Since Searchlight Pictures film The Supremes At Earl’s All You Can Eat release, costume designer Whitney Anne Adams focuses on enriçhing the historical accuracy of the characters, whether flipping the pages of yearbooks, catalogs, magazines, viewing films, and TV shows or public photographs online, specifically, Adams, who also uses Flickr as a trustee standby. “What people are wearing, especially in a specific time and place, and our movie takes place in the Midwest,” Adams said.
“The trends take a minute to trickle from the coast into the Midwest, and I have to look at what has been trickling down.”
When getting started on the film, Adams begins with a spreadsheet as a foundation and a guide in pulling every visual reference from the script and the book that is adapted. There was information in Edward Kelsey Moore bestselling novel and the screenplay that Adams expressed she wasn’t necessarily going to use because once a character is in 3D in real-life with an actor. “What looks good on that actor's skin? What looks good on their body? What are these actors going to wear?” Adams said, who started picking colors for the three lead actresses Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Barbara Jean (Sanaa Lathan), and Clarice (Uzo Aduba) that worked for their characters, like Odette is a earth-tone palette, fiery and bright for the foundational group member.
“I pulled those color palettes back to the 60s, what colors were popular in the 60s that also worked with the color palette of what their elder versions were gonna be.”
As audiences can probably tell from the movie, Odette’s orange dress was built from a vintage fabric that Adams found, for a love of a nice bright pattern and colors but making sure that the textures, prints, and palettes are the right ones made sense for the characters in the story. “Sort of flying— sprinting through filmmaking and sometimes things get dropped by the wayside,” Adams said, who writer-director Tina Mabry set the tone on production for communication and collaboration around Adams in being able to catch a lot of issues in time to adapt and pivot. “It was just fun to figure out all these characters together with the script that she put together.”
Filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina with only filming 30 shoot days, over 162 principal costumes, and a thousand backgrounds just between the three lead characters who had sixty-seven wardrobes between all of them. “This was one of the most logistically challenging movies I’ve ever had to do,” Adams said, which is a massive scale in a short period of time in a location that doesn't have a lot of stuff with a limited budget and timeline. “I had to fly to New York and LA to source vintage clothes just to have enough and compete with other films are filming at that time, but I had an amazing team to help me carry it out, and I can do those logistics.”
Adams (Blumehouse’s ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ and Universal Pictures ‘Freaky’), had previous credits in a wide mix of different types of movies, and often works in the horror genre, has a lot of other different logistics from stunt and multiples. “Working out how to make it all happen in the period of time,” Adams said, who did an Indian American movie a few years ago.
“Most of this job is just logistics and not design.”
Adams expressed that it is a lot of networking, building connections, and knowing the right people who is going to help in where these clothes are and designing. Adams says the actual design part is just the tip of the iceberg to carry out that design with a lot of people, resources, and problem-solving. “Costume design is not just the costume designer,” Adams said, who is one of her favorite things to always shout out the team effort. “It’s the entire team and every single person on that is so important to the finished film.”
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