We recently connected with Vanessa Gonzalez and have shared our conversation below.
Vanessa, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about growing your team – how did you recruit the first few people, what was the process like, how’d you go about training and if you were to start over today would you have done anything differently?
I started in costume design as a department of one, and for a couple years I did every job alone. One day I was on the tar mac of LAX, moments from leaving on a once in a lifetime vacation, when a director I had worked with a few times called me about a shoot. I had to turn down the job, and I was devastated to lose it. When his video came out, ego aside, I was really impressed by the other costumer’s work. Soon after this I was offered my first job that included an assistant. I immediately called that director for the other costumer’s contact and luckily she was available. I was really fortunate to work with her. She had much more experience than I did, and after our commercial she brought me on to co design a movie she was signed on to do. These days, when I’m looking for an assistant I ask other costumers for contacts they trust. There’s usually plenty of talented people in our field looking for work. If I were starting over today in this career I would probably force myself to be more active in facebook costume groups. My social media anxiety prevents me from tuning into these stations but there are a lot of good resources there.
Vanessa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name’s Vanessa Gonzalez, VanGo for short. I’m a native Los Angelino who fell into the world of costume design through the encouragement of friends. I think of myself as a fixer for clothes and specialty costumes. Do you want to look like a Dia De Los Muertos burlesque dancer, Y2K Raver, 1980’s Wall Street broker, or even a pile of rocks? I can procure the costume you need, whether it’s one outfit or hundreds of looks. I think what sets me apart from many other designers is my love of synthesizing elements from different eras. I’m most proud of my most recent work with director Tamar Levine for the show Very Important People on Dropout TV, a surreal improv show where we brought so many unusual characters to life. Another career highlight was my work as a researcher and assistant designer with Jennifer Bryan on the earliest stages of the Star Wars series Acolyte which took us to the Lucas Ranch to look through their costume archives. I’m also super proud of my work on Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour, with designer Jessica Jones, which was a crash course on creating custom made garments for stage.
Something I’d like people to know about my personal brand is that I put a premium supporting local businesses. Always on my mind is the Anna Lappe quote, “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” Whenever possible, I prioritize going out into the world to find things in person, and when I can do that at an independent business it usually results in a more interesting final product and I feel better about the money I’m spending.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Pursuing costume design was a major pivot for me. This may sound crazy, but I didn’t really know being a costume designer was a job until I was in my late 20s. It took a while for all the roads of my life to converge on that path. As a kid in the 90s, I went to punk and ska shows, goth, soul and brit pop clubs. The world of music meant everything to me, and the ritual of dressing up was always a momentous exercise in personal styling. The transformative power of clothing is something I appreciate in the most visceral way and the subtle distinctions between subcultures and their expression was a real life masterclass I studied and absorbed from a young age. In highschool I wanted to be a fashion designer, but then an internship at a fancy fashion magazine exposed the corporate pandering rampant within the world of haute couture and I was done. The experience soured me to the industry and ultimately I decided to finish my BA in psychology (another love of mine). After college I became an LAUSD teacher and played in bands and promoted shows around town. These years were largely about designing classroom lesson plans and the perfect thrifted outfit for my classroom days and rock club nights.
I had been teaching for a few years when a friend working at ICM arranged for me to be a research assistant for Julie Weiss, an Academy Award-winning costume designer. I accepted the job solely as a source of extra income. Little did I know how that experience would change my life. Julie introduced me to the world of costume houses, niche vendors, fabric stores and familiarized me with all the earliest stages of launching a project. After a couple of months of us working together, Julie left for China and I went back to teaching. But the seed had been planted. Costume design pulled together my love of fashion, psychology, library research, and history. I couldn’t get it out of my head.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
Nearly two years passed after Julie introduced me to the world of costume design before I made the daunting decision to pursue it as a career. I had no idea where to begin, but I told everyone I knew that I wanted to be a costume designer. Once you tell the universe you want to do something then the angels start to appear. My first angel appeared at Wacko/Soap Plant, an art gallery and gift shop in Los Feliz. I was working there part-time over the summer, and one day I found myself in an unexpectedly deep conversation with a customer. I casually mentioned my desire to pursue costume design to her, and she immediately lit up and told me she was a production designer and invited me over for tea to give me a crash course on working in “the industry.” She referred me to some of her friends and shortly after our meeting I got a call from another award winning costume designer, Erin Lareau, who wanted to know if I was available to help with costumes for a private Katy Perry performance at the Nokia Theater in downtown LA. Boom! A door opened.
My second angel was my artist friend, Ann Hadlock, who was finishing up a grad program at Art Center and introduced me to a director putting together his senior thesis. Using the techniques I learned under Julie Weiss, I created booklets with my research, and offered them as visual ideas for the characters to the director. This approach ultimately won me the gig despite my having no prior experience.
The work I did on that short film built the foundation for my professional network. During the short film, the assistant camera operator offered me a job on a series he was developing, and then the producer from that series recommended me to some other directors he knew, and so on and so forth.
There’s a myriad of ways to get started in the industry but I realized early on that I wanted to design, not just work in the costume department. Which ultimately meant that I would rather be at the helm of a small project than be a PA on a blockbuster movie. So my start was slow yet steady and luckily I had substitute teaching to supplement my income during those early years while I built up my costuming network. Many of my early projects were non-paid. There would be a bit of money for the costumes themselves but often nothing or only a nominal fee for my time. I was still teaching to pay the bills, but only as a day-to-day sub which meant I could be available for last minute costume gigs.
As my network of contacts expanded, I came to meet the directors known as Fatal Farm. This was a key milestone. They had a grandiose style featuring unique, specialized costumes that allowed me to create characters in a way that really pushed my creativity and problem solving. With them I made Thanksgiving pilgrim basketball uniforms for a Fox Sports ad, early 20th century miner costumes, and dozens of 80s punk looks for a Robocop scene remake.
During these early days, I also enrolled at Pasadena City College for fashion and sewing classes to build my skills, and took on part time work hostessing at a restaurant on the weekends to further supplement my income. The first couple of years were grueling, but I kept the faith that the work would keep coming, and it did.
All my work has come through word of mouth, but not always through directors and producers. Other costumers, production designers and makeup artists have brought gigs my way, and some of my contacts came about in very unexpected ways. It was through my volunteering at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater that I met one of my favorite collaborators, Jessica Jones, who brought me on to assist her in designing Taylor Swift’s Reputation Tour and many other exciting projects. I wish I had a silver bullet recommendation on how to scale up but for me it’s just been a slow and steady grind sprinkled with grit and stubborn doggedness.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://vangostyle.com
- Instagram: @schlitzie
Image Credits
The photo of me was taken by Kiki Huynh