Melissa Whitworth visits the set of 'Pan Am' in New York, and talks to the show's costume designer Ane Crabtree about girdles, ladylike fashion and the enduring appeal of Sixties glamour.
BY Melissa Whitworth
It takes a month to create just one of the sky-blue stewardess uniforms from scratch, says Ane Crabtree, the costume designer behind the new BBC Two series Pan Am , which premieres tonight.
"We had one original Pan Am uniform from the Sixties and it was measured to within an inch of its life," she says when we meet on the vast set at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn. "We rebuilt it for the show. Now we have 16 uniforms, and we are building more slowly."
It takes 20 different craftsmen to make the uniform. Crabtree wanted a very specific colour of fabric. The hats are made by a milliner in Los Angeles, and even the Pan Am hat pins are hand-moulded.
"It's all very old school," she adds. "We are making them as they would have been made in 1963."
What Mad Men did for reviving ladylike Sixties-style dressing, Pan Am will certainly bolster. The show's star, Christina Ricci, tells the Telegraph the period is her favourite for vintage shopping.
"I like seeing the immediacy of what happens on TV and how people on the streets are eating it up," says Crabtree. "You are seeing men in slim suits now. Women are wearing long pencil skirts. I get e-mails asking where the best places are to buy [Sixties-style] gloves. Men are starting to wear hats. Simple sheath dresses are back in vogue. People are really excited by this trend."
Perhaps not about the girdles, though; mandatory for stewardesses at the time for "improving posture". Kelli Garner, who plays Kate, explains how her excitement quickly wore off, as the girdles are extremely restricting.
"We looked at every Life magazine from January to December of 1963 [the year the first season takes place in]," says Crabtree. "We looked at certain films: Blow Up , To Catch a Thief , The Apartment ."
And she looked at certain people: for Ricci's character Maggie, Crabtree was inspired by young Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood; for the male characters, she referenced James Dean and Steve McQueen. "People have always looked to what the stars are wearing," she says. "Just look at the way people aped Jackie Kennedy's clothing; her style came to embody the Sixties era."
Crabtree's costume department is bigger than that of the Twenties drama, Boardwalk Empire (which shoots on the same lot in Brooklyn), because of the international locations featured in each episode. "We have four separate crews at all times, I work with anywhere from 18 to 30 costume people a day to maintain all of that. And we have many tailors, too."
To cope with the costume demands - one episode required outfits for 400 extras - Crabtree also sources from costume houses. "We don't have time to make everything, so I pulled from every costume house that had Sixties clothing in LA. I had to grab blindly before filming started [for the first series] because we had no storylines yet."
Crabtree estimates that around 50 per cent of the costumes are made, and 50 per cent are borrowed from costume houses. There's one called "Right To The Moon Alice" in upstate New York (housed in an old dairy barn) started by two Broadway veterans, where Crabtree makes frequent trips to stock up on her quota of ladylike.
"We came to a place when we couldn't go any further, the torso decade, I call it, epitomised by Britney Spears. It's not intriguing, it's not sexy. It's not new anymore," says Crabtree. "What's new now is to be covered up a little bit, to be subtle. People are getting sense of what that means now.
"Elegance is coming back and TV certainly has a hand in it."
