Sent Out On Hollywood's Iceberg
Why Isn't Hollywood Helping Ursula Boschet?
I’m re-introducing the free weekly essay. I used to drop one every week and somewhere last year I ran out of steam. Let’s see how long these last! This week, I’m sharing some thoughts on costume design, Hollywood expiration dates, and Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds as enemies of industry.
The slip during the It Ends With Us press fallout that Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively allegedly workshopped the locked script during the writers’ strike (bad!) and Blake’s own very proud admission to self-styling her character Lily Bloom (bad!) reveals how little regard they have for their colleagues within the industry and their collective survival.
“To me fashion design and costume design is storytelling,” she told the Today Show.
It is, Blake, but in Hollywood, it’s also a union job.
There’s the costumers and costume designers, and the network of sourcers, archivists, vintage dealers, seamstresses, studio services managers, tailors, and warehouses they build and manage. There’s creative strategy, research, design, and production (and reproduction), as well as deeply skilled decisions regarding how clothing fits, moves, and looks on camera, and its function in the creation of a character’s identity, their emotional state, and their space in the world.
It Ends With Us did have a costume designer on payroll, Eric Gaman, who’s worked with Blake since Gossip Girl and probably doesn’t mind yes-ma’am-ing her decisions to override his work so long as it keeps him employed. When confused fans started criticizing the film’s disconnected and distracting wardrobe choices, Gaman …expectedly… doubled down on the work, though he did make sure to let everyone know the dreckitude (RIP Andre Leon Talley) seen on film was a joint decision between himself and Blake:
“It might’ve set off a few alarms for the studio,” Daman said, referring to the largely negative discourse. “They were concerned, but Blake and I both stood by what we were doing as far as the design concept. And Blake could sell anything. You can put a paper bag on her and it just looks fantastic. If she feels good in it, she will sell the shit out of it. And Blake and I both knew that.”
Alright.
The power dynamic between those two and the permissions he’s given her need to be studied at a later date. After all, this isn’t just a conversation about including the actress collaboratively in the ideas stage, or her bringing an interesting piece of jewelry up for consideration. It’s about her sourcing items and building the wardrobe herself, jobs that are not hers to do.
Overstepping into costume design gave Blake the chance to play dress up in the clothes of her husband and famous friends, and gave her something to self-righteously boast about during the press tour. Shopping her friends’ closets also allowed her to avoid tapping into the well established resources that already exist within the industry.
A few weeks ago, there was a story in the L.A. Times about the aging costume designer Ursula Boschet, covering the last days of her prolific warehouse. The store itself considered to be one of the last true costume shops left in the city. At 90, the wardrobe archive that has been both her life and career for the last five decades is shutting down.
An archive that includes original 12th century costumes, modern masquerade ball camp, Spirit Halloween-style trash (added in recent years to help revenue), spectacular vintage curated by decade, countless pieces of character work created for half a century of film & TV, and everything in between.
The L.A. Times writes the loss of Ursula’s Costumes off as just another casualty of the “big Hollywood slowdown.”
Urusula, however, put it frankly: “I couldn’t pay the rent anymore.”
A few years ago, at 87, she took out a $100,000 loan to survive the pandemic. Over the last decade, her staff of on-site seamstress has dwindled from six, to one, to none.
“There was no money coming in,” she said. “I couldn’t pay the rent anymore. And I have bills to pay.”
Her story isn’t just one of an elderly woman in debt. It’s about an industry-wide consensus on usefulness and expiration dates. Are costume designers still necessary?1 Do films need to source from the small businesses and archivists dependent on their business? Or, should lead actresses just pull clothing from the closets of their millionaire supermodel friends instead?
Does Hollywood really care about its “icons”?
The article includes anecdotes about costuming Steve Martin (Est. Net Worth: $140M) and Michael Keaton (Est. Net Worth: $40M) and how hosts like Conan O’Brien (Est. Net Worth: $200M) always called on her for kitschy costumes for their late night bits. Memories of Maria Shriver (Est. Net Worth: $200M) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Est. Net Worth: $1B) are mentioned, Maria enjoyed spending time upstairs chatting with staff.
Actress Kate Beckingsale even joined in on the L.A. Times photoshoot, trying on costumes and sharing quotes about her favorite memories in the shop. Kate herself lives in a $10M, 10,000 square foot home in Brentwood. For her part though, she did buy 30 costumes at the liquidation sale. I guess that counts.
Almost none of those former clients, though, seem to care enough to write a check large enough to save her business, clear her debt, or at least spare Ursula from the humbling task of creating a GoFundMe.
The GoFundMe set up mid-July for her has raised only $1,400 of its $125,000 goal, the highest of the 27 donations being just $200 dollars. It hopes to help re-pay owed debt from that Covid loan and secure funding and palliative care for the surgeries the elderly cancer survivor needs.
The organizer of the GoFundMe, presumably one of her adult sons (the article only mentions a daughter in her 70s), unintentionally paints a picture of a woman sent out on an iceberg by her industry to die:
It is humbling to have to say goodbye to the ones we love and their lifelong passion of work. Ursula Boschet just turned 90-years-old. She is a master legendary costume designer, who walks into her costume house every day at 9:00am, cane-assisted and troubled with pancreatic cancer and age-related conditions. However, the business is still operating and she understands that her customers she has had for 48 years depend on her.
It is time to close shop now; and there is a heavy financial burden that has taken hold...Ursula needs help...The pancreatic surgery will be costly. Mounting debt from the covid pandemic needs rectifying. And closing costs of Ursula's Costumes are not yet set, though gaining traction.
We, her growing support group, are looking to fill a GoFundMe goal of $125,000.00 to care for an outstanding individual. To give her peace.
In a city full of vanity projects and painfully inflated studio salaries, her industry — her community — couldn’t find a way to fund the couple thousand dollars needed to help one of its icons retire happily and proudly, without the stress of crippling debt and liquidation of her life’s work.
One less Porsche, in a driveway already full of Porsches, would cover the $100,000 in Covid loans she’s repaying.
Flying coach for just one leg from LAX to Bali, instead of buying a $16,000 lie-flat seat, would cover the monthly lease of her 6,000 square foot store. A “light night” of bottle service in Las Vegas. I mean, Felicity Huffman basically paid that to cheat her daughter’s way into USC. And it didn’t even include tuition. Just fun money. Sigh.
Part of the lie sold in Hollywood is that things only work because there’s a community of necessary, precious functions that come together to create the “magic.” That it powers not just its community, but the city at large.
So why hasn’t Hollywood collectively come to Ursula’s aid? When you consider the billions floating around town, the costs she needs are simply pennies. How hard would it have been to make sure her business is always on the “pull” list, to source from her vintage collection first before letting the lead actress shop her own husband’s closet. I don’t know if the excuse of “cost savings” has much weight here. Hollywood can surely afford to keep itself in business, it just doesn’t care too much about what happens to everyone else.
Yes.
Costuming is so important, but the industry acts like they can cut corners on it and it shows in many of its latest productions in recent years. I saw a TikTok this morning that explained how part of the reason that costuming in recent streaming films looks so cheap is because they look fresh off the rack. They’re not designed or fitted to look like actual worn-in clothes, but look spotlessly clean, like they were just pulled out of a package.
As the artists who make up film & tv are forced out, the product will be reduced simply to product, alienated from the humanity of craftspeople & relying only on the soulless & metaphysical pull of celebrity.