Sundance turns my thoughts to polyester
Saturday. My first day at Sundance Film Festival and I’m feeling polyester.
Tonight – at midnight to be exact – my good friend and ELLE cover photographer Carter Smith is debuting his new short, YEARBOOK. A short I helped costume. Just to be clear, I am not a costume designer, but I get characters and when the challenge came to outfit a group of nerdy, sexual teens in the Seventies, readying for their school picture, how could I say no? Its was the highschool I always imagined; a Sears portrait studio on acid.
The project was about scouring through Salvation Army bins of elephant collared polyester shirts and Burger King brown printed polyester suits. I got to embrace bad fashion. I got to shop for bad fashion. And it was liberating.
Recently a journalist asked me what my favorite decade was for fashion and I said the Seventies. And their reply was, “Of course! Disco, Studio 54, Liza Minnelli, sequins! So glamorous!”
But I was really thinking about something else.
I was thinking polyester.
