Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531371
(or walkabouts—full body mascot- type costumes). Eventually, through a friend, she worked on her first low- budget nonunion indie movie Wired to Kill. Costume and Creature Designer Steve Sleap, who hired Dorothy, le the project and she had to take over the design. She built the costumes and worked on set, even driving the costume truck. "I thought my goal was to be a Costume/Fashion Designer but I quickly learned, all before I was 23, that there are more creative jobs besides the designer. I think most people think it's just a designer and she pushes a buon and these things get made. That is not it, and so I had to decide is it more important for me to have the notoriety or is it more important for me to have a creative day job and not get the credit, although geing credit is great when you do get it." Dorothy got waived into Local 705 during production on Batman Returns. "They had previously hired a team to work on the Penguin bodysuit but were unhappy with it, so they let them go and that enabled them to get a waiver to hire me and get me in. That was more than 30 years ago and there were very few Specialty Costumers back then. I was in charge of assembling the bat suit and making the Penguin bodies. There was a specific bodysuit I had to make for the Penguin because he had to jump off a bridge and into the water. If he had just worn his fat suit, he would either sink like a stone or I think more of what would have happened is he would have bobbed and then slowly sunk. It just would not work. So, I created a lobster trap of a body so the water would go through instantly." Dorothy spent the next few decades working on dozens of high-profile productions, including Demolition Man; Batman Forever; Batman & Robin; Planet of the Apes; Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 & 3; Tron: Legacy; Star Trek Into Darkness; Star Trek: Picard series; and several of the Marvel films and television. When talking about her work in specialty costuming, Dorothy says, "As far as my strengths go, I am primarily a Paern Maker. I was formerly a Fashion Designer, so I think the designers appreciate my eye of how to go about the project in that way. There are times I'm asked to work on just one or two areas in the costumes, or it's that I'm in charge of the whole construction of it. I love working in any of those kinds of scenarios, but I think people don't realize that it's not a linear direction as to how a costume 24 SPRING 2025 gets made. I think the reality is more nuanced. I come to a job, and I have a myriad of samples. Sometimes I will show the designer and they'll go and sort through my samples and say, 'oh, I like this sample and I want to design the costume around this,' or they'll take a sample and say, 'I want you to riff on that in different ways.' Then you also work with the conceptual illustrator and the shopper because they come up with different things and we might get inspired, so it's never linear; it's a lot of back-and-forth." Many of Dorothy's techniques come from traditional paern-making skills but as a specialty, the difference is she may be building for superheroes, "I like to say, 'honor the onion.' I am always dealing with layers. When you have layers on a curve, you know that the outside layer is bigger than the inside layer. I accomodate for that in my paern making. I start paerning the base layer but then I have to onion-ize it."