My favorite part of any press junket about new movies is talking with the Costume Designer. We sat down and chatted it up with Paco Delgado, who created all the whimsy looks that you see in the movie A Wrinkle In Time! What a creative mind you have to have to read a script then come up with iconic looks that will stand out in a film. He did a great job and so many of the looks popped on camera! Check out what Paco had to say about creating looks for Oprah, his favorite pieces from the film and so much more!
Can you tell us a little bit about your process? Where do you start with a movie as huge as this?
Paco: The first thing I always do is to read the script. Basically because there’s a lot of information in the script. I mean, you know. In the script you say… You read things, like, you know. She wakes up in the morning. Or she goes and takes a bus. You know, I mean, there are really, really tiny things that they always tell that you can understand things. This movie, these celestial beings, or whatever…
Paco: Then you already know, Oprah’s character has to be energy. And she’s a warrior. Then Mindy, she is, like, very playful that you, you see the way she engages with the childrens, and the silly things that she says to the children. Then you think, well, you know, this is very playful. She has to have, like, another like, form outside that she has to be, like, interesting and fun. And then Mindy speaks with Mindy’s cousin. She speaks with quotes from books. Then I thought, well, you know, this, this lady’s a super… librarian of the universe.
Paco: She has all the culture, the universe into herself. Then, you know, I mean, we can draw things from him you know, every culture in the world, like Japanese. So African prince, so, you know. South American broidery, let’s say, that’s the beginning.
Then you talk to the director and the director says do you know about that. Everything you have thought is completely wrong! ‘Cause what I want to show is, like, I want to show this other sight of things, and yet that’s your Ava, this is interesting. Please let me show it to you. Yes, you can work that way, but it also… Then, you know, it’s like a movie like a… a conversation. A conversation of peace. You talk to… You know, the screen talks to you first. Then the director talks to you second. Then you talk to the actors and they come with other ideas because It’s like if I’m your mom or your dad and tell you in the morning, hey, you! Wear this.
Favorite costume from A Wrinkle In Time?
Paco: So one of my favorite costumes was… Mindy. I don’t know how to explain it except it looked nice.
How long did that take you to… to make?
Paco: Well, the first thing is, you know, because she was like this super librarian, I was thinking, you know, she have to have, like, all her dresses have to have layers of things, like, you know…Like it looks like a, you know, like book pages.
I was, like, trying to… I was trying to… think, is it possible to make something with paper? Because, I mean, you know, You see a lot of, like, paperwork in the internet of people making paper. But I was thinking, you know.
I mean, I, I was really thinking that will work, and will… will it stay like that the whole movie? And then we were, like, trying, you know, to find the right paper that we found these people in, in, in south LA that they have this warehouse where they saw, like, Japanese paper, made by hand.
Then we went there. We were trying little things. At the beginning we bought it in like at raw stage. Then we tried to have our people who dyed materials try to see if they could dye it different colors. It dissolved. You know…
I mean, it was, like trying a lot of different things that we found. We found these are the paper that it was made by hand as well, but it was, like, from another, another, another vendor. And then we put it together, and then I mean, you know. It was like so many different things.
Some of the dresses took eight, eight weeks. But also you have to think that we were doing, like, a… Everything worth doing, being done simultaneously.
Mindy’s cape, had a lot of words on it. Had words on the lapels, had scripture on the bottom, how that came to be?
Paco: She is this woman talking about books. Why is she cannot have that? And also I was thinking about graffiti. I was thinking, you know, that you walk into the… into our streets, and graffiti is one of the… Graffiti’s amazing. Because the thing is, I mean, I don’t think a lot of people have really stopped to think about it. But graffiti is an amazing expression… artistic expression where you have words, and thinking into it. It’s not just, like, making a drawing of a butterfly. It’s like saying a message. And then I just saw… This is amazing that she can have all these graffiti on her.
We all use the Latin alphabet, but on that, I just thought, you know, I mean, she is… She embodies all the culture. Then she have to have their She have to have Chinese. She has to have, you know, an invented alphabet. Consistently being in the universe. She speaks a language of a culture that we haven’t encountered yet. Or maybe in 200 years we will encounter them.
A Wrinkle In Time In Theaters Now!
