Eliza Doolittle in her old brown suit (above) and new blue suit (below, right): These “sibling” looks: These “sibling” looks reflect the two ends of the Edwardian period, the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern world. “You can see Eliza’s growth,” says Padua.Sketches by Joyce Padua
Sketches by Joyce Padua
In musical theatre, familiarity breeds contentment. Beloved songs and storylines prompt generation after generation to line up for their favourite shows – as others work hard behind the scenes to inject new life into every well-known entity.
For Joyce Padua, costume designer for the Shaw Festival’s production of My Fair Lady (playing May through December), that means honouring the past and acknowledging the contemporary.
Almost 70 years after My Fair Lady premiered on Broadway – the source material, Pygmalion, by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, premiered in Vienna in 1913 – the cherished musical still has huge appeal. Credit the unforgettable Lerner and Loewe songs, and the age-old wisdom that wealth and social position do not necessarily indicate or elevate good character.
Since one’s appearance can be a shorthand to revealing class and character, wardrobe plays a big role in carrying the plot.
“I love talking about design as dramaturgy because I think the choices we make as designers inform how direction happens and how the audience reacts,” says Padua, adding that design elements can create another route into the story for an audience.
Noting the iconic costumes created by famed British designer and photographer Cecil Beaton, for the 1956 play and 1964 film, Padua wanted to pay homage to original version and its roots in Pygmalion.
“The new ‘in’ into the world of My Fair Lady was the idea of Eliza as a central figure and heroine in her own right, as opposed to her being a character that things [just] happen to.”
Padua incorporated flowers and floral imagery into the wardrobe for aesthetics and to align with the theme.
“Eliza is a flower seller, and I thought about where we could go in terms of using [that] metaphor, where we can sprinkle in the language and colour of flowers to give it an underlayer of life.”
And given that My Fair Lady is very much about class, “we were really interested in what transition looks like, and idea, again of flowers, planting and blooming,” she says.
Eliza at the Embassy ball: In the Embassy ball scene, all the ladies’ dresses have embroidered floral overlays. “I really wanted that sequence to feel like a garden, where Eliza is blooming as this singular English rose,” says Padua.Sketches by Joyce Padua
Set in the Edwardian era, the play represents an important time of transition and cultural transformation: women’s suffrage was by then a global movement; progressive social change saw reforms in child labour and demands for better working conditions overall, giving the working class a voice for the first time. New technology meant telephones and electricity were becoming more common in people’s homes.
The straight-laced Victorian era was over, and a far more liberal age had begun.
To reflect that, Padua explains, Eliza starts out wearing an old-fashioned suit that’s closer to a Victorian sensibility; as we follow her progress in the play, her appearance evolves with the growing modernity of the times, eventually appearing in a modern sleek suit.
The audience can see the growth in Eliza, although some things remain the same.
“In that first sequence she has violets in her hat, a symbol of innocence and purity. The violet is placed in her hat again at the end of the show, says Padua.
“I didn’t want Eliza to seem as if she hadn’t been changed by her experience, but that she’d grown through it and not lost essentially who she is.”
During her research Padua discovered that, as art imitates life, Beaton’s famed black-and-white costumes in My Fair Lady’s Ascot scene are based on reality: the “Black Ascot” of 1910, after King Edward VII’s death.
Eliza at the Ascot: With hat, dress, an element of grey – a nod to the black and white tradition of the day, here Eliza “integrates herself into that world, but she’s doing it differently, her own way, a way that jars the upper class,” says Padua.Sketches by Joyce Padua
“Edward VII was a huge fan of horse racing and didn’t want Ascot to be cancelled, even in the event of his death, so all of the attendees in 1910 went dressed in mourning clothes, in black,” says Padua. “Otherwise, they would have been in light, airy tea dresses because it’s an afternoon affair.”
Beaton’s 1956 stage costumes were so influential they inspired another black-and-white Ascot in real life.
“It was an homage to the My Fair Lady version of what the Ascot should look like! It becomes a self-referential circle – Beaton inspired by the real Ascot and then, in 1957 or ‘58, Ascot referenced Beaton’s design.”
Padua laughs. “I went down a lot of rabbit holes researching this production.”
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