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13 November 2024
Giving us a brief history of the steps that forged a path towards working in costume design, Michele took us on her fascinating journey with a huge amount of detail about her processes.
Through a London College of Fashion course on fashion design, she worked on embroidery designs with a sculptural element, using nature, fantasy and literature as inspiration. Afterwards she moved into textile conservation, which gave her experience in handling varied textiles from different eras and different techniques. She learned how to stabilise fabric, source suitable threads and embellishments plus becoming proficient in stitching into loose fabric.
After a short film made with friends as costume designer, she became a costume assistant and worked with Mike O’Neill, who became her mentor. Her first notable commission was working on costumes for Anna Friel in “Our Mutual Friend”. After that she worked as Principal Costume Embroiderer in Elizabeth 1 with Helen Mirren. The Game of Thrones was a notably long series, in which Michele created many pieces of embroidery to adorn the costumes for many characters.
Her process was to read the script, meet with the costume designer to see their ideas and then on to research for the style of decoration and sourcing fabrics etc. The embroidered decoration served as a visual reference for the audience to the character and it all helped to make it believable to the viewer and gave an illusion of reality. She would make a sample for approval.
The pilot about the Stark house was such a success that the series ran for 8 seasons. During that time characters changed, grew older, more powerful, hardened and thus the embroidery was created to reflect that. Michele had to make “doubles” that is copies, sometimes 2 or 3, but if a lot of action was involved up to 8 copies could be required in case of damage, or blood, mud, or water being splashed on the costume. Sometimes a piece of embroidery was not fully seen on film as the actor was photographed from behind.
However Michele says it was all creatively rewarding and we were amply rewarded with many more details of her work and processes expressed in an interesting and often humorous way. This was all backed up with a wonderful display of many samples of her work.
MW
Our November 2024 gallery
