LUPITA NYONG'O'S ECLIPSED TRANSFORM: HOW THE COSTUME DESIGNER TURNED THE STYLE STAR INTO A REBEL SOLDIER

It’s a bedraggled vintage T-shirt that references the Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats that immediately catches my eye within the first moments of Danai Gurira’s harrowing and searing play Eclipsed. The Public Theater production, soon headed to Broadway this spring, tackles the gut-wrenching details of survival and identity amid war-torn Liberia in 2003 through the perspective of five female protagonists—ranging from soldiers to peacekeepers—who are all ensconced at a base camp overseen by a rebel general.

True, said vintage T-shirt is attached to the slight frame of Academy Award winner and two-time Vogue cover girl Lupita Nyong’o, which of course draws my gaze, but it’s the grave symbolism of the tattered tee that holds it. “Girl,” as Nyong’o’s puerile character is referred to, is just that—a child like any of the animated characters emblazoned across her top, who has fled the turmoil of war that hit her village. She quickly makes the shrewd yet destructive decision to sleep with the general to secure her protection and a place within an unorthodox familial community; soon, Nyong’o is referred to as “Wife Number 4.” It’s a method of survival, yes, but a glance back at that pitiful and precious T-shirt and one soon realizes just how jarring and twisted the outcome of it all really is. A childhood, just like the one etched across her chest, is gone, and a future of killing as a rebel soldier is fast approaching.

It is moments like this in Eclipsedthat prove that above all things, clothing is essential to helping piece together an identity that war has the potential to destroy. Dressed in everything from vintage T-shirts and traditional wax-print wrappers to ab-skimming crop tops and blinged-out boot-cut jeans, the women assert their personal style against all odds. Fighting over hair extensions, sneaking in hot pink nail varnish, or even stripping the dead for their boots, one sees there is still a desperate need to cling to femininity.

In fact, as I soon learn speaking with Clint Ramos, the Obie Award–winning costume designer behind the Liesl Tommy–directed production, the costumes throughout the play are used emblematically to “evoke what has been lost.”                                                 Lupita Nyong’o’s EclipsedTransformation: How the Play’s Costume Designer Turned the Style Star Into a Rebel Soldie

It’s a bedraggled vintage T-shirt that references the Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats that immediately catches my eye within the first moments of Danai Gurira’s harrowing and searing play Eclipsed. The Public Theater production, soon headed to Broadway this spring, tackles the gut-wrenching details of survival and identity amid war-torn Liberia in 2003 through the perspective of five female protagonists—ranging from soldiers to peacekeepers—who are all ensconced at a base camp overseen by a rebel general.

True, said vintage T-shirt is attached to the slight frame of Academy Award winner and two-time Vogue cover girl Lupita Nyong’o, which of course draws my gaze, but it’s the grave symbolism of the tattered tee that holds it. “Girl,” as Nyong’o’s puerile character is referred to, is just that—a child like any of the animated characters emblazoned across her top, who has fled the turmoil of war that hit her village. She quickly makes the shrewd yet destructive decision to sleep with the general to secure her protection and a place within an unorthodox familial community; soon, Nyong’o is referred to as “Wife Number 4.” It’s a method of survival, yes, but a glance back at that pitiful and precious T-shirt and one soon realizes just how jarring and twisted the outcome of it all really is. A childhood, just like the one etched across her chest, is gone, and a future of killing as a rebel soldier is fast approaching.

It is moments like this in Eclipsedthat prove that above all things, clothing is essential to helping piece together an identity that war has the potential to destroy. Dressed in everything from vintage T-shirts and traditional wax-print wrappers to ab-skimming crop tops and blinged-out boot-cut jeans, the women assert their personal style against all odds. Fighting over hair extensions, sneaking in hot pink nail varnish, or even stripping the dead for their boots, one sees there is still a desperate need to cling to femininity.

In fact, as I soon learn speaking with Clint Ramos, the Obie Award–winning costume designer behind the Liesl Tommy–directed production, the costumes throughout the play are used emblematically to “evoke what has been lost.”

One thing that really jumped out at me was there is still this fierce desire to hold onto a sense of femininity in the face of a total dissolution of identity.                    It’s so funny that you say that because that’s exactly what it is—this was a war actually fought and won by women. The woman who started the Peace Initiative Movement, Leymah Gbowee, actually won the Nobel Peace Prize, and she organized all the women together and said, “We’ve got to talk to the men, to tell them to stop fighting,” and they did! They were able to do that, and that’s remarkable to me that for the first time in history, women were able to tell men to stop fighting and change the course of a nation. Women could get these calls or through word of mouth would be told to show up at a certain place and wear white. They didn’t know what was going to happen, but these were the peace rallies, and eventually it was institutionalized. They printed T-shirts and printed words of peace directly on the fabric, and they would dress themselves in it. It was very direct as a mode of dress.

I am really intrigued by the vintage T-shirts, which I felt were saying so much. What did they represent for you and the characters?

The American hand is still very much at play in Liberia, and what I realized through my research is that Africa, and specifically Liberia, is a depository for all of America’s discards. A lot of Christian missionary groups would send discarded secondhand clothing, so there are a lot of these random things like a T-shirt for a cheese factory in Wisconsin. It looks so bizarre and instructive on a history of a nation, so I rode with that and found vintage T-shirts that we could use and seemed appropriate. I found this Rugrats T-shirt that I put on Lupita and thought, Let me try this on her and see if it feels right, and the moment she put it on, my heart just broke. This is it! This is a failure! This encapsulates the feeling of losing that innocence, of barely holding on to a certain kind of innocence.

I don’t know if people noticed, but Wife Number 1 at the end wears this red Pace University T-shirt, because she’s basically talking about what could have been, and her big thing is education. It’s so powerful to me that she’s wearing this T-shirt and has no idea what it totally means—the irony is lost. What I really wanted to do was have the American audience, in a circuitous way, have a visual connection to the piece, and I think the T-shirts help that because they create such a dissonance.

What was the process of working with a style icon like Lupita? She’s, of course, an actress first, but what is it like stripping all of that away to help her become this character?

I had to literally sit myself down and say, “You gotta just let that go!” and here’s what I think is amazing about Lupita. You’re right: First and foremost, she is an actor, and she was ready to go back to her performance roots. At the fitting she was so brave and unafraid, because I think she could have easily been like, “I won’t wear that!” but it was such a beautiful exercise in egoless-ness.

The Rugrats T-shirt was the first item we put on her with that linen skirt, and she immediately felt sad. She saw the girl’s character, but she also felt safe that I wasn’t going to placate that celebrity thing. I think that from then on we were able to have a communication that was unencumbered by her celebrity. I worked really hard to get her to trust that I wasn’t going to do anything that didn’t have an element of truth, and we tried everything we could. We tried so many clothes on her! We were really just rigorous about not how it looked, but how does this feel, and she was game. That’s really the mark of a great artist: when they’re willing to let it all go. That frizzy wig she wears at the beginning, I said, “Well, maybe it can be a tight Afro?” And she was like, “No! We’re going to go for it! We’re going to tell a story here!”