Exclusive: How Costume Designer Angelina Kekich Found the 'Perfect Pink' For GREASE: RISE OF THE PINK LADIES

This spring, audiences went back to Rydell High for Rise of the Pink Ladies, the new Grease prequel series on Paramount+.

The musical series takes place four years before the original “Grease.” In 1954, before rock ‘n’ roll ruled, before the T-Birds were the coolest in the school, four fed-up outcasts dare to have fun on their own terms, sparking a moral panic that will change Rydell High forever.

Of course, a new Grease series wouldn't be complete without its iconic costumes!

We sat down with Angelina Kekich, who set the tone for the new series by designing the costumes for the first three episodes of the season, to discuss how she put her own spin on these iconic looks. Plus, check out exclusive photos of never-before-seen costume sketches!

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I want to go back to when you were first approached to do the series. What was your first impression of the project?

So Vancouver has a really small film community and I had heard rumors that The Rise of the Pink Ladies, the prequel, was coming to town. I had called my agent, Ralph, and I'm like, "Is this real? Is The Rise of the Pink Ladies coming to town? Like this is Grease." I remember saying to Ralph, I'm like, "You need to get me an interview on this project."

The next thing I knew, I was putting this presentation and pitch together to the creator and showrunner, Annabel Oakes and producer, director, Alethea Jones. When I got the opportunity to chat with them, they had so much passion and excitement for this project that I'd became super excited with and the next thing I knew, my pitch, my presentation gets said chosen by the studio and all of a sudden here I am having this opportunity to design the pilot, set the tone and the look of the series and I just became really excited and super honored to have this ability to you come in design The Rise of the Pink Ladies.

As we know, generations, including myself, have loved Grease throughout the decades and we're just about to celebrate 50 years of Grease first hitting the Eden Theatre. It's an iconic musical piece from a theatre production to a major film piece and it has a stamp in pop culture and also has a really strong influence in fashion all over the world and by major fashion designers. So all of that is really important.

I've had so many opportunities to design post-apocalyptic, I've worked with Stephen Spielberg and Stephen King. This was an opportunity to show my theater side because that's where I come from and do this explosion of color and silhouettes and have fun and show that side of my costume design.

You mentioned how much of an impact Grease has had on pop culture and just the fashion industry in general. Did you feel a certain amount of pressure going into this? How did you deal with that?

Of course, it was important. First of all, I immersed myself into the 1950s. I spent a lot of time researching 1950s fashion trends, magazines. My favorite was the Sears catalog, Home and Family magazines. We researched original 1950's patterns for women and men and looked at original footage, clips, photo albums, newspaper clippings, anything I can get my hands on to get a real feel of the 1950s.

We also looked at post WWII and the history and what was happening with the world in regards to clothing, politics, business, sports, and, of course, social media. That gives a real opportunity to go on to social media and start seeing original 1950s photos.

Of course, we're looking at the 1978 film. It was really important for us to compliment it but not to copy what was done. To give own flavor and when you're designing something and you're looking at an original film, you're going to be compared to from to the original.

It was important to make sure that, as a costume designer, that I'm staying accurate as much as possible, giving the original fans what they need but also to the new viewers giving them something as well.

My research team that worked with me, we ended up buying original 1954 yearbooks. Which was amazing because we were able to look at all the different cliques within the yearbook and the school, the dress codes the uniforms, the personal messages that were written in the yearbooks. It actually, for me, brought the characters alive and helped us draw from that and bring it into our own version.

In the original 1978 film, we watched the transformation of Sandy and Danny right to the end of the film at the carnival scene. And it was also important to look at the transformation of the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds. This all helped us in getting to the place where we needed to, to make our own costumes, but also give that similar vibe from the 1978 film and meet the needs of the original fans.

What was it like working with these four actresses who are new Pink Ladies?

Well, first of all, the four cast members are brilliant. The amount of enthusiasm each of them had, the dedication, just that twinkle in their eyes and their excitement for the project. This was a big project from singing, dancing, acting. These were triple threats we were working with. it was important from the design and costume department that we met those needs.

Marisa Davila as Jane

When it comes to Jane, she is our "Brain Jane" and she comes from a family, Dad's from New York, Mom's Puerto Rican. She's not afraid to like school. She's smart, she's overachiever, but on the other side of Jane, there's a side of Jane that's exploring who Jane is. These are some of the factors that she struggles through with her identity and fitting into the school in season one.

She's also our most methodical and conservative in her style of dressing. She stays the closest within the bounds of the early '50s kind of acceptable entire at that time. When you look at Jane and the pilot on the first day of school, I like to call this Jane's political look. She's also running for school council and she's organizing the important pep rally so we see her wear this classic red, white and blue blouse with a navy blue full circle cotton skirt that we built for her. And then, of course, she's wearing Buddy's Letterman jacket. And of course in the 1950s, that was a huge deal. So that was a big statement to start with at the beginning of the series.

