The disaster had just subsided when Denise Andres learned she’d been nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the HBO drama “The Gilded Age.” 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. Andres, the show’s costume supervisor and 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 recalled.
“And our assistant production manager said, ‘Oh, you guys got nominated for an Emmy.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And I started crying.” Andres, who has homes in Wakefield and Brooklyn, was nominated for "Outstanding Period Costumes for a Series" for the Season 2 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 has 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 decided to come back for at least one more season. An Emmy would be icing on the cake.
“And so even getting nominated is great and joyful,” she says. When Andres came to URI from Providence’s Classical High School in the early 1970s, a career working in a costume shop for theater, TV 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 interest by getting 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,” says Andres. “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.” It’s been a career in which she has never wanted for work, she says. Even while at URI, she worked summer stock at the American Stage Festival in New Hampshire.
After graduating, she worked in theaters around Rhode Island, including supervising costume shops for Trinity Repertory Company and the Berkshire Theater Festival. Andres moved to New York in the late 1970s encouraged by designers she worked with in summer stock. She has lived in the New York metropolitan area since raising her two children in Montclair, New Jersey, and moving back into the city 11 years ago.
Among her TV and film credits, she has mostly served as a costumes supervisor. It’s a combination of the creative, logistical and administrative – working closely with designers, hiring the costume crew, setting up the shop, handling the budget and renting and inventorying costumes from more than a dozen vendors on the west coast and Europe. 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. The job, says Andres, who was “itching” to get it, is challenging, mainly because of schedule changes, movement and logistics. “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%.
” Aside from “The Gilded Age,” one of her favorite jobs was working as wardrobe supervisor for the last two seasons of “The Sopranos.” “It was crazy,” she says. “Jim Gandolfini was a lovely man, very generous.
It was very sad that he passed away. But the show was like you’re working on a project where the material is so good and the actors are so good ..
. it was exciting.” “Shutter Island” gave her a chance to work with Martin Scorsese and three-time Oscar winning designer Sandy Powell – and again three years later on “The Wolf of Wall Street.
” She says the professionalism and prestige that both brought to each project elevated everyone. “‘Shutter Island’ was a fantastic experience to work on such a big film,” she said. “For me it was great working with Sandy.
She’s a brilliant designer. We actually ended up renting a house together. It was really a wonderful, special experience.
” Others high on her list include 2009’s “Taking Woodstock” and 2013’s “The Immigrant,” where she got to meet and interact with Joaquin Phoenix and work with Patricia Norris, the late renowned costume designer. “It was a really lovely little job,” she says. “It was a very low-budget film but it was a beautiful job.
It was the kind of job where we didn’t have a lot of resources, but we were able to create a really beautiful film.” “The Gilded Age” ranks right up there, she says, because of the show’s team. “It’s all about the people and the common goals,” says Andres.
“Our production is so supportive and they have an open door policy and will hear us out on all matters.” With her team, she’ll be going to the Emmy Awards ceremonies for the first time. The 76th Emmy Creative Arts Awards are tonight at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
(The 76th Emmy Awards telecast is Sept. 15. on ABC.
) “We are all very excited,” she says. “Universal and HBO are flying us out and putting us up for two nights.” What will the costume supervisor wear to the Emmys? A gown from Saks Fifth Avenue, Andres says.
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