40,000 crystals. Six-inch heeled boots. A 45-second costume change.
Put them all together and they help to build the fashion of Hairspray Live, NBC's latest live musical production, airing on Wednesday, Dec. 7. Given the colorful and bright '60s fashion we've seen in Hairspray's 1988 and 2007 movies, as well as its stage productions, E! News had to get the scoop from costume designer Mary Vogt on creating the looks for our new Tracy Turnblad (newcomer Maddie Baillio) Ariana Grande's Penny, Derek Hough's Corny Collins and more...
Vogt revealed Ariana Grande took "a real personal interest" in Penny's character, as well as her costume, even refusing the option of having a body double for her fittings due to the pop star's busy schedule. "She just made the time, I don't know how she did it," Vogt said.
And Ariana's fans can expect to see her take a "very nerdy" turn in the production. "When I first heard about Ariana she had just done this Saturday Night Live episode where she had played an intern, and she was so hilarious. I said, oh my god, she's the perfect Penny," Vogt said. "She wanted her to be very nerdy in the beginning and have a real transition at the end. She wears these goofy, long, plaid dresses and on her, it looks adorable because she's so cute. It's impossible not to make her look cute. Impossible!"
Viewers got a sneak peek at Penny's glam makeover during cast's performance at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with Ariana rocking some seriously high boots while dancing to "You Can't Stop the Beat," a feat Vogt was amazed by.
"They're like six inches tall! And they're cheap! I said, 'Are you sure you can dance in these horrible, cheap, tall boots?!! She said, 'Yeah, they're comfortable!' She's really amazing."
"He's just a doll and he knows absolutely everything about dance clothes," Vogt said of Derek Hough, a Dancing With the Stars fan-favorite and Emmy-winning choreographer. "I learned a lot from him about what works for a dancer. He has all these tricks."
For his role as Corny Collins, the cocky dance show host, "A lot of his clothes are metallic stretch," and they "used his tailor" that he's worked with for years that specifically makes dance clothes, Vogt revealed. "His suits are really like an Olympic gymnast outfit, so they're really made very special to him and he's very specific."
And Vogt used Derek to test out the durability of the costumes by asking him to "try to rip his suits." Don't worry, the suits won. "We don't want to be embarrassed," Vogt said with a laugh.
"Jennifer is a beautiful person, she's just beautiful. Everything about Jennifer is beautiful. So you go, well, what can I put on her that will already enhance this beautiful person?" Vogt said of Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, who is playing Motormouth Maybelle and her showstopping yellow jumpsuit. "And I just thought, she can come out looking like the sun. And that's basically what we did."
And for the first time in any adaptation of Hairspray, Motormouth will be wearing pants. "They never did a pantsuit on any of the Motormouth characters, and she does this reveal where she's wearing a police uniform, and I thought, maybe a jumpsuit might be a good thing to help with the reveal, so you don't have to worry about a skirt falling down or hiding a skirt under pants. We'll see how it works!"
"One of my big inspirations for Harvey's ending outfit was I really wanted to do a curvy shape, because he really wanted to look like a woman, not a man in drag," Vogt said, adding that Harvey Fierstein sent her painting and images he looks to for inspiration.
Going for a "curvy Mae West kind of shape," Vogt looked to Fierstein's costume in La Cage aux Folles for direction.
And red was an exclusive color to Edna because of this dress, "Which is too bad because Kristin [Chenoweth] looks great in red!"
With a live show, costume changes have to move super-fast, and Vogt said star Harvey Fierstein, who made the role of Edna famous on Broadway, is "guiding" the costume department on one particularly fast change.
"We have one super-fast change with Harvey, it's a 45-second change, and he's done that 45-second on Broadway like a thousand times, so he's basically helping teach us how to do it, thank god," she said. "He's got a special, quick-change booth that he sets up a certain way."
Of the blonde mother-daughter duo of Velma and Amber Von Tussle, Vogt said the key was to "always" put stars Kristin Chenoweth and Dove Cameron (who also play mother and daughter in Disney Channel's Descendants and are "great pals") in the same color. "They're very similar color tone anyway. They both look good in just about anything, so they're very easy to dress, it's just a matter of what color do they wear in which scenes that doesn't interfere with other characters."
