Yvette Helin has one of the coolest jobs ever, making custom costumes for everything from Broadway shows, to theme parks, to TV commercials. You’ve probably seen her work. She made the costume of the Geico gecko. She’s done Rugrats, Jimmy Neutron, Scooby Doo, Pokemon… The list goes on. Her amazing studio is in Greenpoint, and is one of many urban manufacturing companies based in the GMDC.
Yvette’s costume for Tracy Morgan in A Couple of Dicks
Could you describe what your studio does?
We do specialty costumes. I make things that most costume shops either can’t, or won’t, because it’s not cost-effective. They need to make 50 of something for it to work for them, since they have an army of stitchers that need to be fed work constantly.
The last job I did was a cell phone costume for Tracy Morgan, for the film A Couple of Dicks. I made 16 of them in 10 days. They need 16 because he’s going to go through many phases of destroying this costume – he gets attacked by a pit bull, etc.
What’s your background? How did you end up starting a studio like this?
When I went to art school, I was going to be a graphic designer. Along the way I discovered that everything I made related to the human figure, somehow. Whatever the assignment, I would make either a person or clothing or some sort of performance. There really wasn’t a machine or a method that was not comfortable to me. For example, I’d go into the sculpture department and I’d weld a medieval coat.
Awesome! What brought you to New York?
I got a job at the company which was making Starlight Express costumes for Broadway. They were the most complicated costumes I’d ever seen. When I saw their costumes, I thought, “I want to make things like that!” There was a shop full of about 100 people. They had a bandsaw in the back, cutting foam to go inside the vacuformed pieces that became the shoulders. There was a lot of spandex, and iron-on sparkly stuff, and studs and grommets. Every possible material was in these costumes. It was kind of the perfect entry for me.
It sounds like you found your niche pretty quickly.
Well, not quite. When I first came to New York from Kansas City, I was blasted out of here. In a single day I found out that my car was stolen, my roommate turned out to be a heroin addict, and one of my jobs ended. So I bought a little bottle of Smirnoff and went to the Fort Greene park and just cried! And this was back when Fort Greene was really nasty, not like it is today.
After that I ended up going to Hartford for a little while, to work for the Hartford Stage Company, a repertory theatre. But Hartford wasn’t my dream. I wasn’t thinking, “I can’t want to move to Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of America!” That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to go to New York and be an art star! So I moved back here and gave it another go.
Yvette’s in her Pedestrian Project costume
So the dream was to be an Art Star?
In the beginning. Then I spent some time in that world. It felt like an insane asylum. The costume world felt much better. It had structure. The designers were crazy, but they weren’t AS crazy as the artists – they could show up for appointments. I bounced around between the art world and the costume world for a while.
Could you tell us about your famous Pedestrian Project? What was the concept behind that?
I started doing that in 1989, when I got to New York and realized it was really hard to stand out here. I thought, “Everybody is trying to be somebody – why not just be nobody?” And people did notice that! It was irony and satire at it’s best. I got to have my own little Art Star moment, and we travelled around the world. We were invited to go perform in 8 or 9 countries. They paid us to go, and I got to be the visiting person with the entourage.
I discovered that I didn’t really like it. It’s exhausting to boss people around all the time. It really is. The artist in me kind of just wants to be left alone. I don’t do good work unless I have my quiet time. When you become that person, you don’t get quiet time anymore. If quiet time is where you get your inspiration, then the whole house of cards just falls.
And at a certain point it became clear to me that I needed to pay the rent on a regular basis. The practical side kicked in – I realized I don’t have a trust fund, and nobody was dying soon, and I’d played the lotto twice and didn’t win…
Yvette for Lion King
How did you start your studio?
It was an organic process, that nobody really prepares you for. I’d been freelancing for a while, hopping from job to job. You get your name around enough and people start asking you to do things. It’s a natural evolution. People came to me asking for costumes, I said, “Yeah, sure,” and then I thought, “Where am I going to build this?”
I had a loft in Williamsburg on N. 3rd, back when there were always cars and dumpsters on fire and there were hookers all up and down Wythe Avenue. My roommate and I watched the news once and saw a crack house getting busted, then realized it was across the street from us! We looked out the window and there were cop cars everywhere.
The first job I did in my loft was a set of costumes for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak dance company. Then the Lion King came around. I had worked in a shop making the mock-up costumes for their first reading with Michael Eisner. When the show got picked up, they asked me if I would make all the hyenas. Then I got a call from Nickelodeon, asking me to build the costumes for a pilot project.
Yvette with her Rugrats costumes
Wow – so the big names started rolling in!
Yeah. All of a sudden I had an incredible amount of work! After that pilot was shot, Nickelodeon awarded me the project of making all their costumes for theme parks. I was in my little loft and I had to expand. I subletted a space in the Pencil Factory to fabricate the fiberglass molds that were needed to build the giant character heads. I hired people. We did a lot of work there – Blue’s Clues, Pokemon…
We were doing Scooby Doo and Jimmy Neutron when the World Trade Center came down. We could see it from the top of our building. The blackout also happened when we were in that building. We had made the big giant plant for the Broadway version of Little Shop of Horrors, and were loading it into a freight elevator when all the power went out. If it had been a minute earlier we would have been trapped in an elevator with that thing.
Now you’re based in the GMDC – what brought you here?
The theme parks were sold to new management, and the orders became less. I started doing less of that work and more one-offs for ad agencies and commercials. I needed less staff and less space. I’m getting back to being the kind of studio I was in 1997, when I was making costumes for Baryshnikov. But now I have this tidal wave of experience under my belt and really know what I’m doing!