Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538245
teardrop shaped, five or six of them coming off the boom of the heart. So, it looks like the heart is bleeding. She has a bleeding heart. I just happened to have the right number of those beads in stock, the teardrop-shaped beads." Even with the scene being shot in black-and- white, no detail is skipped over. More recently, BHC's work will be featured this fall in Bill Condon's adaptation of the stage musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, designed by Colleen Atwood. The story takes place in an Argentinian prison where Luis Molina (played by Tonatiuh), a gay window dresser, escapes from his reality of imprisonment into fantasies involving his favorite starlet Aurora (played by Jennifer Lopez) and her film characters, including the Spider Woman. The workroom built several garments for the production, but Cunningham tells us about the experience of building gowns for Lopez's titular character. "There are three gowns that we made, one of which is a fully beaded gold bugle bead dress with a '30s bias cut, backless." Cunningham goes on to describe both of the Spider Woman dresses. "One is a silver lamé with a custom black woven fabric that Colleen bought in England; she had it specially manufactured, it's a really interesting weave made from plastic. It might even be recycled coke boles or something. That went over the silver lamé. It was such a loose weave, and because it's made of plastic, which is very slippery, it just wanted to open up. It's like water trying to seek its own level. Especially because it was a fied bodice, I had to hand tack almost every intersection of the fibers of the black mesh, otherwise, it would just open up and you'd have a big, bright silver breast. There was another dress that we did [for the Spider Woman], with an overskirt that has velvet ribbon stitched onto a spider web paern. It's prey spectacular." We were alloed 3-4 months of time to build these dresses and had fiings with Lopez at her home. "A fully beaded gown does not come together in a few minutes. It requires multiple fiings, because you have to get the foundation right first, and then each panel is beaded before the fabric is put together. And then there are changes; sometimes it's fiing changes, sometimes it's design changes." Along with their custom-made expertise, Bill Hargate Costumes offers office and prep space that can be rented out for small and mid-sized productions with fiing room space and a large area for aging/dyeing and laundry; but Cunningham takes pride when he says, "I don't think we've ever, ever missed a deadline. I know that we're considered expensive, but that is perception, not reality. The reason people think we are expensive is because we take the time to get it right, both in construction and fit, and that's really important to me. And some designers will come to us for certain things because they know that we are going to deliver the realized product that they need, on time, for their project." For custom builds, reach out to contact@hargatecostumes.com MOTIONPICTUREC O S T U M E R S .O R G 47