Ep. 229: Costume Designer Virginia B. Johnson Deploys Deep Craft and Rigorous Cultural Authenticity for Powerful Storytelling
Emmy-nominated costume designer Virginia B. Johnson grew up with a “dragon mother,” which shaped her structured habits and her ability to work smoothly amid chaos. Her childhood was filled with intergenerational connection and crafting - learning sewing, embroidery, knitting and crocheting from a “flock of Filipina aunties,” which fostered not only a sense of community, but a foundational skill for her eventual career. Although she was a pre-med major in college, a serendipitous side gig in a college theater costume shop sparked a passionate pivot to a career that now includes critically-acclaimed and award-winning projects like Hillbilly Elegy and American Primeval, and the opportunity to lead teams in the art of deploying deep craft and rigorous, reverent cultural authenticity to drive powerful storytelling.
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Virginia B. Johnson: You just need to want to understand and be curious and want to be a storyteller.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to costume designer Virginia B. Johnson. Virginia was nominated for a 2025 Emmy Award for Outstanding Period Costumes for her stunning work on Netflix’s American Primeval. Honestly, If you haven’t already, after you listen, you should go stream it immediately. The costumes are exquisitely crafted and researched - and after you hear her explain her process, you’ll want to pay close attention to those details and how the costumes help to lend historical credibility and cultural authenticity to the drama. Half-Filipino, Virginia, or V as she is called, is one of the few women of color recognized in this category. And it’s beautiful to learn how her Filipino heritage and community has contributed to her love of stitch-craft.She learned the ropes of costume departments by serving as a costume supervisor on some acclaimed productions like… The Social Network, Spotlight, Black Mass, and Joy. And, having earned her MFA in Costume Design & Fashion History from West Virginia University, in the heart of Appalachia, she was elated when chosen by Ron Howard to work on the adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. During the pandemic, she used her skills for good - making thousands of masks for healthcare workers. When not designing costumes, V continues exploring the intersection of feminism and craft, with Gather Here, a stitch lounge she founded and runs, in Cambridge, Massachusetts where people can learn to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, and quilt. The studio is a tribute to the many women who have taken up a needle, providing for their families and creating art that is overlooked. As you’ll hear, V is deeply dedicated, rigorous, and community-oriented. She copes with the chaos of the entertainment industry by creating consistent routines for herself. It’s a fascinating study in protecting your passion AND your creative process from being usurped by the turbulence of industry…. Something we can all benefit from hearing…. Here’s Virginia…
Virginia: My name is Virginia B. Johnson, I go by V or VBJ. I live in Greater Boston. I’m currently actually working in Greater Boston. I am a costume designer and I would also consider myself a creative entrepreneur. I own a small business where we focus on sewing and knitting and making things. I have always loved using my hands to create and it has translated into a varied career of making clothes and making connection and that’s something I really love and feel so grateful that I do with my life.
Amy: I would love to dive right into the making clothes and making connection. I wonder if you can bring us into your creative process and the world of costume design through a recent project? You were nominated for an Emmy, congratulations for your work on Netflix’s American Primeval, which listeners, you should know, you can stream it right now. It’s a gritty, brutal Western set on the American frontier in 1857. And it depicts violent clashes between settlers, indigenous tribes, Mormon militia and the US government for control of the Utah territory. Rugged landscape. Period drama. Lots of activity and very different cultural representations. How do you start with a project like that? What’s the research and the getting prepped process like?
Virginia: I mean you started out with the word ‘research,’ which is where we always begin. As costume designers it’s so important that we understand what people were wearing and why they wore it, especially in telling this really brutal and harsh reality of being a woman, being a settler, being a member of an indigenous culture that is literally being invaded. No one wears something just because they can. It’s out of the necessity to either protect your body or to represent who you are and where you are in your community. And there’s all these questions about status as well as power and that’s really the struggle of the story. And so I feel really fortunate that I began my prep period in the Boston area because we have access to so many textile rich archives and examples of how people dressed. But that’s just surface research because then you have to dig in and figure out what were the things that do not survive the passage of time? And those are the clothes that people wear to actually work and the clothes of struggle. So people living in a fort who built a fort with their hands, their clothes very rarely survive hundreds of years later because they’ve been worn by the working class or even less than the working class and those clothes are worn day-in and day-out and really disintegrate over time.
Amy: Yeah!
Virginia: It’s then looking at any sort of art and reading about descriptions, be they fiction or journalists or even the flyers that go out looking for trades people, encouraging people to come West. There are descriptive words about like what you need to bring and what you should have and we take and we suddenly become detectives and really break down, oh, if you do this sort of job you have these kinds of clothes. I talk a lot about this one book called Dressed for the Photographer. That is a collection of daguerreotypes and Joan Severa who is the historian who selected these photos and was the author of this book, went in and then talked about how this image is dated based on not just what they’re wearing, but maybe how the garment has been altered and the hairstyle and the accessories. So that you have a better understanding of what fashion means. These photos are not just of the upper class, but they are also of the middle class. So it’s like a great, great text that is rich and you can’t just look at the pictures. I have to remind sometimes folks that we’re not just looking at pictures or looking at existing garments, we’re actually needing to read and take the time to understand about people and the colours they wore and the layers they wore and all of that good stuff.
