I learned to sew very early on in life.

As a child, I was very creative and always drawing, painting or making a mess at the dinner table, but my other love was theatre. I was a dancer and performer first, but as a person of colour, I didn’t see a lot of leading men who looked like me in the musical theatre world. Costume and clothing provided me with an opportunity to design for any character, regardless of race or gender or culture.

After majoring in costume at college, I was invited to design on Broadway.

The hours were long and tough but I learned to be scrappy. The job involves a lot more delegating than people expect; it’s down to a designer not just to create the costumes, but also oversee all the people making the items while also sticking to the budget and making sure the production is in line with the director’s vision. But all these jobs helped me get seen and build relationships: I worked with Cynthia Erivo on the film Harriet then met [Wicked director] Jon M Chu through working on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights, so I was honoured when he approached me to design for the Wicked films.

We began work on the designs for Wicked a full year before production began.

My starting point was Victorian clothing because the original story was written at the turn of the century, but I also knew that we had to lean into all the fantastical elements. A lot of Glinda’s looks were inspired by Audrey Hepburn, Marie Antoinette and Dior to lean into that Old Hollywood glamour because her character is supposed to be living in a fairytale, whereas Elphaba’s dark and heavy looks were a striking contrast, but felt more authentic and grounded.

Costumes can’t just look pretty; they have to function.

Particularly in musicals, you have to think about the way the fabric moves as an extension of the body. For big numbers like Dancing Through Life I drew on my own experience as a dancer to understand how the pleated skirts could accent the choreography. Or when Elphaba moves through the Emerald City in her cape, that choice of silk velvet fabric was very intentional because I had experimented with how it would whip around and respond to her body in a very specific way. Nothing was accidental.

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