Queen of Soul’s fashion revealed humanity
Designer reimagined Franklin’s iconic looks for the film ‘Respect’
Wrapping up a Zoom chat about his costume design work for “Respect,” Clint Ramos fields a hypothetical question: After learning all that he did about the late Queen of
Soul for the project, would he have wanted to work in real life for Aretha Franklin?
The Tony winner, who reimagined some of Franklin’s iconic looks for the movie opening, answers with a firm yes.
“She understood her sensuality, she understood her body and she was unapologetic about that,” says Ramos. “To me, that would have been such an honor to create something for a woman who actually understands that (about) herself. It would have been amazing, a life-changing experience.”
Starring Jennifer Hudson, “Respect” chronicles the iconic diva’s rise from a choir singer for her father — the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), a legend in his own right — to a superstar with a profound voice in terms of both music and social activism.
As a figure beloved and admired by fans across the globe, Franklin used fashion as a form of personal expression. She wasn’t always perfect, but she dressed in a way that was true to herself and her own emotional landscape.
“More than any other music icon, Aretha to me really exemplified how clothing really expressed the way she was feeling ... what she was experiencing as a human being, what she was experiencing on a spiritual level and what she was experiencing on a political level,” says Ramos.
“And I say this because on every photograph you see of Aretha, it doesn’t
matter what she’s wearing. It doesn’t matter who she’s wearing. There’s always a humanity that you see.”
Ramos is still somewhat new to the world of movies, but he brings to it an impressive background in theater. A five-time Tony nominee, he made Broadway history in 2016 by becoming the first person of color to win for costume design for his work in “Eclipsed,” the acclaimed drama starring Lupita Nyong’o and written by her “Black Panther” co-star Danai Gurira.
His Broadway credits include “Slave Play,” the provocative drama by Jeremy O. Harris; the musical “Once on This Island”; “Sunday in the Park With George” starring Jake Gyllenhaal; “Burn This” with Adam Driver and Keri Russell; and “Six Degrees of Separation” featuring Allison Janney.
Ramos is currently nominated for two Tonys for the 2019-20 season: one for scenic design for “Slave Play” and one for costume design for “The Rose Tattoo.” The ceremony will air Sept. 26 on CBS.
The multitasker, who’s also a professor of design at Fordham University and a committed activist for inclusion and equity in the arts, was born in the Philippines and moved to New York to get his master’s degree at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
His first awareness of Franklin was as a child listening to her songs at home. “My mother, she’s 80 years old, so in truth that was her era of music. We played a lot of Aretha over the years.”
Ramos never got to meet Franklin before her death in 2018 in Detroit or to see her perform live in concert.
“The closest (I got) was the inauguration, but I was so far away. I was just watching a big screen,” say Ramos, who was in Washington, D.C., for President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and saw Franklin’s stirring performance of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
He came on board the “Respect” team after working previously with the movie’s director, Liesl Tommy, on “Eclipsed.”
Ramos did an intensive amount of research for the film and read “all of the biographies not only of Aretha but of the whole family, C.L. and everything, and really plunged into that whole world.”
He also studied the styles that were popular in the eras portrayed in “Respect,” particularly in Black communities. He went to African American churches and combed through their
photo archives, paying close attention to things like specific fabric shades because much of Franklin’s early life was documented by black-and-white photos and film clips.
After absorbing the texts and visual information on Franklin, Ramos says it then became a matter of “figuring out what was not in the words or the pictures.”
He thinks Franklin spoke volumes with her clothing in a different way than glamorous contemporaries like Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick. Whether she was wearing a chic gown or was casually dressed with no makeup, she let her humanity and her strong sense of self shine through her designer labels.
“In everything, you saw the human being behind the clothing,” says Ramos, noting Franklin could reveal both vulnerability and a sense of defiance with her clothing.
According to Ramos, Franklin conveyed a realness, or, as he puts it, a certain “I will move the way I move and you will capture me. The photograph will be whatever it will be, but I will not be posed.”
As a famous consumer of designer clothes, Franklin also stood up for women with curves, who were mostly ignored in past decades by the top fashion houses.
Says Ramos: “Way before we all were conscious about sizeism, she went after Calvin Klein and Valentino and told them, ‘You need to make bigger clothes.’ And I loved that, and that was ... in the ’70s or early ’80s.”
Franklin’s commitment to civil rights also was expressed through her style. “You can track when she started wearing the
Afro with her decision to actually say, ‘Hey, Dad, I’m going to go further than you in terms of your social justice activism, I’m going to go further left,’ ” says Ramos.
He thinks people need to learn more about her activism because “more than (any) other person in her position and a woman in her position during that period of time, Aretha was the most activist of all of them.”
According to Ramos, he prepared about 85 costumes for Hudson to wear as Franklin, following the original script.
More than 50 wound up being used. Some outfits in the movie are his vision of what Franklin would wear. Others pay homage to well-known looks from her life that “had taken on an iconic, semiotic meaning.”
Ramos says his approach to cinema is similar to his stage philosophy. It is never just style for style’s sake.
His goal is to convey character and contribute to the story with his costumes.
“For me, a costume is not only a piece of clothing, but it’s literally a container for a human life,” he says.