Interview With Costume Designer Luke Reichle

We recently caught up with Luke Reichle, costume designer extraordinaire for Castle. Luke has spent nearly  three decades in fashion, designing for film, theater and television, as well as creating red-carpet looks for the stars. His new book, Style Secrets of the Red Carpet, will be out this spring. (We’ll keep you posted on the date!) Luke talked with us about the evolving styles of the Castle characters, the episode he’s most proud of, and the most important piece of fashion advice for all of us.

How do you prepare for a new season or episode of Castle?

“The season we prepare a little differently, because we have seven recurring characters. At the beginning of the year, I’ll have a couple of fittings with each character to start putting together their closets for the season. We look at what’s been designed in the past, what the direction of the characters has been. And with the guidance of the show’s creators, we see where we want to take the characters visually in the coming year.

“As we get into the episodes, each one is really driven by the script. We shoot scripts in eight days, so we will have eight days of prep for the script. We’ll have a concept meeting for that script, where the writers and director and producers and all of the department heads will meet to discuss the specifics of the story and what’s going to be needed. Then, I will have a meeting with the director separately to discuss the concepts of the costumes for the episode. And then we’ll get going.

“As casting comes in, we will start shopping and building costumes for the characters, doing fittings, and getting things ready for the shoot date.”

When you’re working on a show like Castle, where a lot of the action takes place at work, how do you stay true to their professions while also making it fashionable?

“It’s a matter of going with the personality of the character and then what the actor brings to it. All of the actors have their own personalities, as well. For instance, this year I made a big effort to take Esposito and Ryan’s clothes in a different direction, so that they could be more visually distinct from one another. We looked at Esposito and his backstory, and the fact that Jon [Huertas] himself is a former Special Ops soldier. We took that tougher kind of look and put a little bit more street into his costumes. With Seamus, we went in a direction that has a little bit more fashion sense to it, with some traditional elements. His cuts are very contemporary.

“The challenge is that you have all of these people working in the same place. You want to be able to distinguish them one from another character-wise. There’s the challenge of color, because there’s certain colors you don’t want to use in the environment because they’ll blend in. It’s like creating a painting in that you want each element to have its distinction, but you don’t want it to be not part of the whole.”

Not to play favorites, but is there a character you most enjoy designing for?

“Typically I probably would, but not really, because the great thing about this show is that everybody’s different, so you get to do a lot of different designs. I think that some people would say Martha must be your favorite character to design because she’s so outrageous, her clothes are so colorful and her accessories are so wild. But the truth is it’s having Susan Sullivan, who’s an amazing actress, to pull off all of that stuff.

“Among this ensemble, you have this ebb and flow of design, so that it’s great to really work for a while on developing Nathan’s look, because we make all of Nathan’s clothes. We make all of his shirts, all of his suits, all his coats, all of his shoes. And Stana is a completely different approach, because we make and shop for her. Her things come from a wide range of vendors. We’re not stuck in a ‘Prada or nothing’ mindset. I have fun doing all of it.”

We’re glad you mentioned Martha, because we’re a little bit obsessed with her look. What’s great about her is that she looks so sophisticated but also like someone you really want to hang out with.

“Oh yeah, totally. She’s a New York actress, and having been in New York for my entire fashion career, most of my friends during that time were theater people. So it’s someone I kind of felt like I knew. And again, Susan brings so much to the role, and she’s so brave. She is really brave and willing to go out on that visual limb. It takes someone really special to be able to pull off those kind of costumes, and have it not look like a costume.”

Because it just looks like her. That’s really what she would wear in the kitchen to have orange juice with Castle in the morning.

“Right. The gold lamé. [Laughs] And four pounds of turquoise jewelry.”

Beckett’s style definitely seems to have evolved over time. As her relationship with Castle changes, how is that affecting her look?

“Beckett is really the visual pivot in a lot of ways. Women change more than men. So Castle’s look is very established in a way. It’s versions of the same thing. Whereas Beckett’s look really can change more and more. The thing we like to keep in front of us in terms of her look, and designing her look, is this idea of strength balanced with fragility and a vulnerability that makes her very appealing. You can go all hardcore cop look on her, because it doesn’t really work with her character, and it makes her look too hard. And you can’t go all fluffy girl on her, because it looks silly within the context of the story. So it’s a great opportunity to practice the craft of balance while pushing the envelope. We definitely push the envelope with her, especially with her heels.”

What about Esposito and Lanie? Will we be seeing some fashion transformations now that their relationship has been exposed? Lanie had that one great dress a few episodes back…

“Nothing like an evening dress in the morgue. [Laughs] The thing I love about that dress, it was all silver and blue sequins that mirrored all the stainless steel she worked with—the stainless steel table, the stainless steel cabinets, and the stainless steel drawers. So I put her in that to kind of play off of the environment she works in every day. There’s definitely more coming up. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but you’ll definitely be seeing more of that kind of thing.”

Is there an episode or a moment from Castle that you feel most proud of fashion-wise?

“Well, certainly the fourth episode of the season, which was called ‘Punk’d,’ was a fabulous opportunity, design-wise. It was a storyline that led them to a Steam Punk club, and Steam Punks dress in these hopped-up version of Edwardian clothes and accessorize with all sorts of weird contraptions. So it was like being able to do a period movie inside a contemporary episode of television. The great thing about it is that even Castle himself ended up dressed in the Steam Punk clothing. And they had a fabulous scene with Castle and Alexis when she’s talking about being in love and he has this mechanical arm on and can’t quite get it under control. Very Castle. And Nathan’s such a spectacular guy. It’s such a pleasure to work with this cast.”

Tell us a little bit about your new book, Style Secrets of the Red Carpet.

“It’s basically a Hollywood insider’s guide to dressing with ease, power and maximum oomph. I started writing it several years ago when I was on Without a Trace, and when I first started writing it, it was going to be a ‘how to be your own celebrity stylist’ kind of guide. And the more I started writing it, something else started to emerge, which was this idea of dressing from the inside out. I’ve spent almost thirty years looking at people in the mirror and seeing what they see and listening to what they say about their bodies. What I find is that we as a species have an image problem, and when we look in the mirror we don’t see what’s there. We focus on what we don’t like. And so the first section of the book is called ‘It’s Not About the Clothes.’ It really addresses how you view yourself, what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror, and how to get to a place where you can look in the mirror and love what you see.

“And the second part of the book is ‘Everyday Dressing the Hollywood Way.’ That’s really an adaptation of what I do every day as a costume designer into a system that anyone can use.  I get a lot of people coming up to me saying, ‘What do I wear? I don’t know what to wear.’ So I developed this system of dressing where you look at your life like a movie. The same way I have to figure out what an actor is going to wear in a movie or a show, I break down their life into scenes – see what their action is, where they have to go to inform what I need to put in their closets. And it’s that process that I take to the readers.”

Do you have a fashion motto, mantra, or rule of thumb that anyone can follow?

“If I were to have to say the single biggest mistake people make is that they buy the wrong size. The idea of ‘I’ll buy it and then I’ll fit into it later’ is not going to do anything for your peace of mind. Really, the main concept of the book is dress the body you have instead of waiting until you’re ten pounds lighter, twenty pounds lighter, you’ve got your hair the right color, you’ve finished your Pilates program. Buy the size you are, dress the body you have.”

Source: here