UMass Boston

An unexpected assignment at her daughter’s high school led the UMass Boston alumna from economic development into costume design.

In a New York black box theater, West Texas had to hold up at close range.

Susan Yanofsky ’92, the production’s costume designer, could not rely on distance to disguise clothes that looked too new. The audience would be sitting near the actors, close enough to examine the fabric and notice the wear. She was able to age and distress the costumes, but the boots required something more: dust that would rise when the actors stamped their feet.

To create that effect, she had the performers apply powder to their boots.

“The audience doesn’t necessarily notice the dust coming off their boots, but they feel like they’re in West Texas,” Yanofsky said.

Yanofsky has spent years attending to details like these, dressing characters for productions in Massachusetts, Dallas, New York, and Dublin. Her credits range from Othello and Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. The work draws on her sewing skills, her knowledge of theater, and the questions she learned to ask as a political science student at UMass Boston.

Costume design had never figured in her career plans. Her work in economic development included serving as Westwood’s economic development officer, consulting independently, and directing economic development for Lexington. At home, she sewed her children’s Halloween costumes but carefully avoided volunteering for school productions.

That arrangement held until her daughter’s high school began preparing West Side Story. The costumes needed rescuing, and her daughter had assured the school that her mother could help.

“Mom, it’s a disaster,” her daughter told her. “You have to go in and help them.”

Yanofsky brought pieces from her vintage clothing collection and began fixing costumes, paying particular attention to young women who did not wear standard sizes. The way their figures were discussed bothered her. She wanted them treated respectfully and dressed in clothes that worked for their bodies.

“The criticism should be aimed at the clothing and the manufacturer, not your body,” she said. “It’s not your problem.”

The school kept asking her back. By the end of the year, she had been invited to take over the costume program.

She agreed, but with one stipulation: the costume shop would be a classroom, and students would learn to make what they wore onstage.

“I was not going to be this person who came into a high school, an academic setting, and did everything for the kids,” she said. “This was going to be a ‘teach you’ moment.”

Yanofsky recruited students to help and secured a town grant to bring in professionals to teach them. At the town’s request, she opened the workshops to the public, drawing participants from local theater companies. One subsequently asked her to costume a show.

“That was my first professional show, and we won an award,” she said.

More productions followed. For at least a decade, she maintained both careers. Economic development work often meant community meetings that lasted until 10 p.m. Afterward, she might hurry to a theater to catch an actor after rehearsal for a fitting. Weekends filled with costume work.

“Honestly, I still don’t know how I did it,” she said.

Wanting a more thorough education in the theory behind her work, she stopped consulting in economic development and enrolled at The Lir, Trinity College Dublin’s National Academy of Dramatic Art. She was in her late 50s when she returned to school. In 2019, she earned an MFA in stage design, majoring in costume design and minoring in dramaturgy.

There, a production of X posed a question: What would people living on a research station on Pluto actually wear? Yanofsky saw little reason to put them in conventional spacesuits indoors. The station was their home, after all, and she imagined they would want to be comfortable there.

“At the end of the day, we all want to put on sweats,” she said. “A lot of the language in the play was about the loss of nature, the loss of trees and plants. To me, the fabrics needed to feel natural, because that’s what these characters would be craving.”

She chose linen and pursued comfortable, androgynous designs, resisting the form-fitting outfits often assigned to women in science fiction. Individual details distinguished the characters: insignia on the station leader’s costume, for instance, conveyed his attachment to rank.

Questions about gender, authority, and social expectations connected her design work to her earlier studies. At UMass Boston, Yanofsky had interned at the Democratic State Committee, worked at the Massachusetts State House, and served in student government. Her liberal arts education taught her to look beyond a reference image and ask who would have worn those clothes—and why.

“Having had a liberal arts education allows you not just to say, ‘Here’s the resource material, and here’s what this dress looks like,’ but to ask who would be wearing it,” she said. “For me, it’s really important to understand the why of why they’re wearing that.”

That scrutiny can also lead her away from historical dress. When she designed Les Liaisons Dangereuses at Theatre Three in Dallas during the #MeToo movement, she and director Tiffany Nicole Greene chose contemporary clothes. They wanted the play’s sexual manipulation and exploitation to feel uncomfortably familiar.

“When you create a period piece, people are able to frame it and say, ‘That was then. That’s not us now,’” she said. “There’s a separation the audience can make and therefore not see themselves reflected in it.”

Such decisions must also survive practical constraints. Yanofsky studies scripts to calculate the time available for costume changes. A shirt and vest might be sewn together to go on at once; an elaborate outfit might require special rigging. Budgets can force further revisions.

Her work has earned costume design awards from the Eastern Massachusetts Association of Community Theater for Side Show, Ragtime, and Lend Me a Tenor. Safe at Home, for which she designed costumes, won D Magazine’s 2024 Best of Big D award for Theater Production.

Despite her numerous accolades, Yanofsky measures success by how the clothes serve the performance.

“If somebody walks out of a show and says, ‘Wow, those costumes were really good,’ I almost feel like you might have failed,” she said. “You want them to feel like they enjoyed the entire experience—that it worked, that it was cohesive.”

Sometimes that requires anticipating what audiences bring with them. While designing The Birds, she knew some theatergoers would picture Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, in her pale green suit and blond updo. Yanofsky made sure to echo that familiar image before allowing the stage production to move beyond it.

She recognized the approach from politics: begin by understanding the people you hope to reach.

“You sort of meet people where they are,” she said, “and then coax them into the story.”