Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who labored on greater than 30 Broadway reveals from the Sixties to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her demise, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a pal, who mentioned her well being had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.
In 1972, when she was simply 29 years previous, Ms. Robbins started “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” because the syndicated style columnist Patricia Shelton put it, due to her work that 12 months on the unique Broadway manufacturing of “Grease,” six years earlier than it was was successful film.
Ms. Robbins was given a finances of solely $4,000 (the equal of about $30,000 as we speak). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig vibrant crimson utilizing a Magic Marker and common a pink poodle skirt out of her personal tub mat and furry rest room seat cowl.
The poodle skirt virtually turned a compulsory function of “Grease” reveals. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a manufacturing of “Grease” backstage, she noticed a person taking a crimson Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she instructed him that the wardrobe division absolutely may afford a high-end customized hairpiece. He replied that solely a Magic Marker could be genuine.
In a CUNY TV interview with Ms. Robbins within the mid-2000s, the Newsday theater critic Linda Winer commented, “She defined forever our memories of the ’50s.” She additionally praised Ms. Robbins for her “creative obsession with detail and period accuracy.”
Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’s costumes through the years for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London and the ruined South through the Civil War. For “Grease,” she studied highschool yearbooks from the Nineteen Fifties. For a 1992 musical model of “Anna Karenina,” she discovered ball robes from the flip of the twentieth century.
“They are underwear-y colors,” Ms. Robbins instructed The New York Times concerning the robes in 1992, “softer, muted, much more alluring than today.”
Describing Ms. Robbins’s work on a 1985 Broadway manufacturing of “The Octette Bridge Club,” a play by P.J. Barry set within the Thirties, The Reporter Dispatch of White Plains mentioned she appeared “to have raided every thrift shop in town.”
Her devotion to interval costume, Ms. Robbins instructed the journal Theatre Design & Technology in 1987, was not a wholly creative matter.
The area allowed her to keep away from, she mentioned, “the entire city telling me what it should look like.”
Ms. Robbins received 4 Drama Desk Awards for costume design — for “Grease,” “The Iceman Cometh” (1974), “The Beggar’s Opera” (1972) and “Over Here!” (1974). She was additionally nominated for Tony Awards for her work on “Grease” and “Over Here!”
Over the course of her profession, she made costumes for Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall and Anthony Hopkins. In 1985, because the employees costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” she turned Madonna into Marilyn Monroe. She additionally designed the outfits for the staffs of the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the high of the World Trade Center.
Ms. Robbins was additionally admired as a draftsman. She studied the tips of grasp illustrators like Maxfield Parrish, and he or she would recurrently spend eight hours on a single costume sketch. “I believe that drawing is thinking,” she instructed the net theater journal HowlRound in 2014.
“No one drew a costume more beautifully than Miss Robbins,” mentioned Ann Roth, the revered costume designer.
Carolyn Mae Fishbein was born on Feb. 7, 1943, in Baltimore, the place she grew up. Her father, Sidney, taught historical past in Baltimore public colleges, and her mom, Bettye (Berman) Fishbein, had labored as a seamstress earlier than marriage.
When she was 3, her mother and father, involved that she was drawing on the partitions of her nursery, despatched her to a therapist, who instructed them to enroll her in artwork lessons. As a teen, she discovered work singing and faucet dancing at a hofbrau in New Haven, Conn.
She studied artwork and drama at Pennsylvania State University, the place she earned a bachelor’s diploma in 1964, and he or she obtained a Master of Fine Arts diploma from the Yale School of Drama in 1967. She married Richard D. Robbins, a surgeon, in 1969.
She taught costume design at New York University from 1972 to 2004; numerous her college students went on to win main awards for costume and set design, together with Tonys.
In current years, Ms. Robbins centered on writing performs of her personal, together with a number of tailored from quick tales her husband had written throughout his retirement, which was reduce quick after a couple of years by his demise in 2003.
Ms. Robbins leaves no fast survivors.
Her greatest thrill in designing costumes, Ms. Robbins instructed Ms. Shelton, was watching actors remodel.
“The guys in ‘Grease’ were no less than a little reluctant to have their hair cut,” she mentioned. “But when we cut it, put them in tapered pants and a jacket with the collar turned up, there they were — swaggering around the stage and flipping grease off their combs.”