Amy: This digging around and interpretation and double-checking your theories against other historians. That must be kind of fun and fascinating, is it?
Virginia: Yeah, it totally is and you then get to understand how you aren’t just creating this is what people wore in a moment of time. You are then also digging into what would this particular character wear in the moment in time.
Amy: Of course.
Virginia: If you’re understanding that a certain type of person from a certain region of the country in a certain income bracket would have done xy and z to their clothes to make them last longer, or had so many resources that maybe they were wearing cutting edge fashion, even understanding who got in trouble for dressing a certain way because women were being arrested for trying to wear pants or having pockets. It’s a very interesting period in time and then we then can dig in deeper…
Amy: The whole thing about pockets, the way we’ve been oppressed! (Laughter) Just give us damn pockets! Okay, but can you tell me some specific examples from American Primeval of how you interpreted this information?
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: For instance, the main character?
Virginia: Right, the main character of Sarah, who is played by Betty Gilpin, we know that she is travelling alone with her son, and that already is a clue that how would you travel from Philadelphia to the West and already you’re going to stand out. So you need to make some very good decisions so things don’t happen to you. There’s a reason she hired somebody to help her, but he’s just there to possibly handle wandering eyes or men who approach her and things like that. But she can’t stand out, she has to look smart and unapproachable and when we first see her, she’s in this long, closed travelling cloak to really hide her shape and hide herself. And it’s like a bit of armor for her. We chose what is technically like a suit jacket for her, instead of putting her in a dress that matched top to bottom, we chose to use a jacket that wasn’t the same fabric as her skirt, once again, because it’s sensible, it shows somebody who may have resources but isn’t travelling for leisure, is travelling with purpose. So we made those kinds of decisions to really highlight that, even subconsciously the viewer isn’t looking at somebody going to a party, they’re out there travelling. This is like a travelling… it’s dark, we’re not going to see as much dirt… she’s not changing her clothes.
Amy: Yeah.
Virginia: We have to make those interpretations so that even someone who is not familiar with the period isn’t watching some romanticized version of a woman’s travelling outfit. And then that in contrast to the Mormons who are all in very, very dark colours and they all match. They’re very uniform top to bottom. They have very little embellishment, very simple, but similarly we just wanted to make sure that they showed a nice contrast to the women who work in the fort who are in, what I guess we would consider separates now, shirts and skirts that don’t match. But once again, nobody is wearing pants. All of these women are staying in their lane.
Amy: So fascinating. I guess we have a much more immediate connection, or at least I do as a western, white woman, with the types of dress that you’re talking about. But the indigenous characters, I’m just curious how you approach that there’s such a carefulness to avoid stereotyping, oversimplifying or reducing the culture to broad brush strokes that aren’t honoring the population. And so I’m wondering how you approached doing that research and what are some of the things that you discovered? And I’m also just really curious because I’m sure it was fascinating as you did it?
Virginia: Well, once again, we had to dig deeper because there’s something fascinating about what do we put in museums and whose culture is front and center and what do we save? What do we, in the United States, literally value? And so the fact that we started this project and everybody was like, well, there have been westerns done before, so maybe we’ll be able to brand xy and z well, turns out we haven’t done the storytelling about these specific indigenous groups. So there are technically three that are front and center of our story, the Shoshone, the Paiute and the Ute. And we wanted to make sure that it was crystal clear that these three groups or bands had very different approaches to dealing with Settler culture. So we have the Shoshone led by Winterberg, so now we have a woman in a leadership role, that’s already very different from this very male heavy, western Fort Bridger. And they are very much committed to being safeguards to the land and to the people and to their culture. And that’s something they talk about in all of their interactions with any of the white characters. How they’re not going to go and they’re not going to choose violence and they need to protect one another and build community.
We made the decision then to really look towards the elders in those groups, in the Shoshone, the eastern Shoshone and actually talked with them for oral history about how people dressed and what different roles there were and what accessories you would have had. So through that actual history and speaking to Curtis Barney who is an elder of the Eastern Shoshone tribe and a craftsperson, we were able to discern, even down to the length of a dress made from a hide and how many hides it would take to make a woman’s dress and how long was the fringe. The fact that the Shoshone have the most fringe and their dresses are a little bit shorter because females were known for their ability to ride horses. So we made sure that anybody in the Shoshone culture watching would recognize, or maybe even see themselves… or at least have this subconscious connection where they understand this is actually representation that feels accurate and feels authentic. So we have that silhouette and we also know that we’re at a point where they’re not trading with westerners. They are really turning to the land.
