‘The Hours’ Gets Dressed for the Opera

When the British designer Tom Pye was first introduced on to the inventive crew of “The Hours,” a brand new opera by Kevin Places that had its premiere on the Met on Tuesday, it was only for the units.

However that was earlier than he realized that the opera, just like the 2002 film impressed by the identical Michael Cunningham novel, had pulled out all of the stops when it got here to filling the principal roles: three ladies strewn throughout the twentieth century whose fates appear united by a mysterious connection to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” In Joyce DiDonato, the Met discovered its Virginia; in Kelli O’Hara, its despairing midcentury homemaker Laura Brown; and in Renée Fleming, its high-powered Manhattanite e-book editor Clarissa Vaughan.

“Once I heard the castings, I used to be like, ‘I’m doing the costumes as properly,’” Mr. Pye mentioned.

Though he “liked it when it got here out,” Mr. Pye, 54, had scrupulously prevented the movie, which acquired an Academy Award nomination for Ann Roth’s costume design.

“It may be actually distracting, when you’re making an attempt to design and discover your personal picture for all the things,” he mentioned.

In a current interview, he defined his imaginative and prescient for the three ladies on the coronary heart of “The Hours.”

Virginia: ‘Mustards and Burnt Oranges and Olive Greens’

Whereas adapting Mr. Cunningham’s sprawling, multigenerational story for the stage, one goal shortly turned clear: to assist the viewers not lose observe of who’s doing what the place — and wherein decade.

“Within the e-book, it’s very ‘one chapter, one chapter, one chapter,’” Mr. Pye mentioned, referring to the episodic construction of Mr. Cunningham’s novel. “Within the movie, they get to play a bit extra, and that is like 5 occasions extra.”

Realizing there would usually be a number of characters singing onstage on the similar time made Mr. Pye wish to be “as easy and direct” as potential.

“So I’ve been very, very clear — or, I’m making an attempt to be very, very clear — within the shade palettes and the worlds of the costume and the units,” Mr. Pye mentioned, “in order that you already know you’re in Virginia’s world, you already know you’re in Laura’s world, in order that even when the singer doesn’t stand precisely in her world, her shade palette follows her, and he or she may be free onstage to be a bit of bit extra advanced.”

To create a coherent palette that may comply with Virginia all through the efficiency, Mr. Pye seemed to the Bloomsbury group, a casual collective of thinkers and artists, so named for the bohemian London neighborhood a lot of them known as residence.

The true-life Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, belonged to the group, which had “a very particular palette,” Mr. Pye mentioned, pointing to the work of Bell and Duncan Grant, a fellow painter she took up with in a Sussex farmhouse known as Charleston. “You see these type of tertiary colours — mustards and burnt oranges and olive greens.”

Laura: ‘The Reverse of Virginia’

If audiences are supposed to affiliate Virginia with the autumnal and the earthbound — “pure pigments that you simply consider may very well be created from pure merchandise,” as Mr. Pye put it — the character of Laura occupies a very completely different wedge of the colour wheel.

“There’s nothing pure occurring there,” he mentioned.

For Laura’s palette, Mr. Pye took inspiration from Technicolor in an effort to mission postwar optimism. “They’re not regular colours,” he mentioned, evaluating them as a substitute to Cadillacs and Nineteen Fifties diners. “They’re all fairly man-made, manufactured — the other of Virginia.”

To outfit the character of Clarissa, knowledgeable lady dwelling in Manhattan on the finish of the final century, Mr. Pye drew on his personal recollections of the late Nineteen Nineties, together with a few of his first jobs in New York theater. He was principally doing units then, he recalled, which on the time meant loads of glass partitions, glass packing containers and “reclaimed all the things.”

“All we ever did again then was minimalism,” he mentioned. “It was plenty of empty phases.”

“I used to be Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan, and all these nice designers that had been working then, and it’s so minimalist within the shade palettes,” Mr. Pye added.

In line with Mr. Pye, the Nineteen Nineties sensibility was outlined by an intuition to pare down: “‘Let’s strip all the things again, let’s go so simple as we are able to,’” he mentioned. “In order that’s what I’ve achieved with Clarissa.”

Carrying white and sometimes standing earlier than a plain wall, Clarissa often capabilities as a type of monochrome barrier between the extra colourful worlds of Virginia (stage left) and Laura (stage proper). To Mr. Pye, there was one thing satisfying in regards to the general visible impact.

“There’s a purity in that, and a modernity in it,” he mentioned.

The Roses

The well-known first sentence of “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel that types the non secular spine of “The Hours,” incorporates a clue to the opera’s signature motif: “Mrs. Dalloway mentioned she would purchase the flowers herself.”

Clarissa additionally begins her day with a visit to a flower store, the place she buys roses (herself). Seizing on that connective thread, Mr. Pye spied a chance to make the theme of roses “echo, and type of bounce down the many years.”

“Each Laura and Virginia are sporting rose prints, however I wished them to be exact opposite ends,” he mentioned. To create the sample on each Virginia’s and Laura’s clothes, he turned to wallpaper, not textiles, from their durations. For Virginia, he discovered two promising choices, each from the Nineteen Twenties, in a Smithsonian digital archive.

“I favored the roses on one and the background on one other, so I pulled them collectively and adjusted each single shade,” Mr. Pye mentioned. The result’s a custom-printed material that, whereas not classic within the conventional sense, is nonetheless “very, very ’20s” in spirit. In distinction with the “fairly tight, very Deco” florals of Virginia’s costume, Laura’s personal “very ’50s” sample was tailored from a Sanderson wallpaper and options massive, splashy roses.

The Silhouettes

The three ladies of “The Hours” are additionally distinguished by their costumes’ silhouettes — no two fairly alike, and every a mirrored image of its decade.

The dropped-waist silk costume Mr. Pye created for Virginia would have been a well-recognized type within the Nineteen Twenties, with a relaxed really feel befitting a lady dwelling and writing within the countryside. “I wished it to be delicate and to have motion,” he mentioned, including, “the Bloomsbury group had been all artists, so it didn’t wish to really feel too structured.”

There’s a sure postwar extravagance to Laura’s look: With wartime privations largely a reminiscence, a lady like Laura might get pleasure from a skirt that was full for fullness’s sake. “Immediately, it’s: ‘Let’s use 5 occasions as a lot material as we have to make a skirt, simply to benefit from the opulence of that,’” Mr. Pye mentioned.

The nipped-in waist and voluminous skirt of Laura’s home costume hark again to an hourglass silhouette innovated by Christian Dior: “It was that well-known Dior costume — the white jacket and the large, full skirt — that was actually radical after the ’40s, and after the struggle. Immediately we’re going again to one thing extra optimistic.”

For Clarissa, every element appears to speak ease and confidence — the rolled-up sleeves, the purposeful pockets of her skirt.

“There’s actually a little bit of that ’80s energy dressing that may’ve continued into the ’90s, notably for a girl of her standing,” Mr. Pye mentioned.

In early conceptions of the character’s costume, Clarissa wore pants. However Ms. Fleming wasn’t loopy in regards to the concept, Mr. Pye mentioned, and it was in the end dismissed as a bit too on-the-nose.

“This feels stronger,” he mentioned.