An Interview with Costume Designer Maggie Whitaker

We discuss their journey to the craft, their creative process on their various films, their favorite genres, their advice for others, the need for sustainability in design, and so much more!

Close your eyes for a second and picture your favorite fictional character. When doing so, odds are you don’t just envision the face of the individual. No matter how subtle, the person you’re thinking of likely wears an outfit that matches their personality seamlessly, almost as if they could not live without it. Jack Sparrow has his red bandana covered by his black tricorn hat, Darth Vader dons an all black suit coupled with an elaborate helmet, on Wednesdays, the plastics wear pink, Dorothy clicks her shiny ruby slippers, and so on, so forth. Why do we remember these appearances so vividly?

That’s because every iconic persona contains an intentionally unique look to them meticulously crafted by people in the costume design department behind the scenes. Which is why I’m super excited to be able to talk to Maggie Whitaker, a costume designer, educator, producer, and activist.

They have designed for theatre, film, and video games over the course of their career. With a foundation in theatre, they have translated their love of new work development into a successful career in film. Their previous feature films showcased at acclaimed festivals like Sundance, Hamptons International Film Festival, Frameline, and more. Currently, their design work is featured in several short films in Oscars eligible competitions touring the festival circuit, with both “Liminality” and “After What Happened at the Library” collecting recognition and awards as they move forward in their trajectory. Additionally, their work on the short, “Freyr” will be seen this June at Tribeca Film Festival, and “Betty” at OutFest, with the long awaited premiere of the feature film “Dope Queens” at the Bentonville Film Festival on June 20.

Their work as a costume designer is evolving, as they are working as a consulting producer on more and more short films and independent live theatrical and immersive projects. They are taking their broad capacity to network labor, build capacity, and lead departments to add to their portfolio of skills when an independent project needs that extra bit of support. Because of this capacity and desire to build a larger future for their work in the industry, they are focusing their work on building more sustainable models of design. With this as a motivator, they are bringing a sustainable design mixer to New York during Tribeca Film Festival with the goal of creating better pathways for reducing waste and reinforcing local film infrastructure nationwide.

Their theatrical work includes the world premieres of nationally recognized plays including “Eureka Day” by Jonathan Spector at the Aurora Theatre, “I and You,” by Lauren Gunderson at Marin Theatre, and “Truffaldino Says No!” by Ken Slattery at Shotgun Players. Their continuing love of live theatre is based in a respect of text, the development process, and the active participation of creating new work. They actively seek live theatre projects that challenge their creative capacity, offer them the ability to imagine new worlds, and move with an intimacy in detail that allows their work to stay relevant between all narrative media.

They received their BFA in Theatre Design at the University of South Florida and their MFA in Costume Design at the University of San Diego, California. In addition to their production work, they created a fully accredited BFA and MFA Costume Design Program for the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Mx. Whitaker has written courses for both an online and onsite program that deal with the specific training of costume designers through individual project work as well as collaborations with the School of Acting and the School of Motion Pictures and Television. Their alumni have gone on to fellowships at Santa Fe Opera and American Conservatory Theatre, and can be found working in New York and Los Angeles. Mx. Whitaker is a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829.

Maggie was gracious enough to offer up time to speak with me about all kinds of costume design oriented subject matters. They were extremely insightful, friendly and fun to talk to. I hope you all take away as much from this discussion as I did!

Without further ado, let’s get to this interview!

What inspired you to get into costume design?

The nice part about being a really terrible actor in high school is that they start feeling bad for you really quickly.

They’re like, “would you like to go backstage? We could use stage hands. Do you want to work on a wardrobe? Do you want to work makeup?”

For me, it was a really quick path to finding something I liked better than acting. I’d look at the different roles and go, “this is better. Is there a way where I don’t have to do the auditioning part and can just go straight back there?”

They would be like, “oh yeah, yeah, you can have this part you don’t have to do anything for it.”

So it made me think, “cool. Cool, cool, cool.”

Growing up, my face was always in a book. I grew up on a lot of old movies. I’ve always been drawing ever since I was a little kid. I really loved that part of being in the room of characters and story and figuring out how we get that story told while connecting the characters. That made a lot of sense to me.