So we stayed away from anything that Eurocentric. There’s no cotton, there’s nothing of that textile in their costume. But very early on in say the 18th century they’ve already started this wool trade and the fur traders, so we have some examples of wool and wool blankets in that work world. Then we go to the Paiute who, if you watch the series you’ll know that they, to protect themselves, decide to side with the Mormons and they actually take the responsibility for some of these really violent massacres and participate in some of these massacres on their own people to try to keep the army from pressing in, to keep pilgrimages from coming into their land. And they have a far more robust trade with these westerners. So we suddenly saw a mix of say men in leather leggings, but with a cotton shirt, or with like a wool vest. So we are mixing some very western silhouettes. And if you look at some of the daguerreotypes from that era, you’ll see some images where they’re all standing together and they have a breastplate on top of… which is like a native beaded actual plate that goes on the front of the chest and tied on with leather. But then they’re wearing a wool vest and a big white shirt, but then they have leather leggings on.
One of the things that was really important to all of the elders and consultants we spoke to from the various cultural groups was that they would have remained in moccasins until the very end. That that was a connection. You could feel the land. That was a thing that connected them to their culture. And so I then went back to the visuals we had and you do see that. It’s very rare that you would see a native wearing a pair of western boots or black leather boots. Even the main character, Isaac, played by Taylor Kitsch, he is raised by the Shoshone. In our early conversations about how to represent that as a white man raised by the Shoshone tribe, he was like, I would have had moccasins, I would have grown up in moccasins. And so he as an adult continues to wear moccasins. He plays the whole series in this rough terrain in moccasins, even though he’s wearing a wool coat, he is wearing these moccasins with his trapper pants, he’s in leather trapper pants. It’s again, that is the connection to the culture and we made sure that unless somebody was truly in with these Eurocentric communities, we put them in moccasins.
Amy: I love learning about these details because I’m going to rewatch and be able to see all of this and all of these context clues are going to make the whole story that much richer and more alive with information that makes so much sense. And I’m also going to, I think, buy a pair of moccasins because I want to connect to the earth beneath my feet. That seems like a good way to move about the world. You sound to me like a mix of cultural anthropologist, garment forensic technologist, detective, craftsperson and storyteller. Is there any aspect there that I’ve missed? Is there more to the work?
Virginia: (Laughs) Well, I was an English major, so I do think when I’m reading, I immediately am digging in and looking for that deep read, that connected read…
Amy: Yeah, that makes sense because you would have to have a relationship with the words in the script, on the page, in order to actually translate them through your visual. Wow! What about the craft artistry? I’m assuming that a fair amount of the work is a mix of sourcing and constructing?
Virginia: So specifically for American Primeval, over 90% of those costumes were built from scratch.
Amy: Wow, and how many of them do you have to build because I’m sure…
Virginia: There were hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of things were built.
Amy: That’s amazing!
Virginia: Yeah, because of the actual acts of violence and needing stunts. And we had characters who wore the same thing for all the episodes and wanting to see how the environment and the action affected their clothes, meant that we had to have, this is your stage one where things are just dirty and you got a little muddy and oh, this is your stage 10 where you’re holding somebody who is bleeding out. (Laughter) So you need to walk through and make sure that we see the depth of those characters journey, not just on their body, but on what they were wearing. Like I had said earlier, the native… that was all built. We had this incredible team of leather workers, small but mighty, and they were working around the clock to create these really specific looks for the various named characters as well as the community of people that helped to create this vibrant Shoshone village. And then we had this other team that just did all the Eurocentric and just the Mormons. When you’re looking at any specific scene, maybe we rented some boots for some people in the background, but even our main characters, their footwear was custom made. There’s an amazing bootmaker in Southern California, Clint Bryant, his whole family is in the boot making business. So he made all this footwear for the actors, their stunt doubles, the animal wrangles, hundreds of people had their hand in making this all come to life.
And then whenever possible we would also reach out to Curtis Barney and the Eastern Shoshone to craft breastplates and chokers and all these other bits, so that our actors, our native and indigenous actors knew that it wasn’t just like the Filipina Americans version of what they were wearing, but that we had actually had other indigenous hands touching what they were wearing and infusing it with meaning and purpose. And they were working… I think it’s so important, when we tell stories that aren’t necessarily our stories, that that labor is also paid to the people who we’re representing.
Amy: Amen! I think so too. I think it’s also indignity if you had interpreted an indigenous culture and then have an indigenous actor and now they have to wear a costume of their own culture. Even if it’s a minor disconnect or not something readily apparent to somebody who is not part of the culture, I really appreciate you saying that and that we can watch the show, understanding that indigenous cultures were part of the construction, part of the collaboration and part of the economic proceeds of the production.
