Costume Designer Martin Pakledinaz
by Kate Mattingly
All Fours is the most recent collaboration between Pakledinaz and Morris
Before an actor speaks a play’s opening lines or a dancer performs the first steps of a number, the audience sees what he or she is wearing. Costume designs can make or break a show, and Martin Pakledinaz, the award-winning creator behind the costumes for such Broadway hits as Kiss Me Kate and Thoroughly Modern Millie, knows this well.
Pakledinaz (pronounced pak-li-DEEN-az) has built his career on the notion that good design takes teamwork. “I love fashion—I steal from it all the time, but being a fashion designer is a different mindset,” he says. “I’m more interested in collaboration. In my mind, fashion designers seem to choose an iconic figure and design for that figure, like the Bill Blass woman, whereas my inspiration is the particular play or opera I am working on, and the specific characters therein.”
Pakledinaz’s ability to work well with directors and performers has made him a sought-after artist. At presstime, he was working on the revival of the opera Wonderful Town in New York, Regina with the Chicago Lyric Opera and a new piece by Mark Morris called All Fours. Satisfying the needs of such diverse artists and performers takes passion and personality, exactly the combination that inspired Pakledinaz’s career: “I love what performers do. I like being around them and around people.”
Pakledinaz was born in Detroit and grew up in Sterling Heights, Michigan. “My father was a model maker for General Motors and my mother, who was from the West Coast, worked in the Macomb County library,” he says. “In college, I wanted to be an actor, but the kind teachers of Wayne State University recommended that I pursue design. I was best as an actor when I didn’t have to speak, but I loved theater.”
Pakledinaz never strayed. After completing his undergraduate studies at Wayne State and earning a masters degree at the University of Michigan, he headed for Manhattan. Early in his career, he worked with Theoni V. Aldredge, a three-time Tony Award-winning costume designer for Annie, Barnum and La Cage aux Folles. Since then, Pakledinaz himself has been nominated for a host of Tony Awards—first for the Cy Coleman musical The Life in 1997, and again in 1998 for David Henry Hwang’s play Golden Child.
He won the Tony in 2000 for Kiss Me Kate and in 2002 for Thoroughly Modern Millie. Working with choreographer Rob Ashford on Millie, Pakledinaz wore many hats. He played the historian to make the clothing fit the flapper era, the engineer to make costumes that could last through the dance numbers and the artist to make the designs fresh and original. For example, skirts in the 1920s were typically too cylindrical for dancers to kick their legs as high as Ashford’s choreography demanded. In order to preserve historical accuracy, Pakledinaz built wider skirts that created the illusion of a ’20s cut. He used strong nylon or polyester netting under the more fragile garments so that they could withstand Ashford’s dance scenes.
An artform that has inspired Pakledinaz since his Michigan days, dance continues to be an important facet of his career. In the late 1960s, he took “a couple of lessons in Detroit,” but adds, “I’ve never been able to do it.” But he has been able to design dance costumes, a challenge given the sometimes competing demands of movement, aesthetics and budget.
Pakledinaz has collaborated with Mark Morris for many years. “I was designing an opera for a director in Seattle before Mark Morris’ company took its residency in Belgium,” Pakledinaz recalls. “I had not seen the company before, but he and his dancers performed in the opera, which Mark also choreographed.” Pakledinaz says he admired the dancing most for “its clarity and simplicity.”
These are the very words that figure largely in the advice Pakledinaz offers to dance costume designers: “Don’t try to go for big effect. Simplicity is important so that the dance is not lost.” Pakledinaz, who also has collaborated with choreographers Lila York and Daniel Pelzig, believes that “you don’t have to have a lot of money. You just need a clear approach.” Before beginning a design, he listens to the music and talks to the choreographer. “Until you see the steps, you don’t know what to do,” he says.
Pakledinaz’s most recent collaboration with Morris was All Fours, a piece set to Bela Bartok’s String Quartet Four. “The music is a little crazy, but when I watched the rehearsal, the form of the dance became immediately clear,” Pakledinaz says. “There’s a quartet—four dancers who represent, loosely, a family group, and there’s an octet that could represent society.”
All Fours had its world premiere in Berkeley, California in September. From watching rehearsal to design to creation, Pakledinaz completed the costumes in just six weeks. “Mark asked me if I could do it as a favor,” the designer says of the incredibly quick turnaround time. Usually he requires several months, or as he admits, “If you give me six months, I will take six months.”
According to Pakledinaz, his future dance projects include San Francisco Ballet’s full-length Sylvia, also choreographed by Morris, and SFB’s new production of The Nutcracker, choreographed by artistic director Helgi Tomasson.
While he has designed for a range of artists, Pakledinaz says there is a consistency in his work: “I spend a lot of time on the detail because that’s what makes it human.” Attention to the finer points of costuming can be seen in, for example, his choice of silk instead of polyester for a performer’s blouse, both because it has a different quality and is more comfortable to wear. “Every show has its own validity,” Pakledinaz says. “I might do something on one show, and then something different on another. You can’t ever make rules.” DT
Kate Mattingly is a freelance writer, dance teacher and Pilates trainer based in New York City.
