Emilio Sosa, costume designer
This fashionista fantasist makes clothes for real people
by Randy Gener
"You know why I left fashion? Because the fashion industry is not the glamorous place that people think—it's not what you see on TV, kids." That's Señor Subversivo himself, Emilio Sosa, holding forth on his metamorfosis de la carrera while lounging on the sofa of his brightly lit Harlem apartment one lazy Saturday afternoon in late September. The 38-year-old diseñador del traje is explaining his reasons for leaving the beauty trenches and opting to toil and gig in the theatre. "Coming out of school, I still wanted to do the big ball gowns and the beaded dresses," he says. "I wanted to create dramatic pieces and see them all the way through. But fashion in America is about the bottom line, and unless you think of it that way, you're not going to succeed."
| Related Links: Hat Trick, an interview with Emilio Sosa by Celia Wren (October 2003) |
A dedicated fashionista, Sosa was exposed to the theatre by his mentor, the Trinidad-born painter, dancer and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, who instilled in the Dominican Republic-born designer a desire to be on first-name terms with the muse of art and imagination. Growing up in the notorious Fort Apache section of the South Bronx, the young Sosa showed a flair for drawing, which led him to Manhattan's High School of Art and Design and then Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. Sosa came to maturity in the School of Hook-and-Eyes: Grace Costumes on West 54th Street, the oldest continuously operating costume shop in New York. During his college sophomore year in the late 1980s, Sosa took a part-time job at Grace—and never left, serving, until last year, as its vice president and creative director.
"Theatre is a fantasy world," he states, rising to his feet in search of his signature outfit, an extravagantly patched hoodie. Though fully aware of his place in a production's collaborative hierarchy, Sosa is nevertheless the first person who will tell you that a costume designer has agency over a show's image construction, a liminality which he seeks to pass on to the actor. "I look at characters on the page, and I try to make them as real as possible," he says. "I want to make my costumes look like clothing, not costumes. I try to get into the actor's head and the director's head."
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Because of his unconventional pedigree, but even more because of his well-developed eye and an endearingly open nature ("I love tech, man," he exclaims), Sosa's designs embody a gorgeous paradox. Whether he's appropriating (and giving a spectral edge) to Keith Haring's hieroglyphic pop-art iconography for the 2003 biomusical Radiant Baby at the Public Theater, or sparking to life the brightly colored, flowing garments of rural Mexican ciudadanos in Arena Stage's 2004 premiere of Frank Loesser's Señor Discretion Himself, Sosa stays within the make-believe strictures, yet subtly pushes the envelope anyway. Often it's a matter of an urban-chic use of color, an exquisite cut or a flattering fit. He's got an uncanny sense of where street smarts meet high style. Even his hats push the action forward. In Crowns, Regina Taylor's musical celebration of the hats black women wear to church, the removable brims, beaded cloches and feathered extravaganzas wow and intrigue—but they also sum up entire worldviews. "My hats tell stories," Sosa says. "Each hat was chosen specifically for a scene or to convey a character. It wasn't just a fashion show."
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Perhaps because of his extensive experience designing costumes for dance companies (including New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), Sosa's favorite seditious tactic is layering. What makes him a topnotch artist is that he inventively captures the internal life of whomever he is dressing. His pitch-perfect designs for Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog elicit big laughs, as when Mos Def's sly con-artist, Booth, flings off his outer coat to display the eye-catching but shoplifted pimp suit he's sporting underneath. Jeffrey Wright's disheveled Lincoln outfit educes sympathy as it combines aspects of the rundown hustler, historical imagery and shooting-gallery joke.
The blatino rebel hasn't completely abandoned the fashion tribe, though. Sosa personally dresses the likes of Wynton Marsalis and S. Epatha Merkerson. And that tricked-out hoodie he threw on to cover his lithe body is a sample of a new line of clothing he's trying to launch. "Every day I'm in stores, man, but sometimes it's hard, because I'm a big black man and I'm in the lingerie department," Sosa says. "I get weird looks, or I get followed by security. That's why my line of hoodies is called 'E. Sosa.' It's not just an ego thing—it's an acronym for 'Every Success Overcomes Some Adversity.' That's how I view my life."