Virginia: Yeah, and our lead consultant, Julio Keef, I reached out to her on my own to get her involved in the project because that is so important to me and I didn’t just want someone to put a stamp of approval ‘this research looks good.’ I wanted somebody who would actually put me in contact with people who make things and who are elders in their community who are teaching members of the community how to make things. That was just so important to me and Julio Keef was just such a great partner in making those connections and really understanding that I wasn’t just interested in putting some clothes on body, but I wanted to connect with the people that we represented.
Amy: Yeah, that authenticity, I think, comes through in the show. And all of this seems like it’s invisible, but it’s not, it actually does translate to the screen somehow. You feel, as a viewer, I felt more connected to the characters, I think in part because I didn’t question their credibility. I didn’t question the non-sequiturs or anything didn’t feel non-analogous to who they were. But I also feel like it’s really these steps that we can take by these brave people, like you, to help the industry itself, not just costume design, but the entertainment industry become less extractive and more generative, is really, really important. I wonder if you can talk me through some of the other projects that you’ve done, in terms of maybe just some details, as a viewer, if I’m watching Hillbilly Elegy or another movie that you want to talk about, what kind of details can I look for that would be evidence of your careful craft and curation and character development?
Virginia: So, there are all of these things I think that I want the viewer to take for granted, but actually what were very thoughtfully crafted. Everything from Mamaw’s t-shirt in Hillbilly Elegy, she has all these series of t-shirts and they’re all over-sized and they have graphics on them. Well, every single graphic was created and then they go through the intense ageing process. And the t-shirts were all made because we wanted the proportions on Glenn to feel the same as the proportions on the images of Mamaw that existed.
Amy: Oh wow.
Virginia: We do all of these little things and then my hope is that when you’re watching, you don’t bump on it, you just are like, oh yeah, that’s Mamaw. And you don’t think, oh, the cardinal is the state bird of Ohio, so that’s why she has that t-shirt, you just think, oh, she was into Christmas t-shirts, or whatever. Or oh, my grandma wore cat t-shirts too. That it feels familiar and real. But getting to that point is a digging deep where you’re mocking up a variety of different t-shirts and trying to figure out what are the colours and what feels real and getting it approved. And all of that 22work happens, but in the end you just see an oversized t-shirt. But my hope is that you aren’t thinking about it, that you just accept it and it feels authentic. And the same is true, I love doing these action comedies, they’re escapist for me, but I put the same amount of effort and thought into them, where I’m thinking about the character and who is this person and where do they shop, what they wear, what does it say about them. And so I think about The Parenting, which is this horror comedy and everybody is just there for one weekend and you’re just digging in to… if you were dong a ‘meet the parents’ and the house that you go to is haunted and you’re gay, what did you pack and how did you overthink it? And then if you were the midwestern parents and you know you’re going to meet the rich, your son’s fiancé rich, uptight parents, what did you bring?
And then if you are the person who conjured a demon and you’re (laughs) running the Airbnb, what makes you tick? So in all of those fittings we’re going through and doing all kinds of different options and trying to figure out what feels right and how it all works in the world, with the hope that when somebody watches it, they’re like, oh, I see me… oh, my god, when I introduced my person to my parents, this feels right and it’s so awkwardly funny. And if Parker Posey was conjuring a demon, she was probably a modern dancer or really liked movement classes and theater school, you know? So you’re just trying to put that all together and I’m like, a mystical color is purple and she’s like, ‘do you know purple people?’ And I was like, ‘you’re a people person.’ You’re just kind of working through all of that to make sense of a world even when it’s chaotic.
Amy: First of all, I haven’t seen that movie, but now I need to, if Parker Posey is conjuring demons, but it brings up the difference between historical accuracy and authenticity versus fictional character development. And one sounds like… they both sound fascinating and fun, but one sounds a little bit more like the detective work and another one sounds a lot more like, I’m going to take everything I know about humans and rifle through it to concoct a little bit more about this character from what’s on the page and everything I know. And that sounds really fun.
Virginia: It is. And it’s like also suddenly you’re like, yeah, so this kind of person might wear this, but you, in this world, might choose something different. You’re suddenly opening up more options just because you’re in a made-up world, in a made-up environment. And you might make decisions about color and texture and everything, but suddenly, unlike the real world, where you just end up in an Airbnb and who knows, your bathrobe might match the wallpaper, in these made-up worlds suddenly I have to really care that your bathrobe doesn’t match the wallpaper. (Laughter) So you are once again still having to have a pretty tight reign on things so that realism doesn’t mess things up. (Laughs) If that makes any sense?
Amy: Yes, it does and so that sound like there’s a lot of collaboration then with the production designer so that you can anticipate what the whole color palette is going to be a certain frame.
