Kerry Washington's name is ubiquitous with the term superstar. Her iconic characters have ranged from a fashion diva (Save The Last Dance), a protective mother (Little Fires Everywhere), and a political fixer (Scandal). She has continued to wow us with iconic roles throughout her career. Watch above to see Washington discuss her characters and their memorable fashion.
Director: Stephanie Romero
Cinematographer: Amusement Productions
Editor: Jeremy Tanksley
Sound Mixer: Dennis Schweitzer
Production Assistant: Zeinab Gregorio
Fashion Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Stylist: Ashley Furnival
Styling Assistant: Priscilla Langdon
Makeup Artist: Allan Avendaño
Makeup Artist Assistant: Ruby Vo
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Prop Stylists: Sean Stronger, Alexandra Floro
Executive Director, Creative: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
VP, Social: MacKenzie Green
Director: Stephanie Romero
Cinematographer: Amusement Productions
Editor: Jeremy Tanksley
Sound Mixer: Dennis Schweitzer
Production Assistant: Zeinab Gregorio
Fashion Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Stylist: Ashley Furnival
Styling Assistant: Priscilla Langdon
Makeup Artist: Allan Avendaño
Makeup Artist Assistant: Ruby Vo
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Prop Stylists: Sean Stronger, Alexandra Floro
Executive Director, Creative: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
VP, Social: MacKenzie Green
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Kerry Washington, and today we're going Behind the Looks.
00:16This is Save the Last Dance.
00:18I worked with an amazing costume designer named Sandra Hernandez.
00:22She really was into the fact that Chenille, my character, wanted to be a fashion designer.
00:28So we really played with using clothes that Chenille had purchased and kind of repurposed.
00:34So there was a lot of kind of mismatch patterns and, you know, we mixed different clothing items and sewed them together.
00:43Like very funky, very cool, very unique, courageous and bold.
00:47She was very, very, very into fashion, Chenille.
00:50And that was very fun for me because at the time I was an actor living in New York with very, very little money.
00:57I was working at a restaurant.
00:58So being able to step into Chenille's fashion was like a dream come true and so fun and much more adventurous than how I dressed in my everyday.
01:09I do remember a lot of the dances from Save the Last Dance.
01:12I recently did a TikTok with Sean Patrick Thomas where we revisited some of the moves from the film.
01:18But it's also just like really fun to look at it because it has that very clear late 90s, early 2000s vibe, which is kind of in now again.
01:27So if you're looking for some inspo, just rewatch Save the Last Dance.
01:31This is a character named Alicia Masters and she's in the film Fantastic Four.
01:37And I got really, really lucky because Alicia Masters traditionally in the comic throughout history is blind.
01:43And I had just actually finished shooting Ray, watching Jamie Foxx's Oscar winning performance playing a blind person.
01:51So I had a little bit of a cheat sheet.
01:53Alicia was an artist.
01:55So with her wardrobe, we tried to keep it really kind of like funky and artsy.
02:00And we used a lot of nice rich textures and knits, stuff that would be tactile for her.
02:06Stuff she might be interested in from her other sensory points of view.
02:11So this is Broomhilde von Schaft, my character in Django.
02:15These costumes were all designed by the incredibly talented Oscar nominated Sharon Davis.
02:21We had such an amazing time putting together the costumes for this film because we had to kind of straddle the worlds of Broomhilde von Schaft in her slave life when she was working out in the fields and on the run.
02:35And Broomhilde von Schaft when she worked in the house and had to look like more of a lady.
02:40The period clothing, the fabrics were really rich.
02:44The bodices were so tailored.
02:46Lots of corseting.
02:48For me, costume is one of the ways that you really step into a character.
02:52You really understand so much about who a character is by how they dress.
02:56And that was definitely true in Django.
02:59It was really, really helpful to have these costumes and really an unforgettable experience.
03:05This is from a film called Confirmation where I had the honor of portraying Anita Hill, one of our most important feminist icons.
03:12Without Anita Hill, we really wouldn't have the language or the understanding for sexual harassment that we have today.
03:18It was really phenomenal to get to watch Anita in real life, in real time.
03:25I would say like 80 to 90 percent of the costumes in the film were clothes that we saw her in in real life.
03:32To recreate a lot of that fashion was really inspiring.
03:37And I remember when I put that blue dress on, the iconic blue dress that she testified to the Senate in.
