The Art of Dressing a Goddess

It all started last summer when composer/singer Joan La Barbara and visual artist Judy Chicago decided they wanted to try working together. La Barbara was planning a new piece based on female creation myths--something feminist Chicago is no slouch about--and the two women started talking “female goddess” costumes.

Enter Holly Harp, the Los Angeles-based designer for people like Barbra Streisand, Sally Field, Jane Fonda and Anjelica Huston. Supporter, friend, fund-raiser and occasional designer for Chicago since the artist’s Dinner Party project almost a decade ago, Harp would design the dress on which Chicago could paint.

“I was afraid I’d come off like Tillie the dressmaker,” Harp confessed after the three met, “but it felt like a fairly equal collaboration. I understand so many of the issues they’re trying to present.”

Prologue to an Opera?

The costume, the issues and 30 minutes’ worth of La Barbara’s music are scheduled to premiere July 8 at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall as part of that city’s first International Festival of the Arts. La Barbara will sing about what Chicago calls “the creation of the universe by female energy.” Should all go well, their collaboration could one day emerge as the prologue to a full-length opera that would again draw on all three women’s work.

So La Barbara and Chicago, who live in Santa Fe, N.M., came to town the other day to meet with Harp at her Culver City factory.

“I’m not a dress designer,” Chicago said, “and I always wanted to work with Holly. I wanted to see if she could drape and manipulate fabric for us that I could paint on, and Joan could wear, that would allow the fullness of who she is and what she wants to express.”

Working out of Harp’s front office, everyone had a notebook. La Barbara was writing down images and myths that she will turn into music, Chicago was making notes and drawings on the structure of the dress, and Harp was enumerating all the functions a basically beautiful dress has to serve.

“I want you to look stunning,” she told La Barbara as she studied and measured her body, then rushed in and out with gowns for her to try on. “It is to be something gorgeous.”

Money Not an Issue

These are not women who think small. Asked who is paying for a dress by a designer whose clothes retail at $800 to $2,500, Chicago replied: “It hasn’t even come up. The more important question is, what will it be worth? And that hasn’t come up either.” Asked the same question, Harp said: “We’re all donating our time. Art for art’s sake.”

The three women talked over each other, finishing one another’s sentences in what Chicago later called “a seamlessness of collaboration.”

La Barbara, the voice that will illuminate the dress and its artwork, became essentially a soft-spoken mannequin, a light breeze to Chicago’s tornado. Harp, as hostess, was easy but efficient, given that her fall collection opens April 11 in New York and she’s dealing with a killer schedule until then. Chicago was in control, and nobody seemed to mind.

Chicago was as involved in fabric and movement as she was in visual effects, and Harp similarly felt comfortable giving her opinions on non-designer issues.

Everyone was also quite organized: Potential goddess gowns were waiting when Chicago and La Barbara arrived at Harp’s factory, and it took very little time before the three women agreed on a basic white dress upon which to build a costume.

Their clothing, like their meeting, was very casual.

Harp, 48, was in white jeans and jersey, and Chicago, 47, in green overalls and silk shirt. And La Barbara, the object of their obsession, was in a pink-and-white striped top and pink slacks, socks and shoes, a rather ethereal-looking woman of 40 waiting to be transformed into a goddess.

La Barbara slipped on the white-tiered dress, and off they went. The woman the Village Voice once called “the reigning vocal wizard of the avant-garde” crouched on the floor to show how her performance will begin. She covered her head with her hands, and Chicago draped a piece of cloth over her. Her breathing under the cloth represented the first few sounds of the show and of myth.

“Breath,” La Barbara said, “is the first utterance.”

Portraying Six Myths

So many decisions. Should the drape be white or black? (Harp will make one of each so they can decide.) How will they provide a dress that will work in portraying not one but six myths? (Probably lots of pockets.) What should be on her arms? (Bracelets and paint lose out to fabric and gloves.) What should she do with her hair? (More perm perhaps, or color it white.)

They dispensed with the soprano’s feet fairly quickly. After the women weighed the advantages and disadvantages of bare feet, ballet slippers and Roman sandals, Harp suggested that La Barbara cover her feet with flowers. Nobody much liked that idea. So Harp continued thinking aloud, and soon came up with the perfect solution (at least for now): silver sandals that Harp designed in Acapulco in the ‘60s, which had detachable soles and were once called “soul-less shoes for heartless women.”

Questions breed questions:

--How do you create frost?

--Dry ice, but not much. Maybe a handful?

--Wouldn’t a handful hurt the hand it filled?

--Should the hand wear a glove?

--Where will she put the dry ice?

--If she uses a pocket, where should the pocket go?

--And even if the pocket were lined, couldn’t the dress still be burned by the dry ice?

Long White Dress

Three-and-a-half hours later, they had enough answers to stop asking questions: A long white dress with six tiers (one for each myth in the piece) will probably have sleeves, the tiers will probably have slits, and there will probably be pocketfuls of objects that will illustrate the myths. Scarfs will probably be at the back of the dress, be attached with Velcro and be pulled forward as needed.

Summarized Harp: “The overall feeling is fluid.”

The overall feeling is very fluid, actually.

“Will we use any of it?” Chicago wondered aloud later. “I don’t know. Can we create a dress that can transform itself and be transformed in relationship to the meaning of Joan’s piece? You come up with an idea and you try it. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. This is something we’ve never done before.”

Equally important is that La Barbara is still writing the piece, and myths and music can change. At this point, the soprano said, “I’m going through material and trying to find myths that I think I can portray in sound and some minimal degree of movement and which Judy can amplify or describe through the costume.”

What’s next?

Late last month, La Barbara and Chicago also brought in choreographer Bella Lewitzky to consult on movement. Lewitzky will meet with them in Los Angeles in early May, she confirmed, take a look at what they’re doing and hope she can be helpful.

“It isn’t an airy thing we’re doing,” Harp said. “It’s a meaty thing. What really came out of the meeting that I loved is that we had three people and were not only able to come to agreement but to ecstasy.

“A definite result came from our expertise, from the fact we’ve all lived for a while, we’re all women, and all support and inspire one another.”