KINGSTON, RI — An alumna from the University of Rhode Island has been nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the HBO drama, “The Gilded Age.”
Denise Andres, who works as the show’s costumer supervisor, found out she was nominated after handling a disaster on set, which quickly changed her mood from exhausted to overrun with emotion.
The miniseries was filming its third season on location in Troy, New York, in late July, when a leak in the ceiling threatened to soak the show’s costume shop. With a staff of more than 30, the costume shop is the size of a small mall with millinery and tailor shops and fitting rooms — and a stock of hundreds of costumes. So it was all hands on deck.
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Andres, a 1975 graduate of the University of Rhode Island, was in Brooklyn, New York, when she got the call. She jumped in her Subaru and sped north to deal with the looming disaster. Nothing was damaged, but it took a day and half to move the costume shop to a new location.
“It was a lot of work. We were all exhausted, sweaty, hot, everything,” Andres said. “And our assistant production manager said, ‘Oh, you guys got nominated for an Emmy.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And I started crying.”
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But it didn’t come as a total surprise for Andres.
“I had a feeling we would get nominated,” she said. “We were passed up for the first season. But it’s such a costume-heavy show, and the clothes are just fantastic.”
Andres, who has homes in Brooklyn and Wakefield, was nominated for “Outstanding Period Costumes for a Series” for the season two episode “You Don’t Even Like Opera.” She shares the nomination with designers Kasia Walicka Maimone and Patrick Wiley, assistant designer Isabelle Simone, and costume supervisor Rebecca Levin. It’s one of seven nominations for “The Gilded Age.”
A veteran of nearly 50 years in theater, film and television, Andres has worked costumes on dozens of productions.
Her IMDb page shows more than 40, but it is incomplete. Among her television credits are HBO dramas “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire,” “Gotham” and “The Deuce,” along with episodes of “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” and the four-year run of the comedy/drama “Ed.” Her film credits include “Shutter Island,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” “Michael Clayton,” and “Analyze This” and “Analyze That.” But the Emmy nomination is her first.
Last year, Andres thought about retiring, but she decided to come back for at least one more season. She said an Emmy would be icing on the cake, and getting nominated is a joy in of itself.
When Andres came to URI from Providence’s Classical High School in the early 1970s, a career working in a costume shop for theater, television or film was not on her radar. She knew how to sew. Her aunts, one a milliner, the other a dressmaker — owned thriving businesses in Providence in the 1940s and ’50s, and her mother encouraged her by paying for her sewing lessons in the summer.
At URI, she was taking liberal arts courses, just finding her way. But she needed a job to help pay for college. There was an opening in URI Theatre’s costume shop, where she found a mentor, Joy Spanabel, a professor in theater and textiles, fashion merchandising and design.
“I was completely fascinated by it and became a theater major,” Andres said. “Joy Spanabel was a fantastic teacher and just opened up a world for me. And working in costumes is what I’ve done my entire life.”
Among her TV and film credits, Andres has mostly served as a costume supervisor. With “The Gilded Age,” she oversees a costume shop that will handle clothing for more than 500 background actors that bring the show’s late 1800s setting to life. Each actor needs to be fitted, sometimes in multiple outfits, from their underpinnings out. The clothing is then tailored and pressed, inventoried, packed onto a truck and sent to location for filming. The costume shop works about six weeks ahead of filming of the scene the costumes are meant for, she says.
The show will screen in three major locations for its third season — meaning breaking down and setting up the costume shop, and bringing all the machinery and costumes from New York to Troy to Newport, where “The Gilded Age” will film again this fall.
“There are so many people we interact with — casting, background talent, teamsters, people telling us they are one size when they are completely off. So what we have chosen for them doesn’t work.”
But she adds, “We have an awesome team, probably one of the best on this coast, which makes the collaboration so great. Everyone gives way more than 100 percent.”
With her team, Andres will go to the Emmy Awards ceremonies for the first time. The 76th Emmy Creative Arts Awards are Sept. 8, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
What will the costume supervisor wear to the Emmys?
A gown from Saks Fifth Avenue, Andres says.
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