WOMEN WE LOVE: Costume Designer Shirley Kurata

Exuberant L.A. native costume designer Shirley Kurata is known for her eclectic and absurdist work on the global sensation Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned her a Best Costume Design nomination at the 2023 Academy Awards. We're here to unpack what in Kurata’s career led her to work on The Daniels’s Oscar-winning project and her current work, such as costume designing for Boots Riley’s newly-released I Love Boosters.

Born in 1970s Los Angeles, Kurata grew up in Monterey Park with her three older siblings and her parents, who owned a laundromat. Growing up, she was influenced by the Japanese-American community and the 1980s layered, colorful, and baggy fashion trends. Around her 18th birthday, she purchased a pair of oversized round-framed glasses from L.A. Eyeworks, which later became a signature feature of her personal style. 

Moving to Paris at 19 to study fashion at Studio Berçot, Kurata’s eyes were opened up to the experimental possibilities of high fashion and launched her career swiftly from there. Building her reputation through styling work for photographers such as Autumn de Wilde, the director of the 2020 Emma., as well as other editorial and commercial work, Kurata’s name began to generate some buzz. As a wardrobe stylist, Kurata transferred her bold pattern mixing and color choices onto blended vintage and designer pieces. Her client list grew exponentially, including Billie Eilish, Zooey Deschanel, and Pharrell Williams.

Kurata’s intentionality and maximalist aesthetic really got their chance to shine in the Daniels’ sOscar-winning global phenomenon, Everything Everywhere All at Once. She made costume choices driven by her history and the characters, imbuing incredibly intricate layers of meaning and even humor into each piece. She preserved the distinction of each multiverse world through careful costume and color selection, allowing her visual aesthetics to create visible patterns for viewers to follow across the film.

Kurata’s careful attention to detail with each character makes it hard to choose a favorite, but one of Stephanie Hsu’s most iconic costumes stands out among the rest. The combination of all Jobu’s prior costumes works both narratively and symbolically, allowing for various psychological states and universes to collide and synthesize into one coherent and yet conflicting outfit. This works as an allegory for her relationship with her mom, Michelle Yeoh’s character, who has a simpler but equally emblematic wardrobe. Kurata explicitly describes finding Yeoh’s Chinese New Year party sweater in L.A.’s Chinatown. She did not even have to alter it. In an interview with SlashFIlm, she describes it as "something a mom or a grandma would wear, but punk," and "giv[ing] credit to all immigrant parents that have [started a business],” because "there’s an element of punk rock to that."

An equally bold and eccentric storyteller, Boots Riley’s collaboration with Shirley Kurata on his new film, I Love Boosters, makes perfect sense. With her dedication to finding, refurbishing, and reusing, as well as inventing something new altogether as demonstrated in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Riley’s movie thematizes something near and dear to her practice. In an interview with CNN, Kurata describes focusing on characterization through costume, bouncing from the "resourceful element" of Corvette, creating a top from athletic tube socks and a skirt from men’s ties, to punk for Mariah and "streetwear inspired" for Sade. She hoped this attention to detail and fashion rule-breaking would help bolster the film’s message and "energize and rally people to unite."

Kurata really brings a unique vision to every project and person she styles. Make sure to go check out her revolutionary costuming work for yourself by watching I Love Boosters, now in theatres!