The secrets behind the magic of the costume of Saturday Night Live every week

Behind the scenes of Saturday Night LiveThere is a long narrow corridor which is coupled with a makeshift locker room. Its design is genius: a series of doors rinse towards the open wall to reveal the mirrors, creating half a dozen compartments of cupboard size. A curtain withdraws and that’s it, the artists have a little intimacy.

Nicknamed “Main Street” by distribution and the team, this is where the action occurs. The actors work with Broadway dresser between the scenes (often changing in less than two minutes), while while prostheses and costumes the size of a room (like the Bowen Yang drone) roll on the linoleum of the era of the 70s just outside their dressing curtain. Hair and make -up teams adjust their work in this corridor – it is easy to imagine them refine Diane (who only likes her son) and his speaker of the manager or the addition of a final dust of the presidential orange bronzing powder before the weekend update. Visit this Snl Main Street over a week, when the bridges are clear and the stands with fast change are empty, you can always feel the energy, left 50 years to film a live show where anything can happen.

The supervision of everything – clothing rehearsals with changes in frantic outfit and last minute revisions – is the designer of main costumes Tom Broecker. “You need a very special type of person to get involved in chaos that Saturday night livE, “says Broecker, who, in his 30th anniversary, working on the Sketch Show, created between 120 and 200 costumes each week.” One of the big things on work on Saturday Night Live is the variety of costumes, “he explains.” Some will be contemporary, some will be points, some will be science fiction. Some will be an animated drone costume, or some will be an iceberg. This variety is also the thing that, I think, continues to bring people back. »»

When Snl The shooting is, his week goes a little something like this: Monday, there is a meeting with the host. On Tuesday, they turn promotions. Wednesday is reading (about 40 sketches, according to Broecker). On Thursday, rehearsals begin – and that’s when madness really starts: “Writers rewrite and offer different ideas. They changed the cast; They changed the idea; Maybe they even changed the period (time). ” Rolling with punches is a central characteristic of the role of Broecker. This could mean to pivot a cold open of a scene of Crucifixion of Jesus on Friday to a concept “Jesus Cleaning of the Temple” on Saturday. (Yes, it really happened.)

Naturally, Broecker is a master at Tim Gunn – Style make it work. It is based on a large list of contacts that go from designers to show runners, retailers and fabric stores, as well as a lot of ingenuity and a little luck to create costumes from zero every week – and sometimes throw them away at any time. “You have about a two-hour window in California that you can call people and have them throw a lot in a box and ship them,” he explains a change of sketches from Friday at the end of the day. “And it arrives on Saturday morning.”

According to Broecker, the political sketches present one of the biggest challenges of his team. “If you think about it, male politicians do not buy a new tie each week, so the tie they wear for the event that we could recreate does not necessarily come from Nordstrom or Saks. It came from their closet five years ago,” he explains. The team is based on new technologies (they have understood how the 3D printed links) in addition to the proven supply methods it has used since the 90s.

Example: When Kamala Harris changed her Dior costume in Gabriela Hearst for the now viral mirror sketch with Maya Rudolph, his team had to adapt quickly for the visual concept to work. “Kamala looked in the mirror, so you must have the mirror image of this thing. If it was not exactly the same thing, then you will realize that it was not the same thing,” he explains. In the end, they found a similar black suit of the designer – the only catch? He had metal equipment throughout the reverse and the pass. “We had 40 minutes to change,” he recalls. “My team entered Overdrive”, the metal details unwinding one by one until the fabric is naked, while Broecker himself worked on a pin of the same shape and the same size as that carried by the old vice-president.

This new 3D printing tool has also changed the game for the prostheses team. “We work a lot with our makeup team, and Louie Zakarian manufactures these incredible prostheses,” explains the costume designer. “We had to do them with foam, but the difference in feeling and the weight of a silicone body is completely different.” In practice, it looks like Ariana Grande wearing a prosthetic bust under her top pink for an impression of Jennifer Coolidge or by giving Jake Gyllenhaal a realistic body and bicycle shorts for a bicycle sketch.

Which Broecker costumes will be the subject of the SNL legend, causing countless Halloween shipments and internet memes, is the assumption of anyone. “You really never know when you start on Wednesday, when you read the sketch, if something will strike, so to speak,” he said. One of these sketches was the song of bridesmaid, which focuses on the secret Latin lover of a bride, Domingo, played by Marcello Hernandez.

“For Marcello, we knew that he must have been a black shirt and a gold chain and a soul patch,” explains Broecker of the initial inspiration. But he did not predict what impact this soul patch would have: “Then, all of a sudden, funko dolls were spoken to be done, and have we had the license to the dress (bridesmaid)?” Hernandez even made an appearance on the tour of Sabrina Carpenter (the original song of the bridesmaids is set to the point of “espresso”) as a Domingo bearing a Broecker original costume.

Sometimes the joke East The costume. In these scenarios, the team becomes more creative with their work, fashion fashion which is more sculpture than clothing. The costume tree remembers a little who forced one of its members of its team to shape a Titanic Iceberg hat with a sculpture knife: “Kate is an artist who works here, and therefore we have literally gave her a square of foam, and she just started, as, using the electric knife and just hacking.”

Other times, the joke has not yet been written. “The weekend update has become an interesting challenge,” explains Broecker, quoting the penchant of the performers for wild visual gags and the comment of the news at the time. “He tends to be much more influenced by an undergoing event”, which can often lead to a last minute change on Friday evening (or even Saturday morning).

“They care about details,” said the current Snl Ego Nwodim, a member of the distribution, who saw the Broecker Magic costume at work for a recent update of the weekend in which Nwodim presented himself as the host of the dinner of the White House correspondents after a last-minute cancellation. When New York department stores have closed hours before the antenna time, the team painted its all white suit to correspond to its 90s jams of the 90sQueens of Comedy inspiration.

After three decades, you might think that Broecker has seen everything, but SnlThe recent 50th anniversary special gave it a brand new set of problems to solve. For the first time, the costume designer had to deeply withdraw from the archives, approaching the 60 best costumes in the history of the show for live airtight sketches. “There were a few costumes which, I knew, existed and had an idea that they were somewhere, and they were in someone’s house,” recalls Broecker. Some, like Will Ferrell’s famous cow bell sweater, had to be redone in a “new version without butterfly holes.” Others, like cupcake costumes designed as a nod to Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell Lazy Video, were personalized creations. Of course, he always has an surprisingly robust archive of the originals of the past years, like the lady of the church of Dana Carvey and one of the famous bee costumes of the inaugural season.

“We have many people who have been here for over 25 years. I think there may be one or two people who are 50 years here – it’s the kind of magic that occurs here, “explains Broecker of the distribution and the team. “Everyone here is determined to make the best possible show. Sometimes it works, sometimes this is not the case, but we all give our best to do the best thing as possible. ”