As a teen, Shirley Kurata labored within the Aratani Theatre within the Little Tokyo part of Los Angeles. On Sunday, the venue will host an Oscars watch occasion for her movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — and he or she might be one of many winners.
Kurata is up for her first Academy Award for finest costume design for the mind-bending sci-fi fantasy, for which she dressed Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis.
“It feels like coming full circle,” Kurata informed AFP in an interview forward of the Oscars gala. “I’m so honored. I’m in the company of just very, very amazing and talented costume designers.”
Kurata is competing towards three previous winners — Catherine Martin (“Elvis”), Ruth Carter (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Jenny Beavan (“Mrs Harris Goes to Paris”) — and four-time nominee Mary Zophres (“Babylon”).
Dressed in a classic floral jacket and skirt, a turtleneck (her wardrobe staple, she says) and neon inexperienced jelly sneakers with purple soles, Kurata rocks a retro fashion, complemented by distinctive spherical glasses.
On her pastel blue fingernails? The zany googly eyes seen all through the movie.
“Everything Everywhere,” directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, goes into Sunday’s ceremony as a frontrunner with a number one 11 nominations together with for finest image.
The film tells the story of a Chinese American couple that runs a laundromat, is in hassle with the tax authorities and struggles to narrate to their depressed lesbian daughter.
At the IRS workplace, Evelyn (Yeoh) and Waymond (Quan) are abruptly thrust right into a battle spanning a number of universes — towards a sassy omnipotent villain who occurs to be one model of their baby.
Kurata, whose dad and mom additionally owned a laundromat, felt her collaboration with the Daniels, as the administrators are identified, was a “match made in heaven.”
“I think they encouraged me to sort of just show my creative muscles,” she recalled.
Some of the costume concepts had been set within the movie’s storyboarding, just like the bejeweled Elvis-style white pantsuit worn by the evil Jobu Tupaki (Hsu) when she turns policemen into confetti, Kurata explains.
But the character’s myriad costume adjustments weren’t scripted.
“We just sort of brainstormed like, okay, why don’t we have like a golf look for her or like a K-Pop look and we just sort of worked together,” she mentioned.
Kurata did not even sketch out the greater than 100 seems she finally ready for the movie. There was no time.
“I only had a month and a half to prep this movie, which is very short,” she mentioned.
“The entire budget of my movie’s wardrobe was probably the equivalent of one Marvel costume,” she joked about competing with a well-funded blockbuster like “Wakanda Forever.”
But her seems, spiced up with dramatic hair and make-up, popped off the massive display screen — and cropped up throughout social media.
Especially widespread had been Jobu’s Okay-Pop look that includes a Jeremy Scott teddy bear sweater, goddess Jobu in an intricately beaded white gown with a Victorian collar, and Chaos Jobu — that includes a bit of every costume.
“There were so many people dressing up” because the movie’s characters for Halloween, she mentioned. “I was like, okay, thank God, I succeeded.”
Kurata describes herself as a part of Generation X, with out providing a selected age.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, she says she knew she wished to be a designer from age 10 or 11, and discovered to stitch from her mom.
After highschool, Kurata moved to Paris and educated for 3 years on the elite Studio Bercot.
When she returned to LA, she says there “wasn’t really much of a fashion scene” so she focused Hollywood, constructing her resume on low-budget movies and TV units, in addition to by working as a stylist on music movies and commercials.
She finally headed again to the movie scene as a result of she loved the “sense of family” that develops on set.
Kurata, who will begin work on her subsequent venture in May, says she prefers to work on movies directed by girls and folks of coloration, as they provide a “unique, diverse story about the world.”
She divides her time between Hollywood work and Virgil Normal, the shop she co-founded in Los Angeles together with her designer husband Charlie Staunton.
Kurata — who has labored with music stars like Billie Eilish and Pharrell Williams, himself the brand new head of menswear for Louis Vuitton — is not any stranger to showbiz glamour.
But she says she continues to be a bit shocked by the massive field workplace and demanding success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
Kurata, who’s of Japanese descent, known as the movie “a great win for the Asian community.”
“It’s long overdue, but it’s so great,” she mentioned.
Kurata jokes that she’s “more prepared” for Sunday, after not writing a speech for the Costume Designers Guild awards, the place she bested Carter for the prize for excellence in design for a sci-fi or fantasy movie.
“I’m so happy that I’m just getting nominated. I feel like I’ve already won.”
© 2023 AFP