The cos­tume design­er dye­ing to make film more sustainable

This sto­ry is part of Cre­ative Resilience, an edi­to­r­i­al series pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Square­space.

“It’s so impor­tant in this day and age not just to think about going green, but to actu­al­ly do it. The fash­ion indus­try is respon­si­ble for so many haz­ardous chem­i­cals being used, so much waste and envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion, I just felt that I had to make a con­cert­ed change in my per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life.”

Like so many peo­ple work­ing in the film and tele­vi­sion indus­try, the glob­al pan­dem­ic has forced Jo Thomp­son to pause and take stock. As a cos­tume design­er with more than 30 years expe­ri­ence and a wide range of cred­its, from This Is Eng­land to Fleabag, she’s acute­ly aware of the sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues fac­ing her trade. She believes that now is the per­fect time to start rewrit­ing the play­book. ​“It seems com­plete­ly absurd to spend thou­sands and thou­sands of pounds on one item of cloth­ing,” she says, ​“espe­cial­ly when there are plen­ty of oth­er means of sourc­ing mate­ri­als and mak­ing clothing.”

Born and raised in Don­cast­er, South York­shire, Jo relo­cat­ed to Not­ting­ham (via Nige­ria) to study before even­tu­al­ly set­tling in South Lon­don. After grad­u­at­ing uni­ver­si­ty in the mid-’80s with a degree in the­atre design, she quick­ly realised that stay­ing on her cho­sen career path would be more dif­fi­cult than she had antic­i­pat­ed. ​“My ear­ly work, espe­cial­ly dur­ing col­lege, was very polit­i­cal,” she recalls, ​“quite often with a fem­i­nist slant. That’s real­ly what I want­ed to be doing, but I couldn’t sus­tain a liv­ing in Lon­don. There was just no mon­ey in it. So I end­ed up just work­ing for free, doing lots of fringe the­atre, very small-scale stuff where I would make every­thing from the cos­tumes to the sets. I actu­al­ly got a clean­ing job for a time to sup­ple­ment my income.”

A place­ment at the famed agit­prop the­atre com­pa­ny 7:84, found­ed by the British play­wright John McGrath, enabled Jo to fur­ther hone her craft and pol­i­tics (the company’s name was tak­en from a sta­tis­tic, first pub­lished in The Econ­o­mist in 1966, that sev­en per cent of the UK’s pop­u­la­tion owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth). From there, she land­ed a gig as a dress­er at the Lon­don Pal­la­di­um, which led to her being accept­ed onto a train­ing scheme at the BBC.

This com­par­a­tive­ly cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment didn’t always agree with Jo, but she saw it as her pass­port to the world of film, which had always been her ulti­mate ambi­tion. The four years she spent being nur­tured cre­ative­ly by Aun­tie proved invalu­able. ​“At that time [at the BBC] it was fair­ly com­mon to start an entire pro­duc­tion lit­er­al­ly from scratch. If you were doing a peri­od dra­ma, say, you’d be giv­en the bud­get to have a work room and to get things sourced and dyed and print­ed. That scheme doesn’t exist any more, so I was very lucky real­ly. It was a very hands-on, prac­ti­cal way of work­ing, and I sup­pose what I’m doing now relates back to that same process.”

Jo’s big break in film came in 2006 when she was hired to work on Shane Mead­ows’ BAF­TA-win­ning skin­head dra­ma This Is Eng­land. ​“I’d heard they were look­ing for a cos­tume design­er,” she remem­bers, ​“so I reached out to Warp Films, the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, and they set up a meet­ing with Shane. Luck­i­ly he knew my work already, because I’d already worked on lots of TV projects, com­mer­cials and short films by that point, so he just want­ed to meet me to make sure we would get on.

“We met in Not­ting­ham and sat out­side on a step for about an hour, chat­ting about the world. This Is Eng­land was great because I got to do a lot of hand-dye­ing and bleach­ing. It’s quite a stylised film, and there’s a real­ly strong colour palette run­ning through­out it. It was very cre­ative and col­lab­o­ra­tive. Also, com­ing from the North, it very much reflect­ed all the trib­al­ism, the sub­cul­tures and the labels that were around when I was grow­ing up.”

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Giv­en that she describes her favourite projects as those which allow her to col­lab­o­rate close­ly with a writer/​director, how has Jo found work­ing in iso­la­tion over the past few months? ​“I’m so used to being sur­round­ed by peo­ple every day, so it’s been quite strange sud­den­ly hav­ing nobody around. I know it’s been the same for a lot of peo­ple, but when your work is usu­al­ly so col­lab­o­ra­tive it’s dif­fi­cult to adjust to anoth­er way of work­ing. Actu­al­ly, I quite enjoyed the ear­ly part of the lock­down, just hav­ing more time to do the things I’m not always able to fit into my day. At first, I set myself a task: to do one draw­ing every day. But realised I want­ed to chal­lenge myself fur­ther. I kept think­ing to myself, ​‘This is my chance to do some­thing I’ve always want­ed to do – don’t waste it.’”

