WHEN Lynette McKinley’s daughter was scheduled to attend a Noah’s Ark-themed university dress-up bash only to break her knee in a painful accident, she still attended the party.
She was probably the least-mobile flamingo on the ark, but she sure looked fabulous.
With a professional costume maker for a mum, you’d learn pretty early on that the show must go on.
Lynette, 55 years old from Wisemans Ferry, said her two daughters used to stand in as mannequins while she was studying her Diploma of Theatre Costume at Ultimo TAFE.
“My whole family has been a part of the journey!” she laughed.
Lynette is cuckoo for costume making. “I love it - I absolutely love my job,” she said.
Lynette has dressed actors for the stage, film and television, making kit for characters in everything from Wolverine the movie and the television series Love Child, right through to the How to Train Your Dragon Arena Spectacular, and theatre productions Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Mamma Mia.
She was one of the team members responsible for putting together the costumes for the much-anticipated Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage show, which had its Australian premier at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre last month.
If you’re planning on seeing it, Lynette said you can expect to see ‘magic’ on stage.
“You’ll be mesmerised with wondering how they do those tricks; it was actually worked into the costumes,” she said.
“It was actually really hard work, as we had to make alterations and change the positions of certain elements of the costumes to make [the tricks] work.”
She recently remade some of the costumes for the theatre production of Muriel’s Wedding; with the production’s season ended in Sydney, it headed down to Melbourne, however some of the cast members - and therefore their body shapes - were different the second time around.
Wardrobe awakening
Part of the reason Lynette is so passionate about her job is because she enjoys the challenges, which are both technical and creative.
“Today I made a cat suit and it had really specific, tricky elements and I thought, how am I going to do that?” she said.
Lynette contracts to Sydney Costume Workshop at St Peters in Sydney’s Inner West. She travels in there three-to-four days per week, depending on workload, and it takes her two hours each way.
At work, she has a heavy duty, industrial sewing machine - these kinds of machines can weigh around 50 kilograms each - as well as a smaller, domestic sewing machine. Of course, she has a good pair of scissors, and these are kept razor sharp.
“I’m left-handed and it’s difficult to sharpen my scissors properly, but I just learnt to do it on YouTube so now I’m sharpening my own and everyone else’s!”
Her boss, Leonie Grace, crews-up depending on the size of the job: Lynette was one of only six costume-makers working on Harry Potter, as most of the costumes came from the English production; when she worked on Aladdin (she made the Genie’s costume), there were over 20 people in-house and work was also outsourced.
“For Aladdin they used beautiful, expensive fabrics and silks, and Swarovski crystals because they catch the light. As luxurious as the fabrics were, they weren’t hard-wearing, so they had someone doing repairs backstage; if they couldn’t be repaired backstage, they’d come back to us,” she said.
“When you’ve got beautiful things to work with, it’s absolutely great. They had a huge budget for Aladdin and designer Greg Barnes won a Helpmann award in 2017 for the Best Costume Design.”
The St Peters workshop has buyers who source the fabrics, and sometimes costumes will be sent out to be art finished.
“The boss picks you at what you’re best at. I tend to go towards the heavier leather work rather than the intricate bead work which can hurt your arms and shoulders - but I enjoy the whole lot!” Lynette said.
She is, however, skilled to make a costume from the ground up including clothing and fabric selection, pattern construction, hard and soft sculpture, millinery and corsetry.
For 'Aladdin' they used beautiful, expensive fabrics and silks, and Swarovski crystals because they catch the light.
- Lynette McKinley
“I remember one day someone came in to ask us to make some koalas and the boss said sure, we can do that. After they left she turned to me and said, what did you learn in koala college? You just have to kind of feel it out when you don’t have a pattern.”
Back in 2014, Lynette was working with Global Creatures on Strictly Ballroom The Musical, a co-production with Baz Luhrmann and wife Catherine Martin, when Ms Martin was nominated for an Oscar for best costumes on The Great Gatsby.
“It was really exciting!” Lynette said.
Loving the sewing life
Lynette lives in a sandstone house facing the Hawkesbury River, built by her stonemason husband Paul. Inside, she keeps some of her favourite costume creations, including the two she is most proud of: punk versions of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn which she made for her major work at TAFE.
“I designed them, I sourced [the materials], I made the patterns - I did everything,” she said.
Costume-making is something she took on only a handful of years ago; she was 48 years old when she obtained her qualification.
She had always been a keen sewer, and studied clothing tech fashion at TAFE when she left school. She has worked for 25 years as a sales consultant at the Bernina Sewing Centre in Chatswood, and still works there when she’s not making costumes.
“You have to have a regular job that pays a regular income, because in this industry it’s feast or famine,” she said.
“But something always walks in the door and I haven’t been unemployed since graduating in 2011.
“Costuming is a hard thing to get into, but if you’re good you get employed, just like anything. I’ve been from job to job. We’re about to start doing costumes for the Full Monty - there’s not much on them at all!” she laughed.
What’s next for Lynette? She’s hoping to get a gig on the upcoming Frozen the Musical production, set to begin in Sydney in mid 2020.
“Anything to do with Disney is big,” she said.