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: Wow! I’m a little bit of a systems nerd, but I wanted to ask you a bit about the logistics because in addition to this research and artistry and even fantastical character development there’s a lot of people and movement and deadlines and things have to get done. Just tell us what that looks like a bit, moving all the stuff?
Virginia: (Laughs) So I’m currently on a television show, designing a television show that’s been in production for, I guess, 15 years and this is my first season on it, so I’m bringing a new perspective, but also learning on the job about these characters that have existed for 15 years. Even though it’s been in production that long, we’re still having to budget the episode and source the costumes and different things are happening to them. We have a tailor shop, and they do everything from alter regular clothes that maybe we bought off the rack, but it’s the apocalypse, so it’s from 15 years ago. (Laughs) Or build things from scratch. So I do spend a lot of time doing sketches and I’ll do flats and for those people that aren’t in the fashion industry, it’s just like line drawings that have a lot of details about like this is a zipper and I want these kinds of pockets or I want to overdo the pockets and I want lots of top stitching.
Amy: Sort of like blueprints?
Virginia: Yeah, exactly. And then we have this whole ageing and dyeing department and they take everything and make sure it doesn’t look new. I have very rarely gotten to work on a show where people are buying and then putting on brand new clothes. Everything that we use has to get touched and that’s like, for me, really, really, really important. And we do build that into the budget too. If we know someone is going to just come in for one day and we maybe aren’t going to fit them until the morning of, we build in money to buy multiple sizes and then get it into the ageing process so that nothing looks like it came out of a shopping bag if it wasn’t supposed to. And sometimes that’s not very cost-effective, but I think if you put in all this effort for everyone else to look lived in, even those special guests need to have that element as well. We have everything from the people in the costume shop that are just moving everything through the works.
And for people who don’t know this, we don’t necessarily shoot in order. We’re shooting all over the place, so we can be working on stage, shooting the end and we’ve done all the stuff to the clothes for the very end and then we need those clothes to be fresh and clean. And so there’s a costume shop making all those multiples and working through what that might look like and fitting their stunt doubles, all of that is happening behind the scenes. I think people think about ‘behind the scenes’ as just the people putting the clothes on the body, but there’s all these other people doing all the stuff to get the clothes to the people putting the clothes on the actors. So then we have the set team as well, and once we start shooting, they’re on their own planet and they have their own stresses and they’re checking in with the people that are giving them the clothes to make sure they have what they need to get through the day-to-day. I work closely with a costume supervisor who is managing the people and making sure we have enough people and going in and asking for more resources when we need them.
And then I have an assistant costume designer who is there to really push the work through. We finish a fitting, they’re like okay, I’m going to make sure to stop at the tailors, explain what these notes are and then I’m going to take this… they walk it over to ageing and dyeing once that is done and get those through that. Because I am on this runaway train and I can’t get off because I am looking at the future and prepping for the next fitting and trying to take everything we’ve done from my prep period, where I’ve done all this research, I’ve done pretty pictures, I’ve had meetings and then you get in the fitting room and maybe those ideas go out the window because you’re like, this color doesn’t look right or these proportions aren’t quite right. So you make those alterations and then you have to go back and look at the whole picture to make sure that you aren’t changing your visual story.
So that part, for me, is something that I’ve had to really hone because I trained in the theater and in theater we do it all, you do your fitting, you do tech rehearsal and then it’s on stage. And for this process, because we shoot out of order, maybe we shoot one character completely out, I am having to go back and piece everybody back into the story and see what they visually look like?
Amy: That sounds like some serious mind fuckery. (Laughter) I worked in the TV industry for 15 years and so I know the process of shooting out of order and it’s just absolutely sometimes mind-boggling when you have to shoot a scene where a project is finished, there’s all these external reasons why you have to do that and then you might have to go back and shoot that same thing, but now the project is only halfway through. So you have to have either another one or you have to remember exactly how to undo it, and it scrambles your brain. Being able to stay on top of the big picture while making micro-adjustments is a very special skill and keeping track of everything in a non-chronological way is, yeah. (Laughs)
Virginia: Right and it’s also really stressful.
Amy: Yes!
Virginia: The process of making television or film is incredibly stressful and so on top of oh, I miss the days when there were just three of us, because suddenly, like on American Primeval there’s over 75 people, every single day, just in our department. And you’re like oh, you’re having a bad day, so that whole side of the building is having a bad day and you’re like, I cannot manage all of these emotions. (Laughs)
Amy: It’s a lot, because television is an unnatural environment to work in. It’s very stressful but it’s also very deadline oriented, so you show up to work and it’s almost like you have to do your job with a gun to your head every day, just to make sure it’s all getting done. And if everyone is under that kind of high stress, it just creates for a powder keg situation.
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: But there’s also that beautiful synchronization that happens when everybody is attuned to the same goal…
Virginia: Right.
