00:00True Grit, we rolled cigarettes a couple of times in the movie.
00:07What's in there?
00:08It's the tobacco pouch.
00:10That is history.
00:24The building itself is 120,000 square feet.
00:27It's a very interesting fact if you lined all of our clothes up.
00:30I first knew Western Costume when they were on Melrose.
00:34As a young girl who just moved to Los Angeles, I was fascinated.
00:38I've been doing business with Western Costume for about 25 years.
00:42I started coming to Western Costume when I first moved to Los Angeles,
00:47which was, if you can believe it, 19 years ago.
00:49I've been coming to Western Costume for 27 years, maybe?
00:55It was kind of like the Willy Wonka chocolate factory of the Hollywood film industry.
01:01You can pull here. They have a fabric room.
01:04They have a shoemaker tailor shop.
01:07They have a research library.
01:09Our library caters to anything relating to dress.
01:12The books and the materials in it have been amassed over a hundred years.
01:16We have this incredible library of clipping files.
01:20There was so much visual research material that was done throughout all eight seasons of Mad Men.
01:26And all of the research material is here at Western Costume Library.
01:30Their men's tailor shop and also the ladies shop are amazing in their technical skills
01:37and able to really take a designer sketch and to build a costume.
01:42Jack and I have had a long-standing relationship.
01:45Most recently he made the Copacabana Bouncer Coats for Viggo Mortensen in Green Book.
01:51And I consider Jack an amazing find.
01:54Every movie that I make clothes for him, they are special for me in different ways.
01:59We do all our suits. It's like old style. It's all handwork.
02:04Nothing but fusible, nothing machine. It's all by hand.
02:12I also love working out of here because Maurizio is a great bootmaker and shoemaker.
02:16My grandfather was shoemaker. My father was shoemaker.
02:22I born between leather and sole.
02:24Black Panther was made here at Western Costume where the split-toe boots were created.
02:32It was for Black Panther, for Batman, for Superman, Wonder Woman, the Spider-Man.
02:39We made it over here.
02:41And this one we made it special for Shaquille O'Neal.
02:45The most what I like when the designer called me and said,
02:49Maurizio was perfect.
02:51I also am inspired by going through the racks, pulling vintage costumes from all different periods,
02:57like Mad Men the 60s, for Deadwood the 1870s.
03:02I did True Grit and then Cowboys and Aliens right after that.
03:05Okay, I don't want to do a Western for a while.
03:07I don't want to walk on aisle 18 ever again.
03:10But then, five years passed and I got this great script,
03:14which was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
03:16We made quite a lot of hats in the millinery department.
03:19These are both early prototypes for the Buster Scruggs hat.
03:23Patrick was instrumental in helping to work out Buster's hat,
03:27which is one of the most important hats in the whole movie since it's the title of the film.
03:31Mary came to me really early in the process and we got to play with shapes and sizes.
03:37She had a really great idea of what she wanted Buster's hat to look like.
03:40I think Patrick made us four hero hats, but there were many before that.
03:46And Ali live here.
03:49I've been nominated for an Oscar. This is my third one this year,
03:53but I got nominated for the first time on True Grit, for the second time for La La Land,
03:58and the third time The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
04:02I was first nominated in 93 for Malcolm X.
04:06Western Costume built some of the zoot suits in Malcolm X.
04:09I was nominated for Amistad.
04:11We pulled a lot of clothes out of Western Costume for that film.
04:15My third nomination just came the other day for Black Panther.
04:19I would say that almost all of the films that I've ever worked on,
04:24I have found something at Western Costumes.
04:27Over the time I've been here, we have overhauled our archive, the Star Collection.
04:32That's where pieces that were worn by famous actors or in important films go,
04:39instead of staying in stock and being rented for subsequent productions.
04:43When I started at Western, they had very few clothes that they had collected through the years.
04:48And one of my objectives was to make sure that we preserved anything that we found in stock.
04:54These are some pieces from The King and I.
04:56It was designed by Irene Sheriff, actually the film and the stage production.
05:00These were the dancers and the singers from the Uncle Tom's cabin scene.
05:04And we have so many pieces from this particular scene.
05:08But these actually used to go out for high school productions of The King and I for years.
05:14And so they're in varying states of decay, I guess is the word.
05:20Through the years, the clothes we've collected in the Star Collection used to be in just regular general stock.
05:26And at Halloween, people came in and rented Marilyn Monroe's jacket or Vivian Lee Gone with the Wind dress.
05:32It was crazy. So when I came to Western, I said, we've got to start putting these things away.
05:36It's such a historical place to come. I mean, not only to be inspired by the vintage pieces, but really to be able to see like an amazing part of film history.
05:49Well, we have a dress from Gone with the Wind. I've got Marilyn Monroe's red jacket from Niagara.
05:56We have clothes from The King and I, My Fair Lady, Papillon.
06:02These are pieces from The Prestige that Joan Bergen designed.
06:05This is one that David Bowie wore. These were made in our shop by Jack.
06:10We've got some pieces from Chinatown. This is a suit Jack Nicholson wore.
06:15We have a number of pieces from Twelve Years a Slave.
06:18This one that Lupita Nyong'o wore, the double of it is now in the Smithsonian.
06:24We donated it to the Museum of African American History and Culture.
06:28We also have the clothes from West Side Story.
06:31When you look inside, it has that unmistakable purple that the sharks wore.
06:37I think preserving these pieces, it's very important because it's Hollywood history.
06:42There's so much of it that's gone.
06:44And just to be able to save this stuff and preserve it for the next generations of costume designers
06:51and even people in Hollywood, hopefully one day this stuff will be in a museum.
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