Luis Sequeira is no stranger to creating costumes firmly rooted in the 20th century, but his latest Emmy-nominated project presented a unique challenge. Lize Johnston as the Witch in the episode "Dreams in the Witch House" of "Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities." THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Netflix
HAMILTON – Luis Sequeira is no stranger to creating costumes firmly rooted in the 20th century, but his latest Emmy-nominated project presented a unique challenge.
Instead of bringing a single period to life, the Canadian costume designer was tasked with making garments that situated characters in different decades for the Netflix horror anthology “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.”
“It’d be like the old movies where you see 1950s racks going one way and then 1920s racks coming in. It was really this ebb and flow of different periods,” Sequeira said Wednesday, hours after being nominated for an outstanding period costumes Emmy.
The variance also gave him the opportunity to flex multiple creative muscles, creating most costumes from scratch and sourcing some pieces from vintage sellers in Hamilton.
“There were certain stories that were part of the same genre, the same thread of being Lovecraft,” said Sequeira, referring to the American horror and sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft. “And then we had the opportunity of being in a kind of otherworldly retro contemporary,” he added.
“We were able to really branch off into a completely different colour palette, and each director came to us with a different vision.”
Sequeira, who’s been in the business for decades and nabbed costume design Oscar nominations for his other collaborations with del Toro, “The Shape of Water” and “Nightmare Alley,” said his team juggled numerous episodes contemporaneously, shooting one episode while preparing costumes for others.
Along with assistant costume designer Ann Steel and costume supervisor Heather Crepp, Sequeira received the nod for the episode “Dreams In The Witch House,” the Lovecraftian tale of a man’s quest to reunite with the twin sister he watched die as a child.
The episode spans decades, from the Edwardian era to the 1930s, with costumes that include tailored waistcoats and a witch’s tattered dress, complete with branches, twigs and tree bark.
Sequeira worked with a team of five cutters, who make the patterns for the clothes and cut the fabric, 12 people who sewed the costumes and a fabric buyer.
“Once the costume is built out of the shop, I take it to the aging department where we would then turn it into something that had some life and had some age and wear, so it didn’t really appear to be just made,” Sequeira said.
“Some of the garments on the series were literally finished the day before we shot them, and we had to infuse 20 years or 10 years of life into a garment to have it look natural.”
Hesitant to reveal the methods used by his team of “magicians,” Sequeira would only say they pulled it off in part by dyeing, sanding and over-washing the clothes.
Though most of the costumes were built from scratch, in some cases Sequeira’s team turned to vintage sellers to bring the characters to life.
Husband-and-wife Hamilton vintage sellers Nik and Connie Bulajic had worked with Sequeira on some of del Toro’s previous Hamilton-shot projects, and were called on again to help out with “Cabinet of Curiosities.”
Typically, the designers give the Bulajics, who own the store Vintagesoulgeek, a sense of colour palette, time period and setting so they can pull some appropriate pieces.
“This one was a doozy,” Connie Bulajic said Thursday by phone. “It went from the Victorian era, all the way up to modern times. It was filmed over a year, so it was quite a big project.”
The most prominent pieces from their shop were in the episode “The Outside,” which takes place in the 1980s. Bulajic’s favourite, a purple and blue dress with massive puffy shoulders, made it to the episode trailer.
But in some cases, the designers will buy a piece and deconstruct it so they can use the pattern to recreate the garment, she said.
Even after working on a few of these projects, the couple said seeing a piece they provided on screen doesn’t get old.
“It’s all very surreal,” Nik Bulajic said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 13, 2023.
