Dressing the Stars
Costume designer Cathy Smith has opened the Museum of Western Film & Costume in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Emmy-award winning costume designer Cathy Smith has worked on Hollywood projects for decades and was shocked to discover there was no museum solely dedicated to film and television costumes. So she started her own.
Smith opened the Museum of Western Film & Costume within the Nambe Trading Post, which she owns, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The grand opening was March 1, but it promptly closed again on March 10 after the ongoing health crisis kicked into gear. But now with travel once again resuming for many, the museum is back open and ready to show off its collection.
“Everything is from my personal collection. When we were starting to get everything together we went through a 28-foot trailer packed with costumes. We picked the cream of the crop,” Smith says, adding that her daughter Jennifer Jesse Smith is the museum’s curator. “The costumes are often quite intricate and expensive, and often times the [studio] could not afford to buy them, so I would make them and then rent them out, which allowed me to keep them. Other times the studios would auction them off, and I would buy them.”
Her collection includes pieces from more than 40 different projects she’s worked on, including Dances With Wolves,
Kevin Costner’s 1990 Oscarwinning film that brought renewed interest in stories about Native Americans. Smith worked on the film and helped create many of the costumes, including Graham Greene’s quilled war shirt. The year after she worked on Dances With Wolves, Smith won an
Emmy for her work on the 1991 TV miniseries Son of the Morning Star, which offers two perspectives of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Other projects represented include Longmire, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Comanche Moon, The Missing and many others.
Smith, who grew up among the Cheyenne River Sioux in
South Dakota, says she continues to work as a consultant on a number of productions. “Sometimes the movies don’t care about authenticity—maybe because the director has a design or vision in mind—but we like to come in and help educate them about the authenticity of these costumes,” Smith says.
Museum of Western Film & Costume currently features 20 mannequins with complete costumes, as well as movie posters, props, original scripts and other materials. For information about the museum and Nambe Trading Post, visit www.nambetradingpost.com.