Costume Designer Kate Tabor’s acid-trippy, unearthly costumes lend themselves to soundtracks that bring energy and wonder into her work.
Kate Tabor has an infectious laugh. It’s unexpected, effervescent, and slightly mad. So much so that I spent our entire interview trying to coax it out. Not unlike her practice as a costume designer, it’s a kind of explosive, kaleidoscopic kinesis that grabs and holds your attention.
Tabor’s creations work best with a soundtrack, as evidenced by her long list of musical collaborators including David Bowie, Rihanna, The Chemical Brothers, and Kylie Minogue. Her surreal silhouettes and otherworldly forms have been realized from milk foam (three gowns inspired by the pouring of aerated latte milk), a mirror to create an onstage doppelgänger of singer Griff during her EMA performance in 2021, enough rope for Wet Leg’s “Oh No” music video costumes that it required three people to carry them down the cliffs of the Isle of Wight, and several hundred sunflowers from which she crafted a couture gown, commissioned in celebration of the 2019 Van Gogh and the Sunflowers exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Though Tabor takes our call from her south London home, a few minutes’ walk from her studio, she also has a place and studio in Somerset, where she was born and brought up. She likes to go there when her projects require her to “spread out a bit more.” Having grown up on a farm in a small village called Kenton Mandeville, Tabor feels her instincts with unorthodox materials began with the space and surplus of materials of her childhood’s natural surroundings.
“I feel like that’s where my creativity started, on the farm, because I used to make things all the time out of straw or corn or grass.
It was an amazing place to grow up because there was just so much to do and use and create,” Tabor explains. “I used to make dolls probably from the age of 5, stuffing plastic bags with straw, and with corn I would make beanie toys and corn dollies. I used to go into my own imaginary world, so my mind developed a really strong imagination. We had a great upbringing; we were quite wild.”
At 17 Tabor moved to London, where she studied at the London College of Fashion and Costume Interpretation at Wimbledon College of Arts before graduating and working with Irish designer and millinery legend Philip Treacy; she worked with him on hats for the 2011 wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (Treacy has also created headwear for Lady Gaga, Grace Jones, Chanel, Valentino, and Givenchy).
“It was a really nice insight for me into the materials that he uses, because they are incredible materials in millinery; the feathers and the spines and the way you make shapes out of buckram and wire. Then I worked for free for a whole year with different costume designers because I wanted to learn on the job.”
From there she met Adam Smith, one of the show directors of The Chemical Brothers who, along with his creative partner Marcus Lyall, brought Tabor into the show to collaborate with Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons of the electronic duo. She has worked with the team now for the better part of a decade and together they will open a retrospective entitled Smith & Lyall, Music Response: 001 in Somerset in October, which includes all of the intricate costumes featured in shows and music videos. “[Rowlands and Simons are] part of the design process, so we work together and we’ve been working together now for eight years,” she notes. “I’ve been really lucky to be able to do those shows because that’s given me an opportunity to express my creativity in music.”
Her creations for the duo are, as one would imagine, suitably trippy, anamorphic forms that suggest humanoid shapes realized in what look like topographic layers, soundwaves, or sprouting pyramids. It’s an aesthetic that lends itself well to Tabor’s body of work in general: larger than life, bizarre yet uplifting, familiar in its strangeness, and often worn by the body in movement, whether dancing in the “Gotta Keep on Makin’ Me High” show video, in intergalactic street fights à la the “Eve of Destruction” video or in a storm of soundwaves as in the “C-h-e-m-i-c-a-l” clip. “I used to be a ballet dancer from the ages of 3 to 18 and I think that’s where I also learned how the body moves and how costumes react to the movement of the body,” describes Tabor. “[A difficult part] is movement. The pieces have to be able to move properly and not break. They have to be flexible and almost have another element to them when they are in motion.”
“It was such a surreal moment, because Rihanna has been one of my favorite artists for years. For her to turn around and say, ‘Kate, I want to wear your piece’—she was just kind of moving and [saying], ‘I love it, I love it’—I think I had a totally out-of-body experience.”
Though perpetually surrounded by the surreal through her creations, one of Tabor’s most surreal moments came from one wearer in particular, Rihanna, who chose her creation to wear in a pivotal scene in the Daniel Glover-directed 2019 film Guava Island, which Tabor worked on under Mobolaji Dawodu, GQ’s fashion director. Tabor had flown from London to Cuba with 10 suitcases full of costumes, staying on the island nation for a month and collaborating with local seamstresses to create over 50 costumes for a pivotal blues festival scene.
“We were working in Cuba, and only one of [the designers’] designs would be chosen, and Rihanna chose mine,” recounts Tabor. “It was such a surreal moment, because Rihanna has been one of my favorite artists for years. For her to turn around and say, ‘Kate, I want to wear your piece’—she was just kind of moving and [saying], ‘I love it, I love it’—I think I had a totally out-of-body experience.”
I ask Tabor what a “normal reaction”’ is to her work. “I think my costumes excite people and I think there’s kind of a ‘wow’ factor to them, because they are often big and bold and I think that in itself is quite impactful. I remember when we did The Chemical Brothers and I made those pink layered [looks]. One of the electricians said it looked like puff pastry,” Tabor recounts, collapsing into giggles. “That’s what I love! I want people to [have] fun and to enjoy them. There’s a fun-ness to my costumes, I think, an energy that they have that is kind of childlike as well, and playful.”
Indeed, Tabor’s work often comes through play and experimentation, more recently with her 2-year-old, Ruby. “We’ve always got music playing and we do dancing and cooking and there’s a creative space. There are always new creative projects that I’ve got going on with Ruby everywhere. I’m just looking around now, and the tree is a collection of branches that she gathered and we’ve attached card mirrors all over the trees so it’s glinting. Yeah,” she sighs, contentedly. “That’s my life.”
This feature is taken from Mission’s current Music issue. Homepage image: The Chemical Brothers Costumes co-designed by Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall, Photo by Tony Pletts; above image Kate Tabor in her London studio photo Emma Lewis.
