FASHION
Costume Designer Luis Sequeira Had 12 Week to Put Together his Academy Award-Nominated Costumes
Research, research and research. Those are the hallmarks of a good costume designer.
Luis Sequeira used that advice and then went one step beyond for his creations seen in “The Shape of Water.”
For the film, the Academy Award–nominated costume designer created 400 pages of photographs and reference points to create the 1960s-era costumes that helped tell the film’s story about the relationship between a South American fish-man and a mute cleaning lady inside a lab in Baltimore.
Sequeira also found clothing catalogs from the 1960s as backup reference for what he wanted to create.
In addition, he developed an extensive fabric collection. “We went to New York, Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto and ended up with a textile library with more than 3,000 swatches. Just about every piece for the lead character was built on this,” he said while attending the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising’s gala on Feb. 3 for an exhibit on movie costumes from 2017.
“We also visited rag houses, where old clothes go to die,” he noted. “We went to Philadelphia and found a couple of collections—one by a lady who had had a department store and a shoe fetish. She had all these clothes and shoes she had never worn. We scooped it all up,” he recalled.
He also viewed movies from the 1960s to get another sense of what people were wearing in the United States then.
All together, Sequeira had 12 weeks to put the costumes together. “We were dancing. It was really fast,” he remembered.
Working with the movie’s director, Guillermo del Toro, he said, was a pleasure because the Mexican director has an eye for detail and exacting accuracy. “He is an incredible visionary, and the art comes first for him. He matched my philosophy,” Sequeira said. “No matter what I do—TV shows, TV movies of the week—every detail matters.”
