You’re back! You worked on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire a decade ago. What does it feel like to come back to this universe?

It was really nice to come back and work with Francis [Lawrence], who directed Catching Fire, and Jo Willems, the director of photography, but do things completely differently. Even though I enjoyed the outlandish, decadent world of Catching Fire, it was nice to do something in that same story and franchise that had a completely different look.

How did you make Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes look different from the original Hunger Games films?

We leaned into a very 1940s and ’50s postwar feel. The book leans into that. It’s set very recently after a big rebellion and war. … Since we landed on the ’40s and ’50s, I did a lot of research on American fashion, especially from everyday blue-collar workers. For example, for District 12, looking at what coal miners looked like then. But we also looked at what people dressed like in different parts of the United States, because this time around we see more of the districts. We really get to see their life and them enjoying life. So we brought in more flora and fauna with patterns, prints, and color.

Do you have a favorite fashion “moment” audiences should watch out for?

It’s so hard to choose a favorite, but I am really happy with Lucy Gray’s rainbow dress. That was a really challenging piece. It has a lot of detail in the book about what it is, and I had to go through a lot of iterations of what I wanted it to be. It took me a little bit, but one day it just came to me. And we had a great patina team working on it, too.

Was that a difficult look to get just right?

We had the corset mimic the shape of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss’s blue mockingjay dress. And a lot of times we’ll start a project before we have a cast, so I kind of started the designs that way. I was ordering all these different colors of tulle in excess. So if there were eight or 10 colors in the skirt, I was ordering all that tulle, shirring it, and playing with the skirt to figure out which colors transitioned well together. Then once we casted, we discovered that Rachel Zegler is quite petite, so we had to scale the whole thing down, reconfigure all the measurements, and figure out how many rows of color to have.

And I imagine, as an action film, you needed to create multiples of that dress.

When I design costumes, I look at the script and I walk to the director and then I look at the stunts, and I figure out how many days they’re shooting in that costume. If it’s one “day” in the script we could be shooting that “day” for 10 days. Our shoot started with the Games, so I imagined our actors easily blowing through and destroying two or three costumes. So it’s also about having extra fabric on hand. For the Lucy Gray dress, we premade extra ruffles so that if they ripped off, it would be quick to stitch them back on. And then you have to make stuff for the stunt doubles as well.

I’m always amazed by how much “stuff” it takes to costume a film. We as the audience might see a single dress, but on set, that single look might have existed as 10 multiples of the same dress.

It really takes a tribe, and that’s something people don’t think about. And sometimes it’s something I have to explain to certain producers. Look at the students in the Academy, for instance. We built all of those ourselves. If you’re dressing 500 background actors in school uniforms, you need two or three times that amount in costumes. At times we were doing 25 to 50 people a day for fittings, and you need an excess, because what if all the people who come in that day wear the size medium? You have to have lots of space, and teams of people that dress people in the morning—because we may need to dress people at 4:00 a.m. so they can go through hair and makeup on time, so they’re ready to shoot at 8:00 a.m. When it’s all fine-tuned, it’s beautiful.

You mentioned that your costume department had a patina team? What do they do?

For this film, I wanted a lot of handiwork, aging and dying, so the patina team is a group of people who are brilliant artists who can age, dye, and paint. They dye clothing and yardage of fabrics, and can age things so they don’t look brand new. Everything had to be aged the right way. Then there were some hard tasks, like hand painting and matching eight or 10 multiples of corsets so they all look the same for Lucy Gray. … I’m always happy to have a team of people who love what they do and really let them shine, and I had that here, especially with this patina team.

Was there anything your actors tried to pilfer from set?

Oh, of course! I understand it—they’re in these pieces for so long. We shoot for so long, and everybody has their favorite thing. And we had a lot of actors [where] this was their first film, so lots of them wanted a keepsake. I always have to explain, you can’t have this because we may have to do reshoots, and because the studio makes you do an accounting of all your assets. As a teaser, I can share that we’re doing a merch line inspired by Ballad, so I’m hoping they’ll take some pieces home that way.