Araks - Molly Rogers ~ In conversation for Lingerie on Film

The 11th edition of Lingerie on Film is here with film by Joana Avillez, Julia Trotta, Julia von Boehm, Mina Stone, Miwa Susuda, Molly Rogers, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Quinn Wilson, Sandeep Salter, Zoe Latta, and Nell Verlaque. On the occasion of the series release, we spoke to each contributor about their taste and perspective, pulling at the thread of what colors their lives. Next to share is Molly Rogers, the costume designer who has spent four decades dressing television's most recognizable women from Sex and the City to both Devil Wears Prada films.

If she could be anyone, Molly Rogers would be Samantha from Bewitched.

She grew up in the South, churchgoing, fairly progressive parents, and a childhood spent almost entirely outdoors — which she credits, flatly, for her imagination.

Outside is where a kid gets to build a world with no adults in it. Her father built them a tennis court himself. She was also left-handed, which down South still got read as a mark of the devil, or at minimum a warning sign for creativity. Her grandfather spent years trying to walk the crayon back to her right hand. "Being an artist was associated with being destitute," she says — nobody wanted one in the family. She took art lessons and piano lessons anyway, hated piano at the time, and now would give a great deal to play again. The real education, she says, was reading — obsessively, and still.

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The Penelope Bralette in *Rose Pink,* on ice.

Her early heroines were never the easy ones. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom every textbook led with calling unattractive, struck her instead as the kindest person ever to live in the White House. She read compulsively about women who burned out fast and young — Edie Sedgwick, Nancy Spungen — "real misfits racing to self-destruction," she says. "So romantic." She isn't being entirely ironic.

“It's like a muscle — it needs to be exercised to grow strong and develop.”

—Molly Rogers

On taste, she doesn't believe in natural gift so much as upkeep. She quotes Diana Vreeland the way some people quote scripture: "we all need a splash of bad taste — it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. It's no taste I'm against."

The Penelope Bralette and Gwyneth Panty in *Rose Pink,* on salmon.

By the time a project lands on her desk, the legwork is already done — conversations with the director and writer, research before she's set foot in a single store, ideas presented to the actors so the whole team is pointed the same direction. Past that point, it's not really her movie to make.

"The clothes can't wear them," she says of actors — they have to wear the clothes, have to be the one who makes them true.

What ruins an illusion for her, camera or no camera, is the smallest thing: a missed button, a collar that's sat wrong. She thinks audiences are sharper than they get credit for — that color and texture register even when nobody could name why, that lighting moves people, that music does the rest. Fabric, in her telling, is never inert. It has moods. It can make a person feel sexy or happy on command.

Lingerie on Film #11

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Her first costume memory predates any interest in fashion at all: Bonnie's death scene in Gone with the Wind, the little girl in blue velvet, matching hat, crop and gloves to finish it off. "I was like, what a way to go," she says. Glamour, for a teenager raised on church and tennis courts, meant feathers and sequins and a whiff of danger — "an outlier in heels," as she puts it, the coolest thing she could imagine being. And then there was Samantha — the nose twitch, the ordinary suburban facade with all that power humming underneath it. She wanted to be a witch.

Fashion itself wasn't the entry point. She was mortified, if anything, that her mother made her clothes, and had no idea styling could be a job. What she wanted was punk music, Cookie Mueller, the whole downtown New York current — the same pull that had every ambitious kid from her college years dreaming of meeting Andy Warhol. She came over from London and landed at Patricia Field's store on 8th Street in 1984. MTV bands showed up wanting something outrageous; the staff started dressing them. Commercials came next, then television, then film.

The Antonia Bralette and Isabella Panty in Confection.

Ask how her idea of femininity has changed and she doesn't dress it up. She wants women angrier, more radical. She's plain about who she blames, plainer about the pay gap she has lived inside her entire career — calls it what it is, depressing, infuriating, no euphemism offered.

Life has gotten quieter lately — meditation, maybe, or just time. What catches her eye outside of costume work is unguarded: a cake, a garden, a chair, anything well-made. Her own style has drifted from the Norma Kamali she wore through the eighties to Vivienne Westwood now, different decade, same subversive backbone. Her Criterion Closet picks: The Women, Chinatown, Blue Jasmine — women with edges.

When a job wraps, she needs water — swims somewhere exotic to put herself back together. Boy George's DJ sets have been on loop.

Her lingerie tracks the calendar: eyelash lace for the weekend, color loud enough to survive a workday.