms. Bellamy and Ms. Middleton, beyond their delicate features and masses of glossy auburn hair. How both were raised by close families in the royal county of Berkshire. (Ms. Bellamy was actually born in Leeds, in Yorkshire, and has a light Northern twinge that still lingers on some of her vowels.) How both were extremely sporty at school, with a particular love of lacrosse. (Ms. Bellamy, who said she was academic, was also head girl, which is similar to a class president.)But unlike the Princess of Wales, who studied art history at the University of St. Andrews, Ms. Bellamy didn’t attend university. After a number of star turns in school musical productions, including Sandy in “Grease” and Scaramouche in “We Will Rock You,” she wanted only to act. She is acutely aware that people wait a lifetime for a break like hers, which came months after leaving high school.Before the six month shoot, Ms. Bellamy spent months preparing to play Ms. Middleton. She watched documentaries and read newspaper clips compiled by researchers. She also worked with movement and voice coaches to perfect her performance. She took home costumes — a nostalgic Noughties-inspired wardrobe of low-rise flared jeans, peplum tops, chunky belts and fringed suede knee-high boots — to wear as she practiced her lines.Ms. Bellamy as Kate Middleton and Ed McVey, who plays Prince William, in a scene from “The Crown.” Netflix/The Crown“I must have looked insane,” Ms. Bellamy said. “I would be dressed as her, reading a book about her and trying to sound like her while walking around the house.” She noted that while there is endless footage of Ms. Middleton after she formally joined the royal family in 2011, there is little — beyond a handful of paparazzi photographs — from her time at St. Andrews, where she first befriended and then fell in love with Prince William.“Her first press interview was when she became engaged at 29, so she was something of a blank canvas,” Ms. Bellamy said. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what she would have been like before she knew where life would take her and that William would become her husband. I hope that I’ve done Kate justice.”At the same time, she added, it was nice to remove the layer of complexities that come with being a royal and just play her as a girl who’s going to university and falling in love.When photographs of Ms. Bellamy and Mr. McVey filming at St. Andrews emerged this spring — and ever since then — there was intense online interest in her private life and next career steps. (So far, Ms. Bellamy has yet to announce her next role.) Lately she has been working with the stylist Felicity Kay to hone her public image and build a brand for herself.Has being thrust into the spotlight given her a vague notion of what it must be like to be a royal?“It’s something I’ve been thinking about, especially as we’ve done more press ahead of the release,” she said. “I really can’t imagine the level of pressure royals face day to day. I mean, until last month I’d never been to Hollywood. Then I was not just there, but on a red carpet with people shouting my name.”She added: “But I keep telling myself that this is something I’ve always dreamed about. You have to remember that, before all of this, I wore a school uniform and could only afford high-street brands like Primark.” More

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      A Hallmark Christmas Movie Costume Designer Shares His Secrets

