Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529398
MOTIONPICTUREC O S T U M E R S .O R G 43 how to make paerns and went on to take courses at LA Trade Tech that led him to working for couture houses. Aer joining 705 and leaving Mad TV, Wallace learned to head a workroom on Dancing With the Stars. "That experience taught me how to work with people, how to manage a workroom, how to give the people the space to be creative and never micromanage anyone," says Wallace. Other paernmakers and tailors were brought into the mix of this very stylized period show, including Sylvester Cetina. Aer living in New York City and working in the soul- sucking world of corporate finance, Cetina moved to Los Angeles, aended Santa Monica College and transferred to LA Trade Tech to take courses in corsetry, advanced paern making, and draping. He is a 705/892 dual cardholder and has been successful in his transition to costuming work with his creativity and has the ability to create paerns more easily than it is for most folks. "I think a lot of people have trouble creating paerns or there's a mental block there, like, 'oh, I can't do it. The geometry, mathematics.' But I'm able to sort of envision something in my head or see a picture and say these are the steps that we're going to take to create the paern or the garment that we're making. In Lessons in Chemistry, we went through the '50s decade and the audience has a picture in their mind of what's considered the '50s but that can be different from what scientists were wearing and so forth." ne of the signature pieces of Lessons of Chemistry is Elizabeth Zo's lab coats. Zo is the show's lead character, played by Brie Larson, a chemist-turned-cooking show host. Wallace tells us that "When the designer came to me and said she wanted to create a look for lab coats, she said, 'I want to do something totally different than what's out there on lab coats.'" They used the inspiration of the '50s housewife with "the cinched waist and the full-circle skirt or the half-circle, or quarter- circle skirts, the big collars, the big pockets and darts because they were the thing used back then. We didn't have synthetics and lab coats and the stuff that we have today, so everything to create that look, you have to have the darts, you have to have a way to manipulate them." He also did lining to the lab coats fabric to give a different weight to them as an additional detail. The team also created different collars that were detachable for the coats. Cetina adds that, "We needed to be able to shi from a strict lab coat, sort of a professional look, into something that's a lile bit more glamorous as the story progresses. We went through this sort of a process of creating these different collars that we would aach to the lab coat." The workroom built the majority of Zo's costume pieces, especially all of her big skirts. Cetina was prepared to work on these projects as he has recreated high-fashion designs of Dior and Alexander McQueen. Cetina says, "I do a lot of research on the construction of these garments and in particular, garments that are strapless and that have to be hooked at the waist so that they don't fall down. That's prey signature Dior." He goes on to say, "The inner construction of the garment is really the most important part because the beauty on the outside, you're fixing it from the shell. The hard part comes from the construction inside and a lot of the stuff that I had researched even O David Wallace with Brie Larson Kelli Hagen Sylvester Cetina