How an Award-Winning Broadway Designer Uses Costumes to Tell an Entirely Different Story on Stage

I've seen quite a few Broadway shows in my day. I consider myself a huge fan of theater and feel fortunate to frequent the Great White Way. While I have a deep appreciation for every last musical and play, once in a while, for one reason or another, a show will stay with me long after the final bow. Most recently, it was the show Once on This Island, and beyond the singing and the acting and the atmosphere and the story, one thing really stood out: the costumes.

Clint Ramos, the mastermind behind the costumes for the 2017 revival of the show, told an entire tale of his own through the clothes the characters wore in each scene. "The creative team went to Haiti to take pictures, so every costume you see is based on a real picture of a real person in Haiti," he told POPSUGAR. "It was a matter of taking those photographs and going to find those clothes, but in some instances, we made them. Then we took them and distressed them to make them look like they'd been worn forever."

Once on This Island tells a story within a story, all of which unfolds on the island of Haiti. The folktale at the heart of the plot is centered on a poor girl named Ti Moune, who falls in love with a rich boy from the other side of the island. To help her along the way are four island gods, and they — along with their costumes — are the true stars of this show.

The creative team drew heavily on Haiti's recent hurricane devastation to craft the sets and the costumes, and that fact is apparent from top to bottom. For the gods in particular, Ramos set out to tell Haiti's story through the evolution of their costumes. "It sort of acknowledges the ravages and detritus as materials to compose the costumes," he said. "Take Papa Ge [the Demon of Death]; it's, like, this crazy homeless person who is collecting Coca-Cola cans for recycling in the beginning, and we reconstituted the cans as the god's spiked spine. And she's originally seen with her goat and [the god's] horns are fashioned after that."

During the parts of the show where the main characters are not gods, they are portrayed as commoners in Haiti — but each costume references the other. For Asaka, Mother of the Earth, she begins by taking care of the townspeople and feeding them. As she transforms into the goddess role, her costume turns into a ballgown made of a tablecloth and the same athletic jersey from the beginning. Ramos wanted to be sure to have subtle nods between the characters so the audience could really connect them.

That was not the case, though, with Ti Moune's iconic red dress — the costume that she wears throughout the story. It starts as a plain red sundress, but ultimately evolves into different dresses as the story progresses. "As she gains divinity, as she becomes more and more pronounced in the musical, ultimately ending up being a goddess, why not make that red dress grow and transform into different things?" Ramos said of her ever-evolving costume.

The costumes on display in Once on This Island are what's generating buzz right now, and it's with good reason — it's far from Ramos's first foray into Broadway costume design. In fact, he took home the Tony Award for his work in the play Eclipsed, written by Danai Gurira and starring Lupita Nyong'o. Eclipsed tells the real story of five Liberian women trying to survive the Second Liberian Civil War. "Part of my job was to honor these women," Ramos noted. "And the only way I could honor them was to make sure that I got the way they appeared right."

The creative team for Eclipsed, like Once on This Island, went to Africa for background research and shot photos for Ramos to work with when designing his costumes. "We created this ironic dissonance with these mundane American t-shirts mixed with this traditional African garb. For instance, you'd see a photograph of a woman running because her village is being burned and she's wearing a traditional African skirt, yelling for help, but she's wearing this old giveaway t-shirt from a f*cking dental office in Ohio," he said. Ramos also noted that so many of the clothes in Africa were American discards and described a level of "f*cked-upness" that's almost hard to imagine.

Ramos, who is a Filipino immigrant, said that Eclipsed was one of his favorite projects ever because he feels drawn to stories that have a message of change. "I'm an immigrant, so I love those stories about being an outsider trying to fit in and make sense of their new world," he said, referencing the struggles the characters face in Eclipsed. "That show was also the first time in Broadway history that the creative team and cast were all black women, so it's an extremely important show." And as the first person of color to take home the Tony for costume design, that message is one that resonates deeply within him.

You can see Ramos's work live on Broadway now in Once on This Island.