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      Keith Nielsen, who oversaw costumes for four Hallmark Christmas movies out this year, shares his approach to dressing festively. (It does not involve ugly sweaters.)Several years ago, Keith Nielsen was feeling less than cheerful when a friend told him about an internship opportunity with the costume department of the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle.”After graduating from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., in 2015, he had hoped to find a job that merged his interests in fashion design and entertainment. When he couldn’t, he started working in retail. He said he had begun to feel depressed about his career by the time his friend mentioned the internship.His only experience in costuming had been on student films, but Mr. Nielsen, who said his grandmother had taught him to sew, got the internship. “On the ‘Mozart’ set, I listened and learned,” he said.Mr. Nielsen, now 30, worked on the show through its final season, rising from an intern to a costume coordinator. Afterward, he started to get more costuming jobs, including for productions at the Westchester Broadway Theater, now closed, and for the TV movie “My Adventures With Santa,” which was released in 2019.The movie tapped into Mr. Nielsen’s longtime fondness for Christmas, he said, and since then, he has been hired as the costume designer for about a dozen TV Christmas movies.This year, he oversaw costumes for four films: “Mystic Christmas,” a romance set in Mystic, Conn.; “Where Are You Christmas?,” a largely black-and-white movie that imagines a world without the holiday; “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” which was filmed at a castle in Scotland; and “A Biltmore Christmas,” which was filmed at Biltmore House in Asheville, N.C. All were for the Hallmark Channel.In “A Biltmore Christmas,” the actress Bethany Joy Lenz, left, wears a reworked Carolina Herrera gown. Hallmark MediaWorking with the theater helped prepare him to take on films, he said, because he learned how to better manage fittings and deadlines while becoming more familiar with outfits from different historical periods.“Keith has a deep understanding of fashion, culture and history, and an uncanny taste and style, especially for period pieces,” said Dustin Rikert, the director of “A Merry Scottish Christmas.” Mr. Rikert also worked with Mr. Nielsen on “Next Stop, Christmas,” which was broadcast in 2021. Costumes Mr. Nielsen created for that movie included the outfits worn by a time-traveling train conductor played by Christopher Lloyd.The director John Putch, who worked with Mr. Nielsen on “A Biltmore Christmas” and on “A Holiday Spectacular,” a 2022 movie featuring the Radio City Rockettes, noted his love of details. “Keith is into the shoelaces and socks people don’t see,” Mr. Putch said.Mr. Nielsen, who lives in Manchester, Conn., said many of his costume ideas originate from what he jokingly described as “my 12-year-old gay-boy mind.” (He declined to provide specific wardrobe budgets for films he has worked on as a costume designer.) In the edited interview below, he discussed the aesthetic influences that have inspired his work and the ways he has conjured the holiday spirit through clothes.Christopher Lloyd, left, and Keith Nielsen on the set of “Next Stop, Christmas.”via Keith NielsenHow do you source costumes?I read a script about four times and let my imagination run. Many holiday films are made in three weeks or fewer, so I often only have a couple of days to get fittings done.When I was costuming for theater, I started seeing old Broadway shows and going to warehouses that I still use. The vendor Right to the Moon Alice is where I get vintage items. I also get them from Ann Roth, an Oscar-winning costume designer, who has amazing pieces at her warehouse in Pennsylvania.Hallmark likes color and saturation. To get that freshness on camera, sometimes I recreate a garment so it doesn’t look like it has been sitting in a closet for 70 years.Do you ever buy clothes off the rack?I shop at outlets and online. I like J. Crew, Banana Republic and, for suits and coats, Brooks Brothers. Kate Spade has bags in bright reds and greens. I don’t like ugly Christmas sweaters.One costume in “A Biltmore Christmas” started as a Carolina Herrera gown that was bought from the RealReal. We had several fittings to re-drape the skirt, add a double-tulle layer and create a gathered bust that draped around the back. When I turn an existing garment into something else, I call it Frankenstein-ing.What has inspired your approach to costuming?I am a sap and love nostalgia and old Hollywood. Bill Travilla’s costumes for Marilyn Monroe are some of my favorites, especially those for “How to Marry a Millionaire.” I also like Arianne Phillips, who has designed costumes for film and for Madonna. I admire her breadth of work. I never want to get pigeonholed.How do locations like Biltmore House influence your process?I walked through the mansion to get ideas from the space. I remember looking at the colors of the wood paneling and of the limestone. Window shades are kept at a certain level and rooms are kept dimly lit to protect the things inside from light. It’s very romantic and cozy, and I wanted wardrobes that communicated warmth and coziness using colors besides red and green.To create a gown and a kilt worn by the stars of “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” I pulled together a bunch of tartans that went with the tapestries, candles and dark wood at the castle. We settled on MacDonald of Glencoe, a tartan with holiday-like jewel tones. The pattern was digitally printed on the fabric used to make the gown, and the kilt was made with a traditional wool tartan.What are some challenges with costuming holiday films?It’s the little things. All clothing sizes have changed: Vintage shoes are narrower than shoes are today, jackets fit differently, and girdles are gone. It’s hard to find people to do embroidery and beading.But I like classic and timeless looks because Christmas movies are watched over and over. More

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      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      in Theater

      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

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      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More