Dressing Felicia: Costume Designer Talks Shop

One of the things I find so great about drag queens is their resourcefulness and creativity to find certain objects and turn them into wearable clothes, like the flip-flop dress. Did you find yourself having to think about your work through a drag queen's eyes?
Interestingly enough, the flip-flop dress came from the fact that they’re going shopping in that scene, so I wanted to make a dress out of credit cards, based on... tile dresses in the '60s. I thought that would be funny, to do it with credit cards. But when we did the movie, no credit card company would come near us because we were doing a little movie about drag queens. So then we thought, flip flops are Australia’s national shoe. We can string them together in the same manner.

The budget for the stage version was considerably higher than the film. How did having a bigger budget affect your process?
The thing about musicals is that the costumes have to be built to withstand a nuclear war. They’re worn every night. The show done in Australia — the costumes were worn 1,500 times. They have to be built to last. There’s stuff in the film that only had to last one scene. For the film, we had $20,000, but we had considerably more than that for the musical.