Inside the Fashion of Grease: Live
Grease: Live is bringing the iconic '50s-set musical to the small screen on Sunday, Jan. 31. E! News spoke to costume designer William Ivey Long, along with stars Julianne Hough, Vanessa Hudgens, and more, and they spilled all the behind-the-scenes secrets about their favorite candy-colored '50s looks.
Sandy
Julianne Hough helped design Sandy's cheerleader look. "I think she likes it because it's very alive, and she was part of the creation. It is so sweet and oddly very sexy, and I say oddly because it's not form-fitting. She picked the sweater," Long dishes. "She is a trained [dancer] so she really knew what she needed."
Sexy Sandy
The tight black look that Sandy wears at the end of the show is a total recreation of the look Albert Wolsky designed for the Grease movie. "The final look is 100 percent his. My version of his, but that's his. Most of the rest of it we've done variations on a theme, but the final look I call my homage to Albert Wolsky," says Long. "I copied it exactly. I told him I was doing it!"
Rizzo
"As soon as I had my first fitting for the first photo shoot that we did, I put on my pencil skirt and threw on my pixie wig and everything changed," says Vanessa Hudgens, who plays Rizzo. Long says Rizzo wears mostly black (or black and purple or black and red), and that she has a "very sophisticated look. Her collar is always up. She rocks the pencil skirt."
Shades of Pink
Don't adjust your TV screens! The color of the Pink Ladies' jackets is slightly brighter than in the movie. "It's a slightly different pink, a Schiaparelli pink," says Long.
"Freddy My Love"
Marty's song is back in the show, and Keke Palmer calls her beautiful gown in the scene her "Cinderella moment." Explains Long, "We have a magical moment. She walks through the wall and she's in another world singing to the USO...she changes from one look, walks through the wall and is miraculously in another look, and then she walks back and is back again in the original look."
Pencil Skirts
"[Carly Rae Jepsen] and I figured out that Frenchy was the most fashion-forward in the '50s," Long says of the beauty school dropout. She wears lots of pencil skirts, and "she's the only one wearing an absolutely vintage, 100 percent real bullet bra."
Tight Jeans
"If you think about blue jeans in the 1950s, they were called dungarees. They were work clothes and they weren't tight-fitting," Long says. "We want the guys to be really sexy dudes so they're tighter fitting. And all the ladies' dresses I've made a little tighter-fitting, a little more body-conscious."
Jan
"You can tell that her mother won't let her go out of the house unless she's wearing a blouse, a sweater and a pleated skirt, but Jan decides how to wear them," Long says of the Pink Lady, played by Kether Donohue.
The Leather Jacket
The T-Birds had to wear leather jackets that would allow them to move and dance. As for the famous logo, "I've hand painted [each jacket], but I started with a stencil," Long reveals.
The Perfect Fit
"They brought us a rack with, like, I don't know, 50 or 60 jackets," says Carlos PenaVega, who plays Kenickie. "We just tried them on. It was kind of like the slipper in Cinderella—it was like 'Oh, this is it. This one fits. This is the one.'"
Norman Rockwell
Long's color palette was inspired by Norman Rockwell. "You have to have those wonderful colors because otherwise Danny Zuko and his crowd and the Pink Ladies can't be the rebels," he says. "You have to have a general palette of normal against which you see the T-Birds, the Scorpions and the Pink Ladies."