From Clothing to Character: Kristin Burke at TEDxPacificPalisades

when I was 13 years old I graduated from junior high in my rural hometown of Chico California was a big deal all the boys were suits and ties and all the girls were beautiful fancy dresses my friends took me to a store and I tried on the most beautiful purple dress you'd ever seen it was fluffy it was fancy it was perfect I went home that day and I asked my dad hey can I buy this dress and he said nope you will wear your suit that you made for your 4-h project it was a white gabardine suit and I had labored over it intensely at 13 years old you don't make a suit to wear it you make a suit to prove that you have the technical skill to make a suit I had spent weeks and weeks with my sewing instructor Bobby ripping out pieces of interfacing ripping out lines of stitching until it was finally right the suit to me represented work like any typical 13 year old girl I just wanted to be like my friends everybody wore these beautiful fluffy dresses so I got into a huge argument with my dad you don't understand if I wear that suit I'm going to look like a total weirdo nope you're not getting the dress you'll wear your suit and I said no really you don't understand what you wear at an occasion like this makes a statement he just laughed and this is what I wore to graduation the hated suit I'd look like a 40 year old divorcee I will admit it but what I knew then at 13 years old was that clothing conveys meaning clothing is a language now I am a costume designer for film and television and I use that language every day in my work the language of clothing is specific persuasive impactful and totally silent most of the time we don't even realize that we are being influenced by it while it's right in front of our face costume is essentially clothing plus intent every day we have choices to make and we tell the world what we choose what we tell the world about ourselves every day clean or dirty relaxed or uptight frumpy or attractive every day we make these choices in your closet and in your dressers you have a collection of clothing that you have assembled you bought those clothes you found them in an alley you sewed them someone gave them to you somehow you came to own everything in your closet and from those clothes you choose to tell the world a little bit about yourself every day and it varies from person to person based on socio economics that'ss age race gender religion everybody's closet is different and everybody has something different to tell the world clothing also has emotional attachment I wore this dress when I met Jeff I was so young and there was so much life in front of me or I was wearing this vest when the tornado hit it's the only thing I had left after the storm clothing is a visual reminder of our memories and our emotions for each person clothing then becomes a codified and complex language clothing is a physical representation of memory or feeling in that sense objects have meaning we all have a story to tell and if you look closely you can gain a lot of insight into people by the sartorial choices that they make Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book blink he talks about something called rapid cognition and that is that we take in a huge amount of visual information in a very short time and it enables us to make value judgments about everything that we see in an instant without processing he says all it takes is two seconds in two seconds we can ascertain the age sex socioeconomic status race and occupation of the person standing before us but more than that we are also able to gain insight into their personality and character by these very subtle visual clues that we don't even realize we're taking in our brain does the work for us two seconds so if you're the kind of person who wears sweats and t-shirts every day but you put on a suit to go to a business interview that is a costume that is clothing worn with intention your potential employers will probably appreciate it and think oh that's a very together person he really looks sharp because you look the part as costume designers we use that looking the part to tell the story we take actors and we turn them into characters and we use every visual clue that we can find to help the audience to understand how to feel about them I have the had the pleasure and privilege to work with many amazing people in my career this is Amy Adams and I worked on a movie with her where she plays a villainous vixen she was fresh from Colorado and in Lhasa in Los Angeles for the first time and I gave her these Python pants and they're like skin-tight Python pants after the movie was over she said I love them so much can I keep them and I was like what look what is this earthy crunchy granola girl want with a pair of like devilish Python pants but she said later on they made me feel powerful and she wore them into the ground in her first year in Hollywood so you see the costume that I gave her for the character enabled her to feel something else in her personal life the costume gave her permission and incentive to explore that feeling on and off the screen I love designing costumes and it can't imagine doing anything else with my life but it can be tough why because everybody gets dressed in the morning and everybody has an opinion and it is my job to make sense of all of these opinions among a disparate group of people making a movie if you can think of the language of clothing as kind of dialectic it's kind of like having an accent or speaking of regional dialects different visual concepts mean different things to different people so my job is to fuse them into one idea first we start with a script we break it into tiny pieces and we look for little spots in the film in the story of the film to tell the story of the actor how does the character grow what do they learn how does their experience change them and how can we maximize those pivotal moments with costume for example in a movie I designed called the cooler I take the character of Bernie from a loser to a winner it's the same gray suit just two sizes too big when he's losing and a perfect fit when he's winning it's a subtle change but it influences the way the audience feels about the character we also work with directors and I ask them so many questions that they find me quite annoying most of the time and the questions include things like