July 2020

from the desk of…
Sandy Klein

Creative Director, NEYT

The beauty of costuming from "experienced goods" or thrifted clothing is that there are scads of scarves, countless coats, vast arrays of vests and multitudes of modern styles to work from. The true nature of the fabric has already revealed itself through wear and colors are more varied and natural looking. Fabrics that you could never afford are more available and our out-of-the-box training is absolutely necessary to make the transformations. At NEYT we teach "green" costuming as much as we can. Occasionally we make something from scratch so that we can learn the form and build of a garment but what we mostly teach is how to find the costume within extant clothing. My first apprentice once told me that of all the places she learned about costuming (Carnegie Mellon, NYC and LA ) the place that helped her most in the industry was NEYT because it taught her to be scrappy. It kept her efficient, highly creative and always under budget.

My favorite thing in the world is co-creating pieces with my students. Check out this little video of me (in quarantine) unfortunately NOT working with my beloved students but you can get an idea of how we work:

I think it's very interesting that after all these years of nothing new under the sun in fashion that we now have a new accessory to play with. The mask! Seize the opportunity as a fashion statement!