So going forward with my career, I asked myself, “how do I stay in the room?” I probably could not just stay backstage and hope that somebody would take pity on me and be like, “yeah, you can go back there.” I didn’t know what all those jobs available were. In high school, there weren’t rules or role models in high school theater talking about all of the backstage world so much. But, I did know a little bit about it because I had a friend whose mom was a costume designer at a local theater company. I started looking into that, and I started that process when I was applying to undergrad.

I went into undergrad as a theater design major. I went into it with costume design as my focus, despite having absolutely no sewing skills. I had to learn them on the fly, by being the worst little stitcher I could be for several years before sort of becoming better. I worked my way through as a designer in theater for years and years until eventually I started picking up film projects.

You’ve worked on theater, you’ve worked on opera, you’ve worked on film, and you’ve even worked on commercials. What would you say are some of the biggest similarities and differences between these types of projects?

The thing that always connects the dots is we’re always putting a character onto a person. Even when it’s a commercial project, even when you are literally just taking corporate headshots or portraits, or even when they’re redoing their corporate website photos. They’re taking this moment to think, “hmm, I don’t know, is this a cute outfit?”

In those situations, you’re helping them find their best self, even if all you’re doing is helping them choose a shirt they brought themselves and re-steaming it for them and just being like, “here you go. I think this is what you’re going to feel best in. Oh, and here’s a little bit of extra stuff I brought just to help you.” Regardless of the scale of the gesture, you’re still helping them find themselves. You’re doing the same if you’re looking at a character that’s on the page: you’re helping that character come to life.

In that process, you’re working with the director, you’re working with the playwright, you’re working with the actor, you’re balancing all of their needs and you’re balancing your own need to be a storyteller. At the end of the day, the relationship that will sink or swim your ability to build that character’s relationship is the one that you hold with the actor because it’s their relationship with their body and with their storytelling capacity that is going to determine whether or not the idea you have about what they’re wearing, their costume, and their character design makes sense. If it’s imposed on them, if it just stays on the surface of them, if it’s just resting here, it’s still a costume. It might be really close, but it’s not quite there yet.

If it’s really the right thing, it just belongs to them naturally. Even if it’s a period piece, even if it’s something that they would have never worn before, or something they would never wear in their real life. It almost feels like it’s invisible because it just makes perfect sense for them. You think, of course, they would wear that, of course, this person would wear that because it stops being a costume. That moment of epiphany is when you truly realize you’ve made a proper character design.

What are some of your favorite genres that you’ve worked on and why?

I love doing a great comedy, because I think there’s nothing more subversive than comedy. Getting a good laugh out of people allows this openness of the soul that enables you to really change your mind by getting people in a really receptive place. Sometimes beating people with grief or when you get somebody’s anger up, it’s harder to get into their heart. But comedy can really open a door. Smart comedy has that capacity, but also, sometimes, we just need something stupid to laugh about. Because of that, I have this incredible love for the times when I’ve gotten to work on big, stupid and/or really smart comedies.

I’ve come from a place where doing new work development has been a cornerstone as to why I keep a foot in the door with live theater. That is one of my favorite mediums to work on at the moment. What’s not to like about a living play? The world building from that is the first time the work in it has ever seen the light of day. Every time something comes alive with it, I’m like, “oh my god, that’s the s@#$ right there.” That’s also been why moving into film has been a little bit easier, because things change all the time. It’s the same thing, just a different scale of chaos.

When those adjustments occur, I just think to myself, “of course, the script changes. It is what it is”. Overall though, when it comes to thematic material, the fact that I’ve been so privileged to work with queer film and queer filmmaking and be able to also tell very San Francisco specific stories as an adopted native to this place and to be able to tell the history of this location and the truth of this space has been a really beautiful personal journey for me. It makes my heart really happy to be trusted with capturing the essence of this place.

How do you manage to work with the director and all these other moving parts to ensure your designs match their vision?

Most of the time, we start with a lot of mood boards. Research is key. That involves generating loose image research, doing text research, and breaking down a script.

When we break down a script as costume designers, we’re breaking it down to a granular level that is probably only matched by the writer, the director, and the script supervisor. I will know every movement of every character. page by page so that I understand how they’re moving through time and space. Then, I’ll take that and I’ll figure out if it’s a period piece, if it’s contemporary, or whatever else it could be. I will match my research foundation to wherever this is going.

