Mitchell Travers knew the world of In the Heights—for seven years, he actually lived in it. So when the costume designer (Hustlers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and former Washington Heights resident signed on to the Jon M. Chu-directed movie-musical, the first thing he did was go back. “I’d go up and photograph things that I saw on the street; I’d try to go into a hair salon, nail salon, clothing shops—a great give and take with the neighborhood because I would be up there shopping,” he says. Waiting in line with a pile of clothes, he’d look at the cashier’s outfit, the jewelry worn by the woman in front of him, the passersby. Travers did this morning, noon, and night; he’d see people going to church on a weekend and people “coming home from the club” over the same day.
It’s one big reason why the film, now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, manages to ring authentic while also selling the escapist fantasy key to any Hollywood musical. Travers’ designs keep each character firmly rooted in the real world, before popping their looks to make each personality immediately shine. He worked off the songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s original musical, too, to keep everything in-tune.
“That staccato rhythm that Lin has with spoken word, on top of samba and these musical styles that we’ve come to know from the neighborhood and expect from Lin—I tried to do a spin on that with the visual, this odd flash of influence,” Travers says. “I was fascinated by the idea of [setting] up a neighborhood that feels both realistic and musical at the same time. There’s always that moment where a character breaks out into song on camera, that you need to invite the audience into a world in which that’s possible.”
Travers exclusively shared two costume sketches with Vanity Fair that indicate his character-building process. “In the Heights…was about using color in a way that makes sense across large swaths of people versus just the specifics of one individual character,” he explains. Travers took fabric pieces, color chips, magazine clippings, and his street-wear photographs, breaking them all into character-based collages.
The above sketch, featuring protagonist Usnavi’s fast-talking cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) and his right-hand man Graffiti Pete (Noah Catala), embodies that cinematic approach to costume design: “I was really excited to find that Champion hoodie”—Travers chopped the sleeves off himself—“and the graphics on Sonny’s t-shirt felt kinetic to me, which was always something I was looking for in the design. I wanted your eyes to move on as you look through all of our shots, because I wanted to find that same rhythm [as] the music.” As to why these look different from a typical Hollywood-movie costume outline: “Normally when you see a costume sketch, it’s a woman in a corset or a man in a perfectly tailored period suit…. I really loved the fact that [In the Heights] allows you to do shredded denim, Air Force 1s, graffiti.”
The sketch at the top of this article, meanwhile, pairs the romantic couple of Benny (Corey Hawkins) and Nina (Leslie Grace), the latter of whom has just returned to New York for the summer after her first year at Stanford University. Travers reflects Nina’s bittersweet homecoming—struggling to find herself in such different environments—through evolutions in her design: “I tried to use a tremendous amount of knit to reflect the anxiety…over the course of the film, [we changed] up the scale and how tightly knit everything was,” Travers says. “By the end, she’s in this open, sort of a ’70s crochet…and you’re starting to see what’s underneath. It’s an opening up, a blossoming.” As for Benny, he’s wearing a classic look that harkens back to the original stage production: “I did feel a responsibility to the Broadway fans. I wanted them to feel like this is still your Benny…just a little different this time.”
That sentiment goes for Travers’s approach to the film as a whole. “The idea of a contemporary musical is an enormous challenge…you want it to feel trendy, but you also have to acknowledge [its history],” he explains. “It was a real tightrope for me…. [The original musical] was a reflection of what was happening at that time. I felt, in fairness to our film, that this should be a reflection of what was happening now.”
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