Kerry Washington's name is ubiquitous with the term superstar. Her iconic characters have ranged from a fashion diva (Save The Last Dance), a protective mother (Little Fires Everywhere), and a political fixer (Scandal). She has continued to wow us with iconic roles throughout her career. Watch above to see Washington discuss her characters and their memorable fashion.
Director: Stephanie Romero
Cinematographer: Amusement Productions
Editor: Jeremy Tanksley
Sound Mixer: Dennis Schweitzer
Production Assistant: Zeinab Gregorio
Fashion Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Stylist: Ashley Furnival
Styling Assistant: Priscilla Langdon
Makeup Artist: Allan Avendaño
Makeup Artist Assistant: Ruby Vo
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Prop Stylists: Sean Stronger, Alexandra Floro
Executive Director, Creative: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
VP, Social: MacKenzie Green
Director: Stephanie Romero
Cinematographer: Amusement Productions
Editor: Jeremy Tanksley
Sound Mixer: Dennis Schweitzer
Production Assistant: Zeinab Gregorio
Fashion Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Stylist: Ashley Furnival
Styling Assistant: Priscilla Langdon
Makeup Artist: Allan Avendaño
Makeup Artist Assistant: Ruby Vo
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Prop Stylists: Sean Stronger, Alexandra Floro
Executive Director, Creative: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
VP, Social: MacKenzie Green
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Hi, I'm Kerry Washington and today we're going behind the looks.
00:03 This is Save the Last Dance. I worked with an amazing costume designer named Sandra Hernandez.
00:21 She really was into the fact that Chenille, my character, wanted to be a fashion designer.
00:27 So we really played with using clothes that Chenille had purchased and kind of repurposed.
00:34 So there was a lot of kind of mismatched patterns and, you know,
00:39 we mixed different clothing items and sewed them together. Like very funky, very cool, very unique,
00:46 courageous and bold. She's very, very, very into fashion, Chenille.
00:50 And that was very fun for me because at the time I was an actor living in New York with very, very little money.
00:57 I was working at a restaurant. So being able to step into Chenille's fashion was like a dream come true
01:04 and so fun and much more adventurous than how I dressed in my everyday.
01:08 I do remember a lot of the dances from Save the Last Dance.
01:12 I recently did a TikTok with Sean Patrick Thomas where we revisited some of the moves from the film.
01:18 But it's also just like really fun to look at it because it has that very clear
01:23 late 90s, early 2000s vibe. We just got it in now again.
01:27 So if you're looking for some inspo, just re-watch Save the Last Dance.
01:31 This is a character named Alicia Masters and she's in the film Fantastic Four.
01:37 And I got really, really lucky because Alicia Masters,
01:40 traditionally in the comic throughout history, is blind. And I had just actually finished shooting Rey,
01:46 watching Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning performance playing a blind person.
01:51 So I had a little bit of a cheat sheet. Alicia was an artist.
01:54 So with her wardrobe, we tried to keep it really kind of like funky and artsy.
02:00 And we used a lot of nice rich textures and knits, stuff that would be tactile for her,
02:06 stuff she might be interested in from her other sensory points of view.
02:10 So this is Broomhilde von Schaft, my character in Django. These costumes were all designed by the
02:18 incredibly talented, Oscar-nominated Sharon Davis.
02:21 We had such an amazing time putting together the costumes for this film because we had to kind of straddle the world
02:29 of Broomhilde von Schaft in her slave life, when she was working out in the fields and on the run,
02:35 and Broomhilde von Schaft when she worked in the house and had to look like more of a lady.
02:39 The period clothing, the fabrics were really rich, the bodices were so tailored,
02:46 lots of corseting. For me, costume is one of the ways that you really step into a character.
02:52 You really understand so much about who a character is by how they dress, and that was definitely true in Django.
02:59 It was really, really helpful to have these costumes and really an unforgettable experience.
03:04 This is from a film called Confirmation, where I had the honor of portraying Anita Hill, one of our most important feminist icons.
03:12 Without Anita Hill, we really wouldn't have the language or the understanding for sexual harassment that we have today.
03:18 It was really phenomenal to get to watch Anita in real life, in real time.
03:25 I would say like 80 to 90 percent of the costumes in the film were
03:29 clothes that we saw her in in real life. To recreate a lot of that fashion was
03:36 really inspiring, and I remember when I put that blue dress on, the iconic blue dress that she testified
03:43 to the Senate in, it felt very
03:46 profound to really step into her shoes
03:51 literally and wear her clothes and say her words.