Amy: And the synthesizing of all the actions kind of comes together and it feels good at the end of the day when you see it on the screen. But it is very stressful, so I just want to acknowledge that you must be clearly a bad-ass to be where you are… (laughter)
Virginia: I like to just think I have a good sense of humor and I try not to take any of it personally. (Laughs) I’m like, just keep going, the only way is through. (Laughter)
Amy: This might be a good time to touch on how notoriously destabilizing it is too because it’s not a steady job, it’s job-to-job, it’s super intense while you’re on a job and in between jobs it’s a different kind of intensity. You’re frequently not at home, because you’re working on-site or different locations. The hours are different, the people you’re working with, the size of the teams you’re working with, the conditions you’re working under, it’s always different. And so I’m wondering how you, as a bad-ass human, other than just being tough and well-adjusted, how do you stabilize yourself? How does one grow roots in a profession that’s so notoriously itinerant?
Virginia: I am a creature of habits and structure and I attribute that to my parents. I was raised… I say this with all the love in the world, by a dragon mother. My mom is half Chinese, half Filipino and she was really strict and was like this family doesn’t get to the next day if we don’t all do the thing that we’re supposed to do when we’re supposed to do it. And that was just childhood. And so getting up at 5:00 and sitting at the piano and practicing piano, being done with that by 5:35, then doing flashcards… I had a very demanding childhood and that was just the norm. It’s not that nuts, but it’s still kind of really structured because I am not in control of so many other parts of my job, especially when we’re filming and I’m on a design gig. That having that beginning, middle and end of the day is key to my wellbeing. So getting up, doing all of my stretches and physical therapy first thing, just get up and get it done, and then have a warm beverage, sometimes that’s tea, sometimes that’s coffee, whatever. And then just getting that information dump too, reading a little bit of the paper, no matter where I am in the world, I read the Boston Globe in the morning because I live in Greater Boston. I also treasure independent news, and so I do that, and that’s the morning.
And then however I’m supposed to get to work, I then spend my time getting to work, listening to an audiobook. I am always listening to a book. I try to make sure it’s not in any way related to what I’m working on. So I just get to have a deep-dive, sometimes that’s a 20 minute drive to work, sometimes that’s… currently a 58 minute drive to work. And I really just to be immersed in something else. And I don’t think about work because the minute I get through the door, it’s just inundation of questions. So then middle of the day I always take phone calls, out, it can be raining, it can be snowing, outside, walking.
And then end of my day, which is probably the most sacred part of my day, after it all wraps up, I spend 30 minutes going and reviewing what we did that day. I am a paper person. I have all of these beautiful notebooks that I note the shows on them, or the projects. I keep really great index, so I can look back at things. But I write down what we did that specific day and try to organize where we need to be the next day. So I don’t have to do that in the morning, I’ve done that at the end of my day. And then I can close the book and leave work behind. And then I have an intense beauty routine where I go through and wash my face and put a warm compress on it and I do all of those things, that’s probably the thing I spend the most time on. Maybe I eat dinner, I spend time with my partner, I play Hello Kitty Island Adventure (laughter) and then I make a cup of chamomile tea and that’s it. From chamomile tea, nothing else happens, then I’m asleep.
People are always like, ‘oh, did that keep you up?’ As soon as I have the cup of chamomile tea, I’m asleep and that is my routine. I did it in college, I have been doing the same thing for as long as I can remember, except for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. (Laughs)
Amy: Hello Kitty Island Adventure, I’m writing that down.
Virginia: It’s a cozy game. Hello Kitty and I are the same age, but she got to go to a magical island and open a bakery. So I play that every night. It’s a task-oriented game. (Laughter)
Amy: You’re amazing, but it sounds to me like you’ve created this really solid container and all the chaos happens within these really bracketed spaces. And so you can tolerate the chaos, knowing that outside of those brackets you have order.
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: And your body knows chamomile team means sleep and it’s had that for years and years and years, so that’s brilliant. You said that you had a ‘dragon mom’ and that she’s Chinese and Filipina, I want to hear more about that childhood and how you found your way to costume design, what can you tell me? I heard ‘piano lessons’ and ‘flashcards,’ it sounds like you were a good student?
Virginia: Yes, that wasn’t a choice, but I love learning, so it was fine. My siblings, maybe not so much…
Amy: How many siblings?
Virginia: I have a younger sister and a younger brother. But my dad was in the military, so was not really present for our childhood, it really fell on our mom and the Filipino community that we grew up in in Southern California. I suffer from ‘eldest daughter syndrome,’ the, ‘eldest daughter of immigrant syndrome,’ so I probably did more… and also growing up in the 80s, (laughs) than people can imagine, like a kid doing at nine or 10. (Laughs) I think I turned out okay. I’ve had a lot of therapy, like any adult, to map out what were the benefits. Because I’m always looking at how did this benefit though in the end. And because of that community though, I did learn that it takes a village to raise entire communities, not just the children, but caring for the elderly and how much we can learn from one another. And my grandmother would come over from the Philippines and help take care of us. And my other grandparents would take us during the summer to help take care of us.
