For award-winning costume designer Holly Poe Durbin, the clothes reveal the inner lives of characters – the little nuances that make them human and real. In her career thus far, Durbin has designed costumes for a rich and varied array of characters and productions, from Broadway and Off-Broadway, to hundreds of U.S. cities, London’s West End, independent film, themed entertainment, and even assorted television pilots.
Her latest project was the costume design for The Shakespeare Center’s 25th Anniversary production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Ben Donenberg and starring Helen Hunt, Tom Irwin, Stephen Root, David Ogden Stiers, and Dakin Matthews.
Durbin finds her inspirations everywhere, from paintings and pop culture, to iconic film images, and talked to me about some of those influences for this latest staging of Much Ado, in this second of three features I’ll be posting about the creative process for this production. (For a look at my interview with set designer Douglas Rogers, click here).
Angela Mitchell: When did you first know you wanted to be a costume designer?
Holly Poe Durbin: I started out wanting to be either an attorney or a child psychologist. But in college, at Vanderbilt, I joined the Theater Club, and I've never looked back. I’ve been working professionally since I was 19 years old, when I began apprenticing at the Santa Fe Opera. I had no idea costume design was an actual profession until I started doing it.
Angela Mitchell: What was the first costume you remember designing?
Holly Poe Durbin: Oddly, I don't recall designing a first costume. One of my earliest memories though, at age 4 or 5, is of drawing. I thought my white bedsheets looked like really large pieces of drawing paper, so I proudly got out all my crayons and drew all over those sheets. My mother was less amused than I was.