For example, if I am doing something like “The Optimist”, much of it took place in the Bay Area. We did essentially a 2004 period piece for that portion. That was my early adulthood. so I could remember everything in my mind palace, but I also went through and I looked at catalog images, found old, disappeared, live journals, and other people’s way back machines of their early aught, Y2K photos. Not just celebrity pics, but real photos. l was going to those archives of authentic, candid images of real people to get that information as well as catalogs, and not just fashion magazines, but Macy’s and Dillard’s and the more middle class, functional catalog images so that we understood the silhouettes of clothing as we were hunting it.

That’s the process I would do for anything that I’m working on. I’m going to kind of drill down, and answer questions like, “where are people shopping from? Where are they getting their clothes? What are the motivators that are driving them? How do they live in their world? What is their, you know, what’s regional to them, what’s local? What are their social constructs?” I would use that to dictate where I start hitting my source research.

Then, when I have casting, I try as much as possible to match the images of the people in my original initial mood board searches. At least to their ethnicity, to their body type, and to their age range as much as possible, so that we are connecting the dots, figuring out what something will look like this on this kind of person to ensure that we don’t have this huge visual disconnect between the two.

Then once we start to dial in what’s resonating positively with the director, we start to really focus on what’s being worn in this scene, and hit the beats. If there’s a ton of looks that they’ve got, like thirty or forty looks, I may not be able to board out forty different boards, but I’ll start pulling racks. I’ll get a range from different eras, start pulling racks and start doing rack walks using visual video or operating physically if we have that time.

Then we start discussing ideas, saying things like, “Here is the rack, Do you want to walk through it? This is sort of what I’m thinking. This is the color palette.”

If we do have that privilege of time of them being able to tangibly touch it, it’s so important because then they can be like, “oh, this is what this feels like. The camera can light it this way.” It’s huge when we’re able to do that. We don’t always have that opportunity, but I can do a video and that can help sometimes.

Then, we go through the fittings and give them lots of options, including backups on a given day. That way, if we get into the location and we’re establishing and they’re like, “Yeah. Funny enough, I know we approved this, but I’m not feeling it, let’s fix it” we can change it. Last minute swaps can occur and we need to be ready for that. You don’t always have complete control over your space, so when something out of the blue happens, and you’re like, “I wasn’t anticipating something, I wasn’t given a head up about -insert surprise information on set-” you have something that you can throw in so that you can still sculpt the actor out from the environment and still make it feel like it’s supposed to be part of them.

You mentioned your work on the film “The Optimist”, how did that project come about and what would you say was the most fulfilling part of that project?

I started off assisting Aggie Rodgers on that. Originally, I was brought on by her to work with her. At first it was very casual. It was like, “oh, I might need you for a few days to help me shop this.” And I’m like, “oh yeah, whatever you need.”

Aggie Rodgers is this incredibly famous costume designer, a local hero, and a dear friend. So when she was like, “yeah, I just might need some help.” I was like, “ whatever you need.” And at first it was like, “oh, well, I’ll have you do this.” I don’t even remember what my original title was. But that didn’t matter. I was like, “yep, great, whatever.”

Then a few days into prep, she was like, “hey, I think once we get into shooting, I’m stepping back and you’re gonna be the costume designer.”

I’m like, “What!?”

She’s like, “ I’ll keep my design credit. You’re gonna be the designer for the shoot, and we’ll start making them treat you like the designer for the fittings and all of that.”

So I’m like, “Oh, okay… Great?” At the time, we were doing ten days in Marin, and then there was a whole other team that was out in Prague that was there because of the contract and the rules around the European team. Nobody from our side could go over there. It was just like Finn and the EP. Everybody else was a completely separate unit with different designers, different, everything for like every department. So, we were communicating with Joseph over what our color palettes were, what we were using so that he’d have that information as he was building up what young Herbert’s life looked like to make choices as he saw fit, he could show us what he was doing in his prep, but, we were in totally separate worlds.

