Costume Designers: Mark Bridges, Charlese Antoinette Jones, Paolo Nieddu, Natalie O’Brien

Costume designers Mark Bridges (“News of the World”), Charlese Antoinette Jones (“Judas and the Black Messiah”), Paolo Nieddu (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) and Natalie O’Brien (“I’m Your Woman”) represent films that span more than 100 years of American history, from post-Civil War Texas to Civil Rights-era Chicago. Wardrobe plays a large part in transporting the audience to a different time and place, but are there any eras these costumers would most like to capture on-screen that they haven’t already? We asked them that and more during our “Meet the Experts” panel, which you can watch. Click on each name above to be taken to each person’s individual interview.

O’Brien has designed costumes for the 14th century (“The Little Hours”) and the 19th century (“Lizzie”), and “I’m Your Woman” brought her to the late 1970s, but she’s game for “anything that I haven’t studied, anything that I haven’t researched I want to try. You want to always strengthen those muscles that you don’t really know about.” Bridges, who won Oscars for films set in the 1920s (“The Artist”) and 1950s (“Phantom Thread“) and ventured to the 19th century American West for the first time in “News of the World,” agrees that “you want to continually challenge yourself.” And “even if you stay in a decade you can still do fresh things” depending on where the script takes you.

Nieddu transformed Andra Day into Billie Holiday in the 1940s and 1950s, but he’d “love to do the 1930s. I think that’s my favorite decade in terms of the aesthetic, the men, the women, the glamor, the sets. That is something I would love to do.” Jones achieved a dream by costuming “Messiah” set in the late 1960s “because 1969 was one of my favorite years in fashion,” but she’d love to flash forward a few years beyond that: “I would love to do something about Studio 54, late ’70s. I love [fashion designer] Halston. That would be amazing.” But as O’Brien explains, the important part of the craft is “to keep learning and keep creating.”