photo: Pete Springer
One of Portland’s most sophisticated ateliers makes elegantly tailored custom garments for a select few under the direction of Jeff Cone. You’ll be forgiven if you aren’t familiar with the name. Cone is the Resident Costume Designer for Portland Center Stage, charged with designing and overseeing the creation of every costume that hits the stage at The Gerding Theater at the Armory. For the upcoming season-opener, Cabaret, Cone and staff are delivering upwards of 80 costumes and will create, from sketch to exquisitely-finished garment, more than a third. They will do all this in just three short weeks. We visited the costume shop of Portland Center Stage a little more than a week before the opening this Friday of Cabaret.
photo: Pete Springer
“People don’t even know we have a costume shop,” says Cone. In fact, he says that the new space in The Gerding Theater at the Armory is a dream. “We are thrilled to have our own building,” he says. The bright studio (he calls the lighting “surgical”) is right-sized for the additional staff he has to bring in during crunch times. And though there is storage for stock, “and stock is so important,” he says, Cone sees them nearing a “storage crisis,” with the crafts shop also serving as a storage area. His hope is that one day the costume department can have its own endowment to ensure the health of the department.
“The big pressures are time and money,” Cone says. “Our budgets are not huge. We get three weeks to make all of the costumes.” Three weeks? Don’t they know well in advance what the shows will be? “True, I know six months in advance. But the show is only cast two weeks before the first rehearsal. Only then do we really know what we’re dealing with.”
Cone approaches the task of designing the costumes with as much integrity as creativity, doing more than due diligence in researching not only historically appropriate dress (down to appropriate materials), but also the class, the personality of the character (what kind of watch would he carry, if he carries one at all?). More than this, his designs for each scene are reflective of the emotional state of the character, or sometimes as a counterpoint. He gives the example of the white dress (ecru, really) he is doing for one of Sally’s scenes when she is at her lowest: pregnant, losing her man, everything falling apart. He would normally have put her in a garment that reflects her state of mind, but here chose to do just the opposite and put her into a dress that she would have worn doing the number at the top of her game.
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