After 25 years of professional costume design career, Ivana Vasić – costume designer, is very fortunate to have checked quite a few boxes on her vocational bucket list: designed costumes for epic fantasy, science fiction, theatre, film, television series, events but also HoReCa industries. Dean Devlin told her recently: “Are you aware that you and I have made almost a hundred episodes of television together?” The list of the international projects she left her mark is long: The Outpost, The Librarians: The Next Chapter, The Ark, The Machine, Tarot, The Deal. Dance pieces Moonfall and Nymph and several theatrical pieces at The Oerol festival in the Netherlands. The list of inspiring artists, filmmakers and producers she collaborated with over the time is vast…To name a few – Jonathan Glassner, Dunja Jocic, Jessica Green, Dominic Monaghan, Mark Hamill, Bluey Robinson, Orsi Nagypal, Suri Krishnamma, Celyn Jones, Bert Kreischer, Aaron Osborne, Emma Gojkovic, Jeremy Swift and many more.
CDH TALKS: The job of a costume designer is quite complex – to understand the character, the image, the story, the context, to integrate artistic talent with technical precision, to raise the overall aesthetic level of credibility that creates the experience. Can we consider such an artistic opus crucial in the triangle of director – actor – costume designer?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: Indeed, we might say that the costume designer’s task is to come up with the actor’s second skin, a wrapping that is to carry a pretty long list of semantic and visual information and expression. Being a semiotic language, just as any other object on the stage or screen is, costume needs to communicate with the audience with clarity and precision, yet to also populate the space and relay the artistic vision conceived by the director and emphasized through stage/production and light design and style. One needs to fathom the meaning of each character within the piece, to give life and both obvious and hidden clues to character’s psychology, history, current circumstances and future intentions. One also needs to bring in connection or to set apart characters to or from each other through visual clues and selection of items they wear. On the other hand, an actor or actress also needs to feel comfortable and true to their manner of portrayal, while wearing the costume. For all these reasons, shaping each look for characters in either form of syncretic arts comes as a result of a very close, almost intimate collaboration between director, actor and costume designer, using the text as the cradle and binding tissue throughout the process. The result has to be satisfactory to each – to be one of the instruments of storytelling, an organic element of the overall concept, to make the actor feel and be the character and to express the artistic style and vision of the designer. When it comes out right, it feels like alchemy.
CDH TALKS: You worked devotedly in the theater, before you dedicated yourself to video format. How challenging it is to “transition” from traditional theater costumes into film discourse?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: Theatre and film/TV do share the same roots, but the logistics and time perception around the two mediums couldn’t be more different. During the time I was predominantly designing for theatre, the film and TV shoots seemed quite intimidating and alien. But once I actually started being onboard those projects, I guess I got possessed by the excitement and the drive of it. The speed of thought and problem solving, the military-like crew discipline and the alarm clock hitting in the dead of night, when one wakes up only to catch a flight to some exotic destination are quite infectious, and in the most positive of all manners. It didn’t take me long to reprogram myself from one to the other. I guess everyone who choses any gig industry as a profession is pretty challenge-driven and likes the constant alteration of pace, and I am not an exception. What we do is an extension of our personalities. Theatre offers more time for analysis, discussion, trying things out and changing our minds. More or less anything is possible until the very premiere night. Film has the same philosophical liberties during the preparation period, but the closer it comes to the shoot, the more it becomes firmly structured. Once the shoot starts, there is no more time for changing very much. Some alterations and touch ups are tolerable, but no surprises and drastic stirs, as those could bring unease and unnecessarily consume time on set. And TV shows are like running long track sprints with obstacles. One must create, present, get approvals, shoot current episode, create the next episode, conceive further episodes and not lose their mind, all at once. This and last year we shot 4 seasons of two different TV shows consecutively (2 seasons per year), which truly was a test of endurance, concentration, discipline and creative capabilities. Typically, one show has about 10 weeks of prep and 16-20 weeks of shoot. At some point this year, we were simultaneously shooting a medieval episode on one production and events on a spaceship on the other. Luckily, no knights or astronauts were sent the wrong way.
CDH TALKS: Which of your costume – design – film – achievements are you most proud of?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: This is a very difficult answer. Every project is like a love affair and all designs feel like children. Creating concepts and designing does indeed feel very similar to falling in love. If I really had to choose the dearest to me, those would be the costumes for The Outpost, The Ark and The Librarians.
CDH TALKS: We are fascinated by your deep emotional connection with the work you do. You are deep rooted. Congrats!
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: Thanks. I chose to study costume design in the first place as a result
of my graphic novel infatuation, especially science fiction and epic fantasy. ”The Outpost” gave me the opportunity to design an entire epic fantasy world, a pseudo-medieval universe populated with heroes,
queens, gods, villains, warriors and unknown kingdoms. For ”The Ark” I got to design astronautical suits of the future and base them on MIT’s beta research I stumbled upon, to shape crews of many spaceships and colonists on a livable planet, to rediscover ancient cultures taken by aliens to other planets where they evolved separately from the rest of humanity. The puzzles I was given to solve were more than exciting. And “The Librarians: The Next Chapter” is by far the most demanding project I have ever been on. Every episode being set in a different period, with different characters, style and concept. We created a few thousand costumes for the two seasons, at a surreal speed. Creating all of these characters feels like having my childhood dreams brought to reality.
CDH TALKS: Do you collaborate with Hollywood?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: I have continuously been working with Dean Devlin, one of Hollywood’s prominent figures, since 2018. We shot all of the mentioned projects in Serbia, as the Serbian film and TV service production industry has become a pretty popular destination for Hollywood projects.
CDH TALKS: It is a great compliment when one production team entrusts the work to someone (a costume designer who comes from another cultural context. Can you share with us any anecdotes from working on large international projects?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: At some point during the second season of ”The Outpost”, there was a new king and his entourage in a script, who were supposed to be “gladiator-like” per the creators of the show. That was all the info I got. So, hm… I decided to shape them using ancient Slavic and Cossack iconography. The drawings were approved, we built the costume for the king, had the fittings with the actor and a presentation to the showrunner followed. I explained the old Croatian tattoos on his chest, the wolfskin of Daibog, Kolovrat carvings on the bullhorn used for drinking mied and the discrete pendant from Vinca, with a symbol that is widely considered to be a proto-European script. After I finished my substantial soliloquy, as if presenting some cross-over ethnological essay, all thoroughly based in an absolutely logical yet completely crazed imaginarium, the showrunner stood silent for a while, looked at me and said “Well, I have no idea what you just said, but it must make sense because I love how it looks”.
CDH TALKS: What projects are you working on now?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: At the moment I am preparing designs for two dance pieces with Dunja Jocic, which are set to premiere later next year in the Netherlands. Parallelly, I am brainstorming Shakespeare’s “The Twelfth Night” with a Montenegrin director, Lidija Dedovic, for the Belgrade Drama Theatre, also scheduled to premiere next year. Beside that, I am training diving, hopefully to compete at some master’s championships next summer.
CDH TALKS: Do you keep some secret we should expect in 2026?
IVANA VASIC, KOSTIMOGRAFIA: The partnership between Peris Costumes in Madrid and my company, Kostimografia, is planned to evolve and set up a historical costumes Rental showroom in Belgrade.
CDH TALKS: Congrats! Thank you on collaboration.