We had about ten days, two weeks of prep, and then, I don’t know, I feel like I’m making up a number because it was a really long time ago. We had some X amount of prep, and then we had 10 days of shooting. Then they would pack up and they were going to start shooting in Prague after that.

Anyway, I started as someone helping out, then got a title, then got jumped up to co-costume designer. Aggie let me run all the fittings and then once we were shooting, I was a designer. Luckily, everybody was so lovely. Finn Taylor, the director, was amazing. He was like, “okay, great, lovely. I trust you, Maggie. If you say so, we’ll make it happen”. He was incredibly gracious and he held a really kind set.

We had a lot to do in a very short amount of time, and we were handling some very emotional and delicate material. And I think it was really interesting because a lot of us were adults through the early aughts we had that moment of cognitive dissonance of being like, “just so you guys know, this is a period. This is a period piece.”

And they’re like, “no it’s not.”

And I was like, “yeah… These jeans, these are periods. This is a period. This is an era. This look isn’t modern. But, I want you all to suffer with me knowing that we’re doing a period piece here.”

You also worked on the film “Dope Queens”. How did this project come about and what was your creative process for it?

That one I shot just before “The Optimist: The Bravest Act”. This was the film that I shot in 2021. And we wrapped that in late November, almost early December. I had about 3 months between “Dope Queens” wrapping and starting work on “Lucky Man”, which was originally “Lucky Man”, but is now “The Optimist”.

I got approached for Dope Queens in early September of that year, and we had about seven to maybe ten days from when I got approached to when we were starting shooting. It was a very short ramp. It was the 1st time I had shot a feature since before the pandemic. The last feature I’d shot was, the epic drag fiesta “Shit and Champagne.” There had been a whole pandemic since then,, so it had been a minute. I had to go from 0 to 1000 in no time, and pull all of my kits out from my basement. I also had to figure out how to do all this with PPE and start calling the friend brain trust, my friend Lynn Falconer. She started calling every friend she had to help set up my books on like all my continuity software to help get me really experienced people who were willing to work for pennies in drips and drabs to help get me organized and sorted. And then we were pulling students from AAU where I teach to fill in, and were like, “we’re gonna make do with what we have”

During this process, we shopped for what can only be described as a bonkers amount of Fashion Nova clothing because I was on a Fashion Nova budget to build the wardrobes for my leads. We also went thrifting, pulling from stocks, building it out and were pulling together an entire costume shop in basically less than a week. We were on the second floor of what was a derelict, four story drag trans bar that had been boarded up since before the pandemic. We also flew down to LA to do forty eight hours of house call fittings and shopping to catch my leads who were down in LA so that I would be able to get all of their key looks sorted before we started shooting.

The whole process was great. Honestly, it was really fantastic. My three leads were just the kindest people. Everybody they brought on set, all of our talent were really great to work with. Everybody was really gracious. San Francisco was very San Francisco. The Tenderloin neighborhood was very tender. It felt very real being there. We were shooting in very real places and I think the film turned out really good. I’m really proud of the work we did.

It was a really cool script and I was really proud of the way that it showcased a story without punishing the people in it for how they were surviving. It wasn’t about punishing people for being sex workers or punishing them for needing to occasionally self-medicate to keep going that night to try and make enough money to make rent. I mean, none of the choices they were making were the most mindful choices. Things obviously go awry, but the film isn’t about punishing them for being bad people who are making bad choices. It’s more of a character exploration. Things go awry and they are having to live with the hands that they’ve been dealt and trying to make the best out of what they’ve got. I really appreciated that approach to the film.

Your work on the film “Fairyland” received critical acclaim because it successfully blends the 70s, the 80s, and the early 90s eras in the United States. How did you manage to pull that off?

That was the work of a whole community that came together to pull that off. We had to make sure that we had enough help to keep everybody dressed because we were shooting everything with young Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) in the mornings because when you’re shooting with kids, they pumpkin out after about ten hours, and we shot everything with teenager Alysia (Emilia Jones), who is over 18 in the afternoons.

So, we would do the 70s for ten hours in the morning. Then we would shift to the 80s and sort of 90s, which we decided was ambiguously the time of sorrow.

