Costume designer’s dream film pursuit

LOS ANGELES

It’s a costume designer’s dream: outfitting A-listers for one of the year’s most anticipated movies.

For Sharen Davis, it came true twice.

Miss Davis created the dazzling dresses in “Dreamgirls” and the drab, down-and-out suits in “The Pursuit of Happyness” — at the same time. Both films opened this month with Golden Globe and Oscar buzz behind them.

However, Miss Davis, who earned an Oscar nod two years ago for her work in “Ray,” isn’t thinking about awards. Her mind’s still buzzing about a year’s work that included her most beloved — and most difficult — projects yet.

For “Dreamgirls,” she built 120 dresses from the ground up. She envisioned the colors, styles, fabric, hair and makeup for the ever-changing looks of the Dreamettes, a singing trio played by Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Anika Noni Rose. Miss Davis also designed dozens of flashy suits for Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy, taking the characters through the swinging ‘60s and into the disco-drenched ‘70s.

In “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Will Smith plays an often-homeless aspiring stockbroker whose entire wardrobe dangles from a hanger he carries with him everywhere. For this film, set in the early 1980s, Miss Davis says she had to limit Mr. Smith’s costumes to “four suits, eight shirts, six ties.”

When she wasn’t searching for “the dullest Members Only jacket I could find,” she was sketching the colorful dresses in “Dreamgirls.”

“It actually expanded me,” says Miss Davis, 49. “I got to do the balance of both worlds, this high-glam world to this very low-end world. It was inspiring to do both at once.”

What Miss Davis calls inspiring would be enough to drive most designers crazy, says Kevin Jones, costume historian for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.

The two movies call for opposite wardrobe techniques: from dreary and spare to colorful and over the top, from limited costume changes to new looks for each scene.

“In either situation, your creativity is working on all cylinders,” Mr. Jones says. “You either have too much to deal with or too little. To do them simultaneously and compartmentalize, you have to be an incredibly organized individual and have a great team working behind you.”

Whereas costumes define the characters in “Dreamgirls,” they’re little more than background in “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Miss Davis says.

She designed each of Mr. Smith’s four suits for the film. As for Jaden Smith, Mr. Smith’s real-life son, who plays alongside him in the movie, Miss Davis had his puffy jacket custom made, but she stuck to the dullest color palette she could.

“To underplay the ‘80s is a real task,” she says, adding that she had to fight her natural attraction to fabulous fashions.

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