My Brilliant Career : Behind the Seams with Head of Costume, Lauryn Jackson

Our costume department is abuzz with energy creating a brand-new range of costumes for the upcoming world premiere season of My Brilliant Career. Designed by renowned set and costume designer David Fleischer, the pieces will reflect rural 20th century Australia: think earthy tones of sand and ochre, with pops of lush navy and deep greens. Here, Head of Costume Lauryn Jackson shares her unique insight into their creation from concepts to stage.

What was the first step in the costume journey for My Brilliant Career?

The first time we saw the designs was when David did a presentation to the Artistic, Costume and Production teams in December 2022. Afterwards, we started workshopping everything including searching and shopping for fabrics. Initially, David began by searching for ideas in fabric shops here in Brisbane and in Sydney where he lives, as well as in Berlin where he happened to be working on secondment at that time. The chosen fabrics were sourced both locally and internationally.

How will the fabrics be used or amended to work with David’s designs?

Several fabrics will be dyed and/or printed prior to creating the costumes, while others will be art finished after they have been constructed to give them a sense of aging or having been worn.

Our cutters create patterns from his designs, which have a combination of period and contemporary elements to them, once the patterns are correct, our costumiers then construct toiles of each garment to check the fit, sizing and movement requirements. The first few costume fittings happened via online meetings while David was in Berlin, we filmed the dancers in the costume toiles and sent the footage over to him, while others were in person during his visits. Now the patterns are being tweaked, and the next step is to cut them in the real fabric. We’re now at that stage where the final costumes are beginning to take shape and that’s really exciting.

How many pieces will the costume team create for the season?

There will most likely be three casts, so we’ll make at least two of each costume, and at last count there will be around 60+ costumes. Currently, we’re making a standard size of each costume, which will then be adjusted depending on the individual dancers once we have a final cast list. There are still many things to be done: printing, more dyeing and art finishing, as well as constructing the costumes. David has one more fabric choice to make, Harry’s suit. Our aim is to have at least one of all the costumes made by the time choreographer Cathy Marston arrives in May. At that stage, we’ll find out the castings and we can begin tweaking from there.

What can audiences expect to see from the colour palette?

The fabric, particularly for Sybylla’s second costume, is beautiful – it’s a gorgeous, lush fabric, as are the fabrics for her aunt, and her grandma. We’re using the fabrics to create a sense of the characters’ wealth and status. Otherwise, the colour palette is very earthy with ochre tones to reflect the Australian landscape and the era.

Tell us the story about the hidden labels, sewn into the inside of the costumes.

Each ballet company who creates a set of costumes for a new production will sew a label into the inside of each piece that says the company name, the year it was created, who the character is, and the dancer who will wear it. What we’re also doing for My Brilliant Career is adding a second label to say ‘this costume is generously enabled by...’ along with the individual donors’ names. It’s something we’ve often thought of doing before and we’re doing it for the first time now as this is such a significant production. Often with shows we do over and over again like The Nutcracker, we’ll actually have layers of labels inside the costumes, which can be helpful if we need to determine sizing by looking back to see who wore what. Some of the older ones have a nice wad of labels, like a book. I can imagine one day; the My Brilliant Career costumes will be just like that too.

How excited is the team to work on a brand-new set of costumes for such an iconic story and production?

We love creating costumes. We like altering too – that’s our bread and butter, but when you get to build something new – that’s our passion. It’s a busy period right now – we’re also creating new costumes for The Little Mermaid, and then Trilogy is a triple bill, so we also have Rooster and A Brief Nostalgia costume to alter as well: there’s a lot going on. But everyone is working really hard and we’re excited - we just love it.