On my birthday, we started the day and we were shooting the first gay liberation parade that you see in the movie, where Steve’s got little Alysia on his shoulders. We started the day shooting that one. Then, midway through the day, we were shooting Boots, the gay cowboy fantasia bar. But, we were recycling the background. So they went from being at a gay liberation parade in the Castro, but it was really actually downtown Crocket, to being gay cowboys at a gay cowboy dream ballet bar, to then being recycled again for a scene we didn’t end up using when later on we were back at Boots, but now it’s a leather bar. We were then turning them into all like leather daddies. We recycled the background three times that day, and that was not a unique day. ‘

That was pretty much how it was every single day of the twenty two day shoot: it was recycling the people, transforming them multiple times, and the same thing with their principles, we would have like four, five, six changes in a day, just switching eras, maintaining continuity, trying to track back and forth of where we were in time and space and re-keeping track of when we were reusing parts of Steve’s clothing. Because sometimes, Steve would try out new ideas. And then he would settle back into himself. So, things that he’d worn like ten years before would resurface. For Alysia, when we would see shirts that Steve had worn when she was a little kid, they were on her when she was taking care of him when he was dying. There were a lot of moving parts to make sure everything seemed as authentic as possible.

What are some future goals you hope to achieve?

I would really love to do a bigger project in the next couple of years. I keep thinking about wanting to be able to sink my teeth into a really big period piece. To get something that is complicated and thorny and out of this world. But also, I’m just a sucker for really good stories. So as much as I say that, honestly, anytime somebody hands me a script where the characters are irresistible, I don’t care what they’re wearing. It’s terrible, I’m not like the best agent for my own costume drama success.

I would love to have on my rider that I get at least one dream ballet per story, because I should have a dream ballet in each story. I think there should be more dream ballets.

I’d also love to do a movie musical. I keep doing real life musicals and damn it, if I keep seeing these movies where they’re doing movie musicals and I don’t get one…I feel like that’s a mistake.

Lastly, I did just put out onto the internet after Elijah Wood did something about stunt farting that I feel like it’s a moral imperative that I should be a part of him farting through some IP. I just feel like I would like to invoke that into my life. That ticks so many boxes for me: body humor, Elijah Wood, etc. It will be weird. And I feel like it will be one of those sets where hopefully, it will be a hilarious time on set with everyone.

What would you say are your biggest pieces of advice that you have for people who are trying to break into the entertainment industry?

Work in as many different departments as you can as you are developing your skill set because the more you understand how the different roles interconnect, the better you are. Honestly, for all the time you spend in every department that is not costumes as you’re working your way up, you should spend some time being a costume PA.

Why? Because one, we kind of rock.

And two, you’ll understand what it is we do better. Because, we really rock, and I want people to know that. It’s not just because we’re super cool and we have the best snacks and our trucks have the best tunes. We’re just really swell human beings.

But going back to what we did in theater: we always learned what everybody did. In undergrad and in grad, your theater training tells you that everybody learns everybody’s jobs. The actors have to do scene shop, the scenic people and the tech people have to do an acting class. They make us be bad on stage, which should happen in film school. Everybody should have to do those different roles. That well-roundedness is key to success.

Is there anything that we haven’t had a chance to discuss that you’d like to mention?

I’m a big advocate for sustainability in design, especially considering that we’re really great at practicing it in film in certain respects. On film sets people are thinking about it in terms of carbon capture. We usually focus on fuel, lumber, those kinds of sunk costs that are easy to measure.

But we often don’t think about sustainability when it comes to labor. And we often don’t think about it when it comes to other harder to measure things like water and how that impacts other departments like costumes, props, et cetera. We also need to focus on how that all connects into infrastructure and how we maintain infrastructure beyond places like Los Angeles and New York. So that means when you’re out in other regions: if you’re working a show, whether you’re shooting out in the Bay Area or New Mexico or wherever, you should visit those nearby props houses, visit those rental houses, and work with those local resources. That’s my little pitch as I sit here in my beautiful warehouse studio, costume shop, and rental space in beautiful downtown Oakland.

Maggie, thank you for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you and learning more about the creative process behind costume design in all its glory. Be sure to check out “The Optimist: The Bravest Act is Truth”, “Dope Queens”, “Fairyland” and all the other projects Maggie has worked on over the years!