Costume Design For A Wrinkle In Time - A Labor Of Love

Do you know what goes into costume design when making a movie? I didn’t either! But I had a chance to sit down with A Wrinkle In Time costume designer, Paco Delgado, and he told us all about the process.

Making The Dresses

After talking to Paco Delgado, we learned that making the dresses was a very complex process because a lot of different materials were used. Things like plastics, a lot of reflective materials, metallic fabrics. They even used real metal in some of the costumes!

One of the ideas behind one of Mrs. Which’s (Oprah’s) costumes was the idea of energy. What would it look like to be energy? Paco told us at first they looked at doing fiber optics, but that didn’t really work. Whenever they made one of the dresses it was a lot of trial and error and a lot of mistakes before they would find what they liked.

“Oprah’s dress that has light, it took ages to make. I mean, weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, because we never found the right amount of electricity to say something that it could lead it from inside, and it could be seen in normal conditions (not just in the dark).

We were very over-excited [like], ‘Oh my god, this is amazing!’ Then we went to show it to Ava in a normal room [with lots of light], and we were like, ‘oh shit, this doesn’t work.’ How embarrassing. That happened with almost everything.” ~Paco Delgado

A story that I loved and thought was really interesting was when Paco told us how they tried to use Neoprene as a material, but they tried to pleat it. They quickly found out that you can’t pleat neoprene because it just goes flat.

So then they set to work to find a solution to keeping this neoprene from going flat, but it just didn’t work on its own. In the end, they ended up using some plastic mesh for support on top, it was almost like a cup that was supporting the pleating and then it worked.

We asked how long it took to make Mindy Kaling’s costume (Mrs. Who) and Paco was so excited to tell us all about it!

She was like this super librarian, I was thinking, all her dresses have to have layers of things. Like it looks like book pages. I was trying to think, ‘is it possible to make something with paper?’

We tried this Japanese paper made by hand. We bought it at a raw stage and tried to dye it different colors, but it dissolved. We tried another vendor and tried many different things. It took at least three or four weeks, nothing here took less than four weeks [to make]. ~Paco Delgado

It was so much fun to talk to Paco about the whole design process. It definitely looks like a lot of work, but when you love what you do like Paco does, I’m sure it was tons of fun as well!

A Wrinkle In Time is now playing in theaters!