Of the "sweet" Dove, Vogt gushed, "The first time I saw [her], I couldn't believe it. She's just so beautiful...it's impossible to make Dove look bad." She also revealed Dove came to a fitting after a nasty bout of food poisoning. "She looked pale and then suddenly she said, 'I just have to go to the bathroom and throw up, I'll be right back.' She was such a trooper. She's like an angel. Who does that?!"
"We have these wacky dresses that mother and daughter wear when they come out of Hefty Hideaway, and it's this wild Pucci print and we're rhinestoning them with 40,000 rhinestones that have to be hand-glued on," Vogt said of Edna and Tracy's first makeover looks. "We were lucky because Dancing With the Stars just wrapped so we got this wonderful woman who is their rhinestoner, she's individually gluing 40,000 Swarovski crystals on these dresses. She's so fast, it's like watching animation!"
(There were no photos of the dresses with the crystals attached available yet as they were still being made.)
"Our Tracy is absolutely gorgeous, she looks like Elizabeth Taylor," Vogt gushed of newcomer Maddie Baillio, noting she's "very fair, so she doesn't look good in white," leading to more colorful clothing for the live production's version of the iconic character.
"It makes her look washed out, so I put her more in colors. She wears purple, lavender, she has yellow," Vogt said. "She starts off with white and I gave her a bright blue tie to try and give her something. And then she goes into color right away."
And as Tracy starts spending more time with the show's African-American characters, "she starts wearing more of their colors. There's two different color palettes, for the white people and for the African-American people, and Tracy starts going more into their color palette. At the end, everyone starts mixing color palettes."
One potential issue Vogt was initially concerned about was the men's suit pants and if they would rip during the dance numbers, with her friends who worked on Grease: Live informing her pants were "ripping all the time" for them. Fortunately for Hairspray's team, stretch is trendy right now.
"We couldn't use vintage suits because the dancers had to have stretch suits, and for some incredibly lucky thing, stretch suits in a '60s style are very fashionable right now," she said. "We bought a lot from Topshop and Zara. It was great."
If Jordan Fisher's Doody was the breakout star of Grease: Live, viewers can expect to be Googling Ephraim Sykes after his debut as Seaweed.
"When I first did a fitting with him, I was like, oh my god, he's got the most amazing physique. Just incredible," Vogt said. "So we made everything very streamlined to show that off. What's the point of working out at 4 o'clock in the morning if you're not going to show it? [Laughs.] We tailored his clothes to be very fitted and to emphasize that. He's just a doll and a fantastic dancer."
10-year-old Shahadi Wright Joseph is taking on the role of Little Inez, who has a big personality, on and off screen.
"She's so little and it's such a big cast with big personalities I wanted her to really shine. I didn't know that she had such a big personality herself in the beginning," Vogt explained. "So I put her in really bright yellow, things that really show so that she can stand among the others...which I didn't need to do because she stands out anyway!I just wanted to make sure she didn't get lost. I wanted her to pop."
Vogt revealed that all of the main cast's clothes were made by her costume department, while all of the background dancers clothes are "vintage" pieces with various tweaks. "They're vintage, so the trick was to get the vintage clothes to meld with the main clothes," she said. "We dolled up the vintage clothes—dying them, re-doing ribbons."
One of Vogt's favorite parts of working on Hairspray Live! has been the lack of restrictions when it comes to using bright colors and patterns. "It's so colorful," she said. "You don't get a chance to use these kind of colors very often in film and television because they always say, ‘Tone it down, tone it down!'"
And because of the caliber of the cast, Vogt said she also didn't have to worry about the clothes outshining the stars. "They're just so fantastic and with this cast, you can do bright colors because you don't want the clothes to be brighter or bigger than the personality of the actor, and with these actors, it's impossible. It's impossible to make anything brighter than them."
Though Grease: Live aired on a different network (Fox), Vogt said she had friends who worked on that production who have offered her useful advice. "They were incredibly helpful for us in what went wrong for them for us to correct, so that was really fantastic."
PHOTOS: Check out the retro fashion from Grease: Live!