Recently, I spoke with Stephanie Maslansky, costume designer for ‘White Collar,’ on some of her design decisions in creating the character of Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer).
Bags: Did you custom design any of the outfits that Neal will be wearing in the show?
Stephanie: So far, I haven’t had anything made from the ground up. However, I am starting to have a few shirts made because I’m sort of running out of—we use specific—there are some—I use some pretty specific designers for Neal in particular. And I’ll tell you those if you’re interested.
Bags: Yes.
Stephanie: We started out using a lot of Paul Smith and a lot of Varvatos. And we’ve now added Thomas Pink, and they’ve been wonderful. We’re using a lot of Thomas Pink. We also use some Calvin Klein. And then, of course, we use vintage clothes as well. And everything, as I said, is tailored even more than Paul Smith tailors.
So, I won’t say I’ve custom made anything, but we customize everything. And the same with Peter, and the same with Neal, everything gets altered in a certain way—shortened, lengthened, taken in, let out, lowered, risen. We do a lot of customizing of clothes that we have found so far. And perhaps as time wears on and there’s season two, three, four, five—God willing, we have more time in prep, I’ll be happy to design their clothes. But so far, I’ve been very fortunate to find really great designers out there who already have great pieces that we can then tailor into the individual items for those actors.
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