03:56 It really was like stepping into history, and the clothes helped me do that. This is Olivia Pope, and
04:03 this is from the finale. In the very first episode of the show,
04:07 she had on a white trench when she said those first words for the first time, "It's handled," and that image became so
04:15 iconic. We really wanted to make sure that in the finale, we brought back kind of a new and upgraded,
04:22 newer white trench to kind of make sure that we were closing the circle on
04:29 who she had been throughout the history of the show. That image in particular is really special because for most of our seven seasons,
04:37 we shot the entire series in Los Angeles, but for the final two episodes, we went to Washington, DC.
04:41 So it's really amazing to have these images of Olivia Pope in the white trench in front of the actual real White House.
04:48 It's pretty cool. White coat, White House, all that stuff.
04:52 The three things that I really loved most about Olivia Pope's wardrobe were her shoes,
04:57 her bags, and her coats. And I really liked that so many women identified with those
05:02 accessories and those layers because it also meant that you could kind of enter into her fashion,
05:07 even if you couldn't afford a
05:09 $7,000 Dior suit, you could maybe get the shoes or the bag. There were entry points to her style that I thought were really important.
05:15 The coats really were born out of Lin Paolo's genius
05:20 dedication to making sure that we were conveying region. Olivia Pope was a character who lived in the Northeast,
05:26 there are seasons in the Northeast,
05:29 so we really used
05:30 layering with sweaters and jackets and coats as a way to really remind the viewer that we were on the East Coast, that we were
05:38 in Washington, DC. In the seven seasons of the show, I do not have a favorite look. I love them all.
05:44 They're like my children. I have a few of those Prada bags in my personal collection.
05:48 We had them in almost every single color. And the purses and the coats also really came in handy.
05:55 In two seasons in particular where I was with child pregnant and Olivia Pope was not.
06:01 So in those seasons, the bags and the coats also served the extra purpose of hiding Kerry Washington's pregnancy so that Olivia Pope
06:08 could still be Olivia Pope. So this is from Little Fires Everywhere.
06:12 This is also Lin Paolo, which is so exciting. And one of the things I love about
06:17 this image is that you can really see how beautifully Lin used fashion to tell the story of how different our
06:23 characters were. My character Mia and Reese's character Elena.
06:28 And you could really tell so much about these women who they were, how they lived their lives,
06:34 how they thought of themselves, how much money they had by how they dressed. And that was really thanks to Lin.
06:40 This is from the film The Prom. This is me and Oscar winner Ariana DeBose.
06:45 I really loved my clothes in this film because I was playing kind of the bad guy, kind of the nemesis, the evil one in the
06:52 movie, which was really fun. And the clothes were kind of
06:56 Stepford wifey,
06:59 which was also really fun. I got to work with Lou, who's the longtime costume designer for Ryan Murphy.
07:05 She's worked with him for decades and she is so extremely talented.
07:11 She really, really got where kind of who I wanted to be in this role and how I wanted to convey a certain level
07:18 of kind of
07:20 conservative
07:21 racism and
07:23 judgmental nature. And I think we were able to pull it off and I was really happy to be able to be
07:29 well-dressed and super mean to Meryl Streep.
07:32 This is the beautiful work of costume designer Renee Ehrlich-Kauffis. She's our costume designer for School for Good and Evil.
07:40 We had such a blast creating this look.
07:44 There was a lot of talk about what should the Dean for the School for Good look like?
07:48 And we kind of went through different images of fairy godmothers and all different periods. The film kind of has an
07:54 amorphous
07:57 sense of period, but not one particular period. So we went with lots of corsets. There's a little Beyonce
08:04 inspiration in here. I like that the fans have noticed that. I wanted her to feel
08:09 surreal, otherworldly. At the School for Good, there's a real emphasis on looking good, not just being good.
08:17 So we played a lot with pink tones, gold tones,
08:21 really making sure that the costumes all shone with a lot of sparkle and light and
08:27 the appearance of silk and luxe. And all of that was really fun to juxtapose with
08:31 Charlize's look as the Dean of the School for Evil because her look is much, you know, kind of darker,
08:38 more structured,
08:40 masculine, not so frilly and frou-frou.
08:44 Thank you so much for watching and for going through some of my most favorite costumes ever.
08:49 I'm so excited for you to see the School for Good and Evil.
08:53 Let me know below what your favorite looks were or if I missed any. Thanks!
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