Anna Fleischle, award-winning costume designer on Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, talks through some of her original costume plates for the smash hit musical.
Inspired by a true story, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is the tale of Jamie New, a 16-year-old living on a Sheffield council estate where he doesn’t quite fit in. Terrified about the future he knows one thing, he is going to be a sensation. Jamie is going to be a drag queen.
“There is a different woman in every man,” confides Anna Fleischle, the costume designer charged with dressing the drag queens of the smash hit musical, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie; characters such as Sandra Bollock, Tray Sophisticay and Laika Virgin, not forgetting the titular cross-dressing schoolboy and, of course, the legendary Loco Chanelle.
“Working on Jamie was the first time I had done proper drag,” reveals Fleischle. “I’ve put men in female costumes before but not in such a specific way and I learned a lot, especially when the show went into the West End where we had some very experienced drag performers in the cast. They were so generous with their support and advice. It was a brilliant process.”
In search of “the different woman” in each performer, the designer quickly realised it was vitally important to get to know each performer, working closely with them to create a bespoke look.
“Often, when you design a modern costume, you create as you go. You’re looking at the performer, discovering what their shape is, looking for the female aspects of it. There are specific shapes in each person, some are more feminine, some more masculine, so, if you want to make a perfect woman out of a man, you have to look for the bits of the body that can be made look really feminine. For example, I had one performer who had quite masculine legs, in that case you go for a long skirt.”
One actor Fleischle particularly enjoyed working with was EastEnders’ favourite Shane Richie, who played Loco Chanelle in the West End production as well as on tour. “Shane and I worked really well together. He was very different in shape to the performer who had played Loco before so, as on quite a few cast changes, I had to come back to rework the costumes but the thing I loved about Shane was seeing him enjoying the process of finding and embracing his feminine side. It was just fantastic.”
She adds, “I like working on the body. There is something about building a costume on an actual person that is exciting. Generally, as a designer, once a show has opened we are done, but with every cast change on Jamie you have to find the woman in each new performer, a wonderful challenge that allows me to reconnect with the show time and time again.”
PLATE 1 : LOCO CHANELLE – SHANE RICHIE | “This is Shane’s Loco Chanelle dress. There is a reference to Loco Chanelle being the ultimate drag queen, someone who had mastered elegant femininity, so I felt the shape required had to be a kind of ‘Marilyn Monroe’, someone who, as a voluptuous woman, was still celebrating her femininity. With Shane, it was definitely very much about cinching the waist to find that kind of shape on him. We also padded him out quite a lot because I wanted that curviness. If I remember correctly, he didn’t particularly want to shave anywhere so we have this fabulous lace fabric over the arms.
“It’s about making areas you think may be difficult to portray femininely, work. In men that’s often the upper arms. For example, a strapless dress can be quite hard for a lot of men to pull off. The long sleeves came out of that but I also wanted a frilliness about the wrists, to give a sense of playfulness. The V shape at the front helps accentuate the female shape – at first it had that as a straight line but it didn’t work, it needed that extra something to take in the waist while accentuating the hips. And then there’s a really floaty skirt, it had something at the bottom to help it swish and bounce. It’s classical, very much old elegance.”
PLATE 2: SANDRA BOLLOCK – DANIEL JACOB | “Sandra Bollock is quite tall and a very joyous, constant and loud character, so she needed something completely different to Loco Chanelle. This is the finale costume. The finale is the only time all the drag queens are in full costumes, until then they are always in a half-dressed state, and I just liked the idea of a feathered bird.
“Again, working with Daniel’s shape allowed Sandra Bollock to have a really small waist but amazingly full, beautifully shaped legs. I went with the plunging V line so you could see the bra underneath. When he comes on, he has his arms down, but the wings have an elongated stick in them so that when he opens his arms he becomes this bird.
“Daniel is a black performer so the costume is white, that was about lifting him as a person of colour and enjoying him in that way. With Loco it was more about a drag queen wanting to be the best woman they could be whereas with this costume, it was about enjoying the outrage and joy of dressing up, being over the top and celebrating life.”
PLATE 3: LAIKA VIRGIN – ALEX ANSTEY | “This was Alex’ finale costume. In drag, the wig is particularly important. It’s one of the really big items, so much bigger than if you are doing something naturalistic. This one reminded me a lot of Baroque costume, when people had big wigs with items in their hair. I like the idea that he has perfectly done hair but that you see all the utensils in it.
“Alex has a very voluptuous body and is incredibly good at cinching in so he had this amazing hourglass shape. This costume was very much based on his character as well. I loved the idea of leaning towards something that we recognise as a kind of Baroque shape but also having an underskirt you can see through. It’s brave, modern, outrageous and slightly crazy.”
PLATE 4: TRAY SOPHISTICAY – JAMES GILLAN | “This was the first version of this costume from the original Sheffield run of the show. It was something I saw somewhere where someone had balloons in their hair. I just loved that idea so I created that balloon wig. Quite often in theatre, and in drag, you have ideas and then have to come up with a way of realising them, in theatre that also means making them in a way that lasts for a long time. So it took us a while to work out how to do this one. In the end, the maker of this hairpiece bought plastic Christmas baubles and stretched balloons over them – because they are solid inside, they keep their shapes.
“James is very confident in his body, so I thought it was good to go with that, keep it simple by not cover everything up. I like the mix of the glittery hot pants, the big shoulders and furry jacket – I think it’s even furrier now.”
PLATE 5: LOCO CHANELLE / JAMIE’S RED DRESS | “This is the famous red dress that Jamie gets to wear and, again, I really wanted to have the long lines and a kind of floatiness about it while bringing out the shoulders. It’s slightly 80’s because that kind of shape really lends itself to performers; it makes a very feminine shape that, at the same time, is quite simple. We didn’t want him to have have something too complicated or outrageous as it was about finding the beautiful girl that was in this boy, so I went for a kind of shiny, satin, extremely elegant number.”
PLATE 6: JAMIE’S REMAKE OF THE RED DRESS | After he has worn the red dress for his performance, like any 16-year-old, Jamie goes home and does what he has seen the people he admires do, he thinks, ‘What’s next? What is the next dress? I can’t possibly wear this one again… I need to jazz it up’. So for me it was really important that what we ended up with looked like something a 16-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom with a glue gun, scissors and possibly some thread could create himself.
“The home made element is a really important part of drag and I tried to keep that in all of these costumes. It’s important we see the joy that comes from the creative process of putting these costumes together, the real charm that comes from the passion not from the perfection.”
Originally commissioned by Drag! The Ultimate Dragazine 2021
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