So we had this intergenerational upbringing that was really important to how I learned to sew and how to embroider and knit and crochet. Crocheting is incredibly important in the Philippines, as is weaving. So I learned those things from the women who weren’t necessarily related to me, but who were in the world that I grew up in. And the value of that. So I took that all through childhood into young adulthood and when I was in college and they asked work study students what skills they had, I was like okay, I know how to shelf books in a library, I babysat, but then I also said I knew how to sew, because I had learned from my grandparents and I’d already lived through this 80s revolution of altering your clothes and making things your own.
Amy: I saw Pretty in Pink. (Laughs)
Virginia: Yeah, exactly, I know! You’re like oh, I just want to be Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, and Molly Ringwald. So all of that is happening. And so knowing how to sew became the skill that got me a job in the costume shop in undergrad.
Amy: That’s a major connection, yeah.
Virginia: Yeah, I would not have known that what I do today was actually a job because it’s not part of my upbringing. We didn’t go the theater. If we went to the theater it was like community theater or we went to cultural shows. I did traditional Filipino dance. We would do those kinds of shows, or maybe we’d see the nativity because we’re from the Philippines, so we’re Catholic. (Laughs) So you would do things like that, but maybe we watched something on TV, so it was college…
Amy: So many people that I’ve talked to that have found their way into various aspects of design have stumbled into it and part of me is always questioning how does design do a better job of announcing itself as a profession, as a real livelihood that’s fascinating and interesting and fun and creative and lucrative.So you discovered your sort of first job in costume design was designing for the theater at your college?
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: That must have been kind of ‘light-bulby’ for you?
Virginia: Totally, because I was a bio pre-med major.
Amy: Oh shit! (Laughter)
Virginia: Like I went in there thinking I was going to be a doctor. I mean my advisor was Dr Mackowsky in the biology department at Drake University and I just happened… they were like, oh, you have all these other interests too. And it happened to be in an era where they wanted to try to get primary care physicians who knew other things, that could talk to people and have real connections with their patients. He was like totally fine with the fact that I wanted to take honor study seminars on democracy in America and cultural studies on women in Shakespeare. I did all that other stuff, but still was taking bio and bio chemistry and things like that. But I had this cool job and started doing the student productions as a designer and assisting the college professor. And then by the time I was a senior I was designing these main stage shows and I was like, I think this is what I want to do. Yeah, it was wild.
Amy: Amazing! Amazing, but then getting into the entertainment industry, which is in some ways it’s kind of like the Wild West, it’s sort of lawless in many ways…It doesn’t have a path really, nothing prescribed, you almost have to find your way in. How did you start doing it professionally?
Virginia: From school I ended up going down the path of summer stock theater, which is a great way to learn how and how not to do things. (Laughs) And you work really, really hard. There’s nothing cushy about it. It really was a testing ground if this was really what I wanted to do. And I was like no, I can do this, I want to keep going. I would eventually end up on the East Coast and I got a job, I was designing Candide for Opera Boston and a producer from WGBH, the largest producing arm of PBS for Boston, for New England, who was doing a documentary for NOVA, on Typhoid Mary, was at the opera and reached out to Opera Boston’s artistic director to find out who designed the show and if they could get my contact information. So they reached out to see if I’d be interested in helping them get costumes for this docu-drama. And I was like sure. And I’m very much like, I’ll try anything. I’m like oh, I don’t know how to hockey skate, but I’ll learn. (Laughter) And fall down, it’s fine, whatever, I’m like just say yes because you just don’t know. So I said ‘yes’ and then was like, oh my god, I don’t actually know what I’m doing. (Laughter) So I bought some books and was like, oh my god, I have to figure this out.
And my father-in-law is an art director and I was like, hey, can you teach me how to read a call sheet? And so we hopped on the phone and he taught me how to read call times and how to read the scenes and read the back of the call sheet. I, unlike a lot of the people I work with, I was never a production assistant, so I literally knew nothing. And I was like, ‘What is a one-liner? Help me.’ I’m so grateful to Doug, he spent years and years as an art director for Stargate and so he was like a really great resource. He was like, I don’t know a ton about costumes, but I do know how to read for the important stuff when you look at the schedule for shooting and stuff. And so it was like a two week gig, but I was like, oh, this was really great and they thought it looked great. And that one producer, she opened the door for me and recommended me to other GBH directors and producers. So for like three years I had steady work in that sort of PBS docu-drama world and really figured it out, like learned on the job.
Amy: Yeah, and amazing that you had someone open a door for you and then keeping championing you.
Virginia: Yeah.
Amy: I’m sure that’s something you do now that you’re in a position to do that. How are you holding the door open so that the pipeline of would-be costume designers is flowing and diversified?