what kind of a person is this what's their backstory what motivates their choices how do you want the audience to feel about them and how can I use those crucial two seconds to let the audience know how to feel about them as well we work with actors very very closely and they have to get in and inhabit the skin of the character as a costume designer I'm the one providing the skin I have to ask them what feels right do those shoes make you walk differently does that jacket give you a sense of authority do you see that in the mirror the character that you're trying to portray we're very lucky in the costume department because we are in on the ground floor for this magical transformation from actor to character and from clothing to costume we work with a lot of producers as well and producers foot the bill for movies and as such they get a say in a lot of departments work and they should have a say they're the ones shepherding the project from beginning to end but as you can imagine a lot of producers a lot of opinions about Kazu so it's my job to distill all of those ideas and different opinions into one cohesive concept not just for one actor or one character but for every single person who appears in the movie also affected are we by issues like time and money we never seem to have enough prep time and we are always just skidding in right under the margins of our budget it's not easy ultimately our goal is for you the audience we need to look at the world and deconstruct it in order to be able to reconstruct it for you to understand the characters and how to feel about them let's look at how this works who's my friend and who's my enemy in a situation like this where we have soldiers it's pretty obvious it's the uniform the costume kind of important in the life-or-death situation maybe we consider things like silhouette we know this woman's a doctor we look at her coat and we go oh that's it but look closely look at her shoes look at her posture the serious cut and color of her clothes underneath it the hair the jewelry the spectacles everything about her if it's the visual coating of what we consider to be doctor the white coat registers first because it's a icon but the details fill in the blanks we also consider color this guy's a waiter but if we take off that apron he'd be dressed in all black we could then think well maybe he's working backstage of the theater or maybe he's working the Mack counter at a department store or in a funeral home or I don't know in an art gallery selling art or something like that what's interesting to note here is that the absence of color tells us about a lot about him as well the absence of color in this sense the use of black he fades into the background he doesn't call any attention to himself we consider context and purpose these are the sisters of charity in Riverdale New York they're nuns they do not wear habits on a daily basis they work with the poor and they work in hospitals and this is how they look regular just like normal people contrast that with the monastery of the Angels here in Los Angeles Dominican cloistered sisters their habit is an outward sign of their devotion to prayer and service same idea but totally different execution often times there is a disconnect between the language of the spoken language the written language and the language of clothing my job is to sort of translate that so oftentimes in a meeting we'll hear something like she needs to look sexy okay sexy how librarian sexy warrior sexy high fashion sexy what kind of sexy what does sexy mean to you or we'll hear something like put her in a red dress okay red dress how red dress like the first time she met Jeff red dress like sexy siren red dress okay what if the movie takes place in China or what if the director is Chinese could it possibly mean wedding dress you'd never put a Chinese bride in a white dress because in the Chinese culture white is the color of death and mourning the language of clothing is highly specific its cultural and based on experience words get in the way of our work so just as confusing as what sexy can mean to one person versus another consider words like rich or poor language of clothing is contextual to the and it needs to be translated as a costume designer I am the translator I have to drill down into the minds of my collaborators to figure out what the visual concept is that they want to convey I then take that visual concept and I translate it into clothing and then the clothing turns into a costume a few years ago I was driving down the 10 freeway it was dark and my car started to overheat I pulled over in a not so great part of town and I called triple-a the guy shows up hooks up my car to this truck I get in the cab with him and we take off down the 10 freeway a couple minutes later my phone rings hey it's triple-a where are you I said I'm in the truck what truck we're here at the location where are you and I said I'm in the truck with the guy and they said that's not our guy you need to get out of the truck right now he was wearing a uniform with a triple-a patch I was fooled I am a costume designer and I was fooled in the crucial two seconds that it took me to make a judgement about that guy I was wrong my job is to recreate that two-second experience in every movie that I make so you should never be able to tell that that guy he's not a tow truck driver either he's assistant costume designer camp and I'm the homeless lady costume designer the tornado torn farmer assistant costume designer Michael crow the swarthy Italian costume designer the businessman costume designer Carlos Brown the flapper dancer Ruth Carter the soldiers salmon Eladio from costume rental corporation the doctor costume designer Michelle Michelle the waiter costume designer Anthony Tran the nun costume designer Stacey L and rich the flower child Lauren Briggs the sexy red siren costume designer the Chinese bride Michelle Liu the woman in the burqa that's me thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 90,234

Rating: 4.8638859 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, TEDx, tedx talks, ted talk, ted, +English, +Media, Clothing (Industry), +Entertainment, +TEDxPacificPalisades, +TEDxPP, United States Of America (Country), +Costume Design, +Design, ted talks, tedx, +film, +Fashion, +Costume, tedx talk

Id: SQ32S-zSpgk

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2013