What Queer Eye Teaches Us About Mens Fashion

Lauren Starobin was still enrolled in college earlier this year when her big break came.

In in the heat of lockdown, Starobin — a former dancer — was called with 72 hours notice to create costumes for some of ballet's best-known talents. And in the months since, Starobin has been steadily churning out modernist designs for some of ballet's blue-chip choreographers and dance festivals.

Contemporary designers dedicated to dance costumes are few and far between. Starobin sought out two of the best known — Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung — to apprentice for in her last semester at the Fashion Institute of Technology, with an eye on one day joining their ranks. But she didn't expect it to come so soon.

With both Bartelme and Jung booked on assignments, Starobin was offered to design looks for the taping of a new work by choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who is often thought of as the most prolific dance maker in contemporary ballet today. Ratmansky's pas de deux for American Ballet Theatre principal dancers and internet sensations Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside was filmed at the Joyce Theater, which had sat dark for months during the pandemic.

Starobin's designs for Alexei Ratmansky's video project at the Joyce Theater. Courtesy/Joyce Theater

"I sent them a sketch and they approved it, and then I didn't sleep for three days because I was making the costumes," said Starobin, who created a duo of inky blue and turquoise unitards with geometric mesh panels for the project. The designs kicked off a career she thought would take years to build.

In the time since, Starobin has gone on to book a steady stream of commissions. In July, she made costumes for Whiteside's own choreographic debut at the Vail Dance Festival, devising a fleet of lingerie-inspired costumes for a cast of all-star principal dancers including ABT's Boylston, Devon Teuscher and Cory Stearns and New York City Ballet's Unity Phelan — all dressed in revealing shell-colored underpinnings and mesh separates.

Starobin, who also teaches gyrotonic at dancer haunt Steps on Broadway, learned about close-knit fabrics at FIT, where she took a focus in lingerie design and was ultimately honored with the school's Critics Award. She took this specialization knowing that lingerie materials often cross over with those used for dance costumes. "It seemed like the closest thing that would help you learn a lot about stretch materials and how to put them together," she said.

Starobin's approach to costuming is layered in thoughtfulness — considering choreographic motifs and athleticism, while drawing inspiration from other art disciplines. In each piece she costumes, there are common threads of unusual color palettes, wispy materials and a delicate outlining or framing of the body.

Lauren Starobin's costumes for James Whiteside's lingerie ballet at the Vail Dance Festival. Courtesy/Lauren Starobin

"I take a lot of care in the design process," Starobin said. "I put a lot of focus on the colors and spend hours at the fabric store trying to find the right ones. Especially with James' piece, he wanted a lingerie ballet. It would have been so easy for that to be cheap-looking with blacks and reds. I decided to go with a palette from a Helen Frankenthaler painting — it's hard to strike the right balance."

"The way Lauren can turn work around so quickly astounds me. She can go from sketch to performance in no time. I appreciate the way she incorporates current aesthetics with the necessities of dance costuming. Her work is supple and comfortable to dance in," Whiteside told WWD of Starobin's unique approach to design.

Starobin went on to work with Boylston on costumes for a Ratmansky ballet for the Hamptons Dance Project, performed alongside ABT principal Thomas Forrester. Last month, she partnered with Dance Theatre of Harlem on looks for a new choreographic work by company dancer Sanford Placide, which was staged outside the New York Botanical Garden's lacy conservatory. "There was beautiful arm work. That's why I made these flowy, pretty dresses but wanted to emphasize their arms with mesh paneling," she said of the costumes for Placide's choreography.

On Friday, her next designs will premiere in a piece called "Murmur" for the Kafra Dance Collective, staged at the Upper West Side's Symphony Space theater.

But for Starobin, this has been a long time coming. "As a dancer, I was the type looking in the mirror every five seconds fixing my outfit to get the right angle of where the waistband sat. I cared a lot about the sartorial aspect of being a dancer," she said. "I'd say I'm just obsessed with clothes and the body so it just sort of manifested this way."