Deborah Everton

Deborah Everton
[[File:|200px]]
Role:	Costume Designer
BSG Universe:	Re-imagined Series
Date of Birth:	December 21, 1955
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month! ,
Age:	70
Nationality:	USA
Official Site
IMDb profile

Deborah Everton (born December 21, 1955) is an American costume designer who served as costume designer on the Re-imagined Series miniseries in 2003. A member of the Costume Designers Guild, she is best known in the science fiction field for her Saturn Award-winning work on Star Trek: First Contact (1996). She operates out of Los Angeles through her production company, DaisyDexter Inc., which she founded in 1990.

Career

Everton began her career as an assistant to a costume designer before receiving offers to design independently. Prior to her first design credit she appeared on screen as a Hooker in Brian De Palma's neo-noir thriller Blow Out (1981), and she served as costume supervisor on James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and as production designer on Night Screams (1987). Her first credit as costume designer came on the horror film Bad Dreams (1988), directed by Andrew Fleming.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, Everton accumulated feature film credits across multiple genres. She has described her approach to the work as akin to anthropology — studying the lives of each character she dresses. She designed costumes for James Cameron's undersea thriller The Abyss (1989), Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), and the The X-Files pilot for Fox (1993). She also designed for the NBC pilot and subsequent series Earth 2 (1994).

Her television work in this period brought her a CableACE Award nomination from the National Cable Television Association for outstanding costume design for the TNT film Heart of Darkness (1994), directed by Nicolas Roeg.

Everton's work on director Jonathan Frakes's Star Trek: First Contact (1996) earned her the Saturn Award for Best Costumes from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films at the 23rd Saturn Awards in July 1997. The film's costume budget ran to approximately $1 million, according to Everton's own professional profile. The Saturn Award also followed recognition from the Fennecus Award for outstanding costume design for a fantasy and the Apex Award for outstanding costume design for fantasy, science fiction, or horror, both in 1996. She worked with Frakes again on Clockstoppers (2002) and on the Masters of Science Fiction episode "The Discarded" (2007), a teleplay adapted by Harlan Ellison and Josh Olson.

Everton also designed costumes for Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids (2001), as well as Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005) and American Gun (2005). Her 2013 Lifetime television film Anna Nicole drew attention for the transformation of actress Agnes Bruckner into Anna Nicole Smith through an extensive prosthetics and costume process; Everton remarked upon first seeing Bruckner in full costume that she did not recognize the actress at all.

The Craft

Everton met director Andrew Fleming while working on The Abyss and the two struck up a friendship that led to a professional partnership. When Fleming came to make The Craft (1996), he brought Everton on as costume designer with the brief to make the four lead characters look as though they were in The Cure. In her account, Fleming gave her considerable creative latitude.

Everton's approach to the four main characters was to assign each one a loose elemental association as a design anchor. The elemental scheme — Sarah as earth, Bonnie as wind, Rochelle as water, and Nancy as fire — was shared with screenwriter Peter Filardi and confirmed by Everton in interviews. The Catholic school uniform setting initially gave her pause, but she came to see the uniform as an opportunity to embed character within the constraints of a dress code — drawing on her own experience of attending an all-girls boarding school. For Nancy (played by Fairuza Balk), Everton designed the costumes to read as protective armour for a character she described as preemptively rejecting others before they could reject her; the character's low income was reflected in sourcing from low-end outlets, and Everton fabricated pieces — including very likely the character's PVC coat — where multiples of vintage items could not be obtained.

On the first day of shooting, Everton dressed lead actress Robin Tunney's character Sarah in a deliberately nondescript outfit to signal that Sarah had no formed identity yet. The studio reacted badly to the look, and Everton had to defend the choice to a group of executives who arrived at her office. The confrontation resolved once she walked them through how each character would develop through the script. Everton had also wanted Tunney to appear with her natural pixie cut, but the studio required a wig for the role.

Everton has noted that while she intended the costumes to be accessible to teenage girls, she did not anticipate the scale of the film's cultural resonance. She learned of it firsthand at press junkets in Paris, where she found audiences arriving at theatres dressed as the film's characters. Reflecting on the possibility of a remake, she expressed concern about what she saw as a tendency in contemporary productions to over-sexualize female characters, arguing that there are other ways to convey empowerment to young women, and that she had personally avoided projects where female characters were unnecessarily demeaned. She continued her collaboration with Fleming on Dick (1999), for which she researched the early 1970s period by studying issues of Seventeen magazine from the decade and drew on a mixture of dead-stock vintage clothing and original designs — including all of the lead characters' tights, which she dyed to match individual outfits.

Battlestar Galactica

Everton designed the costumes for the Re-imagined Series miniseries, which aired on the Sci Fi Channel in December 2003. The miniseries costume work included the distinctive flight suit, for which Everton selected a mossy green undertone to give the suits a sense of earthiness — a deliberate choice to connect the Colonial pilots visually to the world they had lost. In the same interview, Everton described being drawn to costume work after watching a costume designer age a costume on set, calling it "a whole new art form," and described her primary creative influence as nature, citing its shapes, structures, and colors. The ongoing series' costume design was taken over by Glenne Campbell, while Everton did not continue with the regular run.

References