Virginia: Once again, if you ask, I say ‘yes.’ Because I’m in Greater Boston, I am surrounded by so many schools. If somebody is like, can you come and speak to my high school class about what you do and how you got started and what are the skills that you might need to get into it, and I always say ‘yes.’ If I’m in town, of course, happy to do it. I’ve spoken at a bunch of universities. If there’s a conference on ‘women in film,’ I will be there, because I just want people to see it and understand what I do and if they have any interest, like have somebody that wants to talk to them. I have a few friends who teach at MassArt, and they all know that if they have a student who expresses any interest in costumes or film, that they can reach out to me and I will do a Zoom with them or meet with them in person because I want people to know that this job exists and that you don’t necessarily need a fancy degree to do the job. You just need to want to understand and be curious and want to be a storyteller, that’s all of it. And so I try to be as visible as possible. I don’t want to be small. If somebody is like, oh, do you want to talk about what your work… or even talk about shows I didn’t even like working on, but if it means I have the opportunity to tell people what we do in this position, that is an opportunity to connect with maybe a different group of people and it’s so worthwhile.
Amy: Thank you for doing that. That’s one of the joys of this podcast is getting to talk to you, people like you and help to demystify these really interesting fields of work. I want to touch briefly on… I know we’re running out of time, so I’m going to get through this really quickly. (Laughter) Can you just tell me, just a little bit about Gather Here and why you started it?
Virginia: Yeah, because like you mentioned earlier, this industry is very unstable. There have been periods of time where I’ve done just one show the whole year and I know people think, oh, but it’s Hollywood, you must make good money. I was like, we make money, (laughs) we do get paid for our efforts, but being worried and stressed about where your next paycheck is coming from, or did you just do such a bad job nobody wants to hire you, what’s going on? That kind of mental stress was really wearing me down. And I was feeling very solitary and I wasn’t doing enough to connect with the people in my actual neighborhood, and where I live. And not getting the same kind of collaborative experience that I get when I’m working on a filmset. I’ve said, I get to go in and talk to the tailors about how clothes are made and I get to talk to agers about how clothing gets older and how people wear it. So in 2010 I was in Iowa City, helping my sister with her wedding and she and her wife have this local store called Home Ec Workshop.
And Home Ec Workshop is a yarn and fabric store and they have a little workshop space and they made all the bunting for their wedding tent there, and people could come and help. So many hands making light work. But also stitching intentionally for these people. And by the end of this experience I was talking to the owner, Cody, and she’s like, if this can exist in Iowa City, there’s no reason it can’t exist in Boston. And I sat with that for a while because I haven’t felt that kind of sense of connection to total strangers since the last gig. And I was like, why doesn’t this exist? So I searched for this where I live and I didn’t find it. So I have a friend who is a scenic artist who said, “Imagine what you could build if you spent those 14 hours a day that we spend on set building what you needed?” And I was like, oh my god, lightbulb! What if I spent 14 hours a day for the next six months building what I need? And so that is how we built Gather Here, which is a fabric and yarn store, but more importantly, it’s a studio space for people to come and learn and share their work.
It hosts exhibits, we currently just participated in Cambridge Open Studios and paired up with the Cambridge Modern Quilt Guild to display 19 different quilts that people could come in and because it’s modern quilting, they see a variety of different techniques and have a different idea of what quilting might mean. I teach people how to sew, how to alter their clothes, but we also employ 20 people who are also getting to share what they love to make and help people on their craft journey. One of my favorite things we’ve done this year is that we also collaborated with the Brattle Theater, doing one night a month, we do Picks and Crafts where I pick a movie that might be fashion forward or fashion adjacent and they turn the lights on halfway, so people can needlepoint or knit while watching the movie. And so we just watched Clueless, and with a hundred people and they were all making something while we watched and got to talk to one another.
And that is like a real source of community and joy for me and it takes all the things I love about making a film, but it happens every day of the year. And we get to do this work together and in times of just uncertainty, it is a place where I find myself fully grounded in present, in this place that is about place-making. And so it’s not just about them, it’s about me.
Amy: That is a gorgeous story. I love the intentionality behind it and it sounds like utopia and I’m fairly close. So I want to show up to Picks and Crafts. I’ll look for the schedule and you’ll see me there. I’ve loved talking to you, thank you so much for sharing your story and giving us a peek inside the process and the details that are so important to the storytelling, this has been really, really interesting, thank you.
Virginia: Amy, it was such a pleasure, huge fan, was so excited. So thank you so much.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Virginia, including links and images of her work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like Clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clever with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.
VBJ behind the scenes on Hillbilly Elegy.
VBJ on set of American Primeval.
Winter Bird in American Primeval.
VBJ working on Hillbilly Elegy.
VBJ on set of American Primeval.
Winter Bird drawings for American Primeval.
VBJ speaking at an event at ICA.
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
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