03:45It felt very profound to really step into her shoes literally and wear her clothes and say her words.
03:56It really was like stepping into history and the clothes helped me do that.
04:01This is Olivia Pope and this is from the finale.
04:06In the very first episode of the show, she had on a white trench when she said those first words for the first time, it's handled.
04:13And that image became so iconic.
04:16We really wanted to make sure that in the finale, we brought back kind of a new and upgraded, newer white trench to kind of make sure that we were closing the circle on who she had been throughout the history of the show.
04:32That image in particular is really special because for most of our seven seasons, we shot the entire series in Los Angeles.
04:39But for the final two episodes, we went to Washington, D.C.
04:42So it's really amazing to have these images of Olivia Pope in the white trench in front of the actual real White House.
04:49It's pretty cool. White coat, White House, all that stuff.
04:52The three things that I really loved most about Olivia Pope's wardrobe were her shoes, her bags and her coats.
04:59And I really like that so many women identified with those accessories and those layers because it also meant that you could kind of enter into her fashion.
05:07Even if you couldn't afford a $7,000 Dior suit, you could maybe get the shoes or the bag.
05:13There were entry points to her style that I thought were really important.
05:16The coats really were born out of Lynn Paolo's genius dedication to making sure that we were conveying region.
05:24Olivia Pope was a character who lived in the Northeast.
05:27There are seasons in the Northeast.
05:29So we really used layering with sweaters and jackets and coats as a way to really remind the viewer that we were on the East Coast, that we were in Washington, D.C.
05:39In the seven seasons of the show, I do not have a favorite look.
05:43I love them all. They're like my children.
05:45I have a few of those Prada bags in my personal collection.
05:48We had them in almost every single color.
05:51And the purses and the coats also really came in handy in two seasons in particular where I was with child, pregnant, and Olivia Pope was not.
06:01So in those seasons, the bags and the coats also served the extra purpose of hiding Kerry Washington's pregnancy so that Olivia Pope could still be Olivia Pope.
06:10So this is from Little Fires Everywhere.
06:13This is also Lynn Paolo, which is so exciting.
06:16And one of the things I love about this image is that you can really see how beautifully Lynn used fashion to tell the story of how different our characters were.
06:25My character, Mia, and Reese's character, Elena.
06:29And you could really tell so much about these women, who they were, how they lived their lives, how they thought of themselves, how much money they had by how they dressed.
06:38And that was really thanks to Lynn.
06:41This is from the film The Prom.
06:43This is me and Oscar winner Ariana DeBose.
06:45I really loved my clothes in this film because I was playing kind of the bad guy, kind of the nemesis, the evil one in the movie, which was really fun.
06:54And the clothes were kind of Stepford wifey, which was also really fun.
07:01I got to work with Lou, who's the longtime costume designer for Ryan Murphy.
07:05She's worked with him for decades and she is so extremely talented.
07:11She really, really got where kind of who I wanted to be in this role and how I wanted to convey a certain level of kind of conservative classism and judgmental nature.
07:24And I think we were able to pull it off.
07:27And I was really happy to be able to be well dressed and super mean to Meryl Streep.
07:33This is the beautiful work of costume designer Renee Ehrlich-Kalpas.
07:37She's our costume designer for School for Good and Evil.
07:40We had such a blast creating this look.
07:44There was a lot of talk about what should the dean for the School for Good look like.
07:48And we kind of went through different images of fairy godmothers and all different periods.
07:53The film kind of has an amorphous sense of period, but not one particular period.
08:00So we went with lots of corsets.
08:02There's a little Beyonce inspiration in here.
08:05I like that the fans have noticed that.
08:08I wanted her to feel surreal, otherworldly.
08:13At the School for Good, there's a real emphasis on looking good, not just being good.
08:18So we played a lot with pink tones, gold tones, really making sure that the costumes all shone with a lot of sparkle and light and the appearance of silk and luxe.
08:30And all of that was really fun to juxtapose with Charlize's look as the dean of the School for Evil because her look is much, you know, kind of darker, more structured, masculine, not so frilly and frou-frou.
08:45Thank you so much for watching and for going through some of my most favorite costumes ever.
08:50I'm so excited for you to see the School for Good and Evil.
08:53Let me know below what your favorite looks were or if I missed any.
08:57Thanks.
09:00Bye.
09:01Bye.