​​Blurring Lines

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Stacey Berman ’09 has two websites. One features costumes she has designed for the big screen, and the other looks as though it was commissioned by a Chelsea art gallery. Both are equally impressive. The art site features a poetic manifesto: Be soft around the edges / until there are / no edges.

She says that lately she inhabits “three worlds”: the film world, the art world, and academia. “I’m at an intersection of three very blurry domains, and it’s very difficult to figure out how to straddle them, and right now, I sort of triangulate between them,” she says. “But in my dream, I would somehow figure out a way to integrate them more.”

While an art history major at Barnard, Berman began her interdisciplinary practice when the Theatre Department’s costume shop manager, Kara Feely, invited her to work with her company, Object Collection. It often assisted with costumes for the legendary avant-garde theatre impresario Richard Foreman (who passed away in January). Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater productions included sets and costumes that were integral to the storytelling. 

“I got into the whole design world via the Lower East Side in this last gasp of the Richard Foreman moment,” she says, “and so that’s a very direct Barnard link.”

Since then, her costume work has been seen in performances at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, on screen in Brittany Runs a Marathon and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, and in music videos for Fall Out Boy and Jenny Lewis. 

A long-term collaboration with artists Gerard & Kelly was fostered by an introduction to French-American costume designer Camille Assaf from professor of professional practice in theatre Sandra Goldmark. Berman’s costuming work continues to this day, most recently with her third collaboration with writer-director Aaron Schimberg, A Different Man, the much-celebrated film exploring appearance and identity that was released this past fall.

A proud member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the behind-the-scenes union, Berman says film work has allowed her to expand her oeuvre. But she notes that costume designers, roles often filled by women, have historically been “wildly underpaid” compared with other department heads.

“You could make the argument that it’s because people think of clothing as frivolous and it’s something that everybody working on a film does every day,” she says. “We all get dressed. Unlike operating a camera, which I don’t know how to do, the camera operator knows how to get dressed.”

Hierarchical inclinations of the industry eventually pushed her toward managerial roles, leaving her longing to use her hands again, as well as her imagination. “When your whole life is telling you that you’re this one thing, you need to carve out space to realize you can do more,” she says.

The pandemic provided just such an opportunity. She used the downtime to pursue a master’s in design studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In her first year, she received an award for her work with “clothing and architectural spaces of self-evolution,” and in 2023, she graduated with distinction. A year later, she moved to Paris. Her work as a designer continues to evolve alongside her growth as a writer and as an artist.

“I would say that the [three worlds] make a circle,” she says. “Film and academia don’t necessarily touch in my life, but academia and the art world definitely do, and the art world and film definitely do.”

Berman now sees the medium of film as a touchstone for transformation. Getting dressed, she says, is more than a mere social practice; rather it’s a communication tool for sharing versions of oneself. When costuming, the process begins with the script, then close collaboration with the actor.

“Magical is not the right word, but you feel it when you find this thing, it can be something really minor, like shoes make [you] walk a different way, or something is itchy — but it’s even more abstract than that,” she says.

Today, she relishes that transformation not only on film but also in her art and through research: “It [makes me understand] how we [dress] for ourselves, for each other, and [how] we too use clothing as a tool to become someone else.”