The cre­ative world that Jo inhab­its is firm­ly ana­logue – steeped lit­er­al­ly in phys­i­cal tex­ture and colour. Yet the rise of the dig­i­tal world has facil­i­tat­ed her own cre­ativ­i­ty. ​“I real­ly am not an expert in the inter­net or build­ing web­sites – far from it!”, she says… ​“but with the Square­space web­site build­ing for­mat and all the tem­plates you can use, it’s real­ly easy to image the site as a port­fo­lio and to just stop mess­ing about and pub­lish your work.” And in the film indus­try, vis­i­bil­i­ty is cru­cial, of course.

“My Square­space web­site is more than just a folio for me too. It’s a way to share work with oth­er cre­atives and to get feed­back on the work itself. It helps to con­firm that you’re doing good stuff and that peo­ple like the direc­tion in which you’re trav­el­ling – which when you’re fly­ing solo is real­ly important.”

It says a lot about Jo’s cre­ative instincts and gen­er­al out­look on life that not only has she man­aged to adjust dur­ing lock­down, she’s also devel­oped a new way of work­ing – one she hopes the rest of her indus­try will embrace once nor­mal ser­vice has resumed. Hark­ing back to her days at 7:84 and the BBC, she’s been exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent dye­ing tech­niques using nat­u­ral­ly-derived colours. ​“I do a lot of dye­ing in my work,” she says, ​“so I thought that if I’m spend­ing all this time at home, why not use what’s read­i­ly avail­able. The one rule I gave myself was that it had to be some­thing I already had in my kitchen, so it’s using things like avo­ca­dos and cof­fee, or hibis­cus flower tea or black tur­tle beans.”

As a life­long veg­an, Jo has always been envi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious, so in one sense mov­ing away from using syn­thet­ic dyes feels like a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion. ​“I’ve been doing a lot of read­ing up about my indus­try recent­ly, and it’s ter­ri­ble the amount of waste that’s pro­duced. I always try to use fab­rics from eth­i­cal sources, but it’s not always easy. You’re try­ing to chal­lenge the con­ven­tion­al way of doing things, which has been the same for a very long time – even though we’ve been using nat­ur­al dyes and ani­mal dyes since the Egyp­tians.” Jo admits that the nat­ur­al dye­ing process is very slow, but says she’s already think­ing about how her home­spun meth­ods could be fac­tored into a typ­i­cal pro­duc­tion sched­ule. ​“It’s def­i­nite­ly achievable.”

There’s not just an eth­i­cal advan­tage to using organ­ic, sus­tain­able prod­ucts. ​“I find that the cam­era hates syn­thet­ic fab­rics,” Jo says. ​“The red dress in Peter Strickland’s In Fab­ric, for exam­ple, could have been made with a cheap mixed fibre, but the beau­ty of the silk is that it’s much more sub­tle on cam­era – even though it’s bright red – and it absorbs the light much bet­ter. The soft­ness of it, the way it float­ed, you wouldn’t get that with a man-made fibre. Because film pro­duc­tion is such a pres­surised envi­ron­ment – it’s all about mon­ey and time – it’s quite hard to put into prac­tice, but it’s been good to think about projects I’ve worked on pre­vi­ous­ly, like In Fab­ric, and ques­tion how I could have done that more sustainably.

Pri­or to lock­down, Jo had just com­plet­ed work on anoth­er Warp Films project, Lit­tle Birds, a six-part series adapt­ed from Anaïs Nin’s col­lec­tion of erot­ic short sto­ries, which is due to air in August. While film and TV pro­duc­tion in the UK is slow­ly start­ing up again, Jo accepts that it could be a while before things are back to busi­ness as usu­al. Good thing, then, that she plans to con­tin­ue find­ing new ways to be cre­ative and keep busy. ​“I want to exper­i­ment with embroi­dery next,” she says, ​“The thing that lock­down has brought home to me is that I need to have some­thing else as a back up which doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly involve film­mak­ing. If some­thing like this were to hap­pen again, I need to have a back up.”

Jo Thomp­son and all of the cre­atives fea­tured in our Cre­ative Resilience series use Square­space as an easy and afford­able web­site builder to get their work out there in a beau­ti­ful way. If you’re think­ing of shar­ing your own vision with the world, start build­ing your Square­space web­site today with a free tri­al – no cred­it card required! Use the dis­count code LWLies when you’re ready to go live.

Read more sto­ries from our series on Cre­ative Resilience, in part­ner­ship with Squarespace.