We also have the musical performance, "I Want More." We really wanted to create a costume that popped in those hallways, in the gray hallways. So we took this beautiful, early 50s vintage sweater that I found. I actually found a multiple of two, which was crazy, which never happens in our industry with vintage pieces. I built a full circle skirt for her. This gave her that dramatic movement that she needed for the choreography that Jamal Sims had created for her.

It was important that we had a really convincing closet for Jane. As we all know, teenagers have many different moods. It was important when we were creating her closet that we that we cater to that as well.

Cheyenne Isabel Wells as Olivia

So then we come into Olivia. I like to kind of look at Olivia as my words is, "She marches to the beat of her own drum." She's a talented writer, she's a bookworm but she also has a subtle defiance against school rules and also dress codes. So on the first day of school, we see that she pulls her jacket open while she's with her brother in the T-Birds and she's got this bombshell silhouette on and we are inspired by Marilyn Monroe for this piece. I built her this bold, vibrant, fitted red and white top that we pulled in with this hugging bodied, high-waisted pencil skirt and a pair of adorable kitten heels.

This was our opportunity to have a homage to Marty and Rizzo. Olivia rocks the iconic neck scarf. Also, we see her in this costume and she's got the home economics scene where she's got her dance sequence. And of course, at that time, pencil skirts didn't have that much stretch. It was important that, we were finding two-way stretch fabrics and we were building a lot of these pencil skirts for Olivia with that.

Tricia Fukuhara as Nancy

We come to Nancy. She's our aspiring fashion designer. I look at her as our fashionista, our chameleon, surrealist artist. She's influenced by rock and roll, Hollywood, latest fashion trends, surreal art. We see that she embraces the cinch and flare kind of rock and roll look, which she manipulates and expresses her own kind of surreal sense of fashion.

In her first costume, we see she's wearing this colorful, green, full circle skirt with this contrasting pale yellow crinoline underneath. We built this embroidered apple cake, very large red lobster at the front of it, that's on a leash that swirls all the way to the top of her bolero jacket and she has this surreal hand which holds the leash. Again, this is an ode to Elsa Schiaparelli to the lobster dress that Elsa Schiaparelli designed and also the surreal hair and hat that she created as well.

We also see in episode three, the first introduction to "Bad Nancy." We see her in this black leather, ho-cature outfit, which is inspired by Christian Dior's classic sculpted two-piece suits, which we built for her. We designed this exaggerated silver snake bejeweled motif that wraps around her bodice. I found this brilliant vintage nineteen fifties sequin beret hat and in London, I found a vendor who had 1940s-inspired and kitten heel loafers. So it really gave her, in my opinion, this bad ass look.

We also see at the pep rally she wears a Bolero jacket that's made out of pom poms. We probably cut like, I would say probably 2000 strands of multicolored fabrics and stitched it to make the jacket for her for that.

Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia

Then, we come to Cynthia. Cynthia is our "Wild Child," wants to be a T-bird, and also is not wanting to conform with the 1950s dress code, but has to in Cynthia's way. We know that Cynthia comes from a working-class background and, chances are, probably received most of her clothes as hand-me-downs, or Cynthia would have gone into her dad's closet.

The very first look that we see Cynthia in is a blue collar workman's shirt with a ill-fitting dirndl skirt that does not fit properly on Cynthia's waist with a 49ers Pendleton jacket and a pair of bobby socks and saddle shoes.

I remember working with Annabelle Oaks in what was going to be Cynthia's signature piece and that was the comb tucked into the bobby socks, which is a little bit of an ode to the T-Birds. And of course, we know that high school, the kids back then had school wear and they had weekend wear. So, of course, Cynthia is a huge T-Bird wannabe. So when not at school, at the Frosty Palace or at the drive-in or wherever they were at, Cynthia would be wearing pieces that reflected that tomboyish greaser look.

The Pink Ladies Jacket

We should really talk about the pink jacket. It's an important piece. I had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles, to pull a lot of vintage pieces from private collectors, the rental houses, but also I got to see an original Pink Ladies jacket. So I got to see Marty's jacket. For me, that was probably the most intense, emotional experience for me as a costume designer. At that moment, I knew I was designing the prequel.

I knew I had big shoes to follow behind, Albert Walsky from the original 1978 film, costume designer. So all of this was like happening at that moment. I remember I had my phone out and I had taken at least 25-50 pictures of the jacket to get a really good sense of the construction, the color of it, the stitching, the embroidery of the Pink Ladies at the back and the front, measuring the collar.

I looked at everything that I could at the jacket to get a really good idea for us to be able to bring that information back to Vancouver and then that would become our foundation for building the Pink Ladies jacket.

It was important that there's four years between 1954 and 1958. It was important that there was similarities in the jacket, but also different enough that we know that time has taken place in between. Most importantly, recognizable enough that the fans of the original Grease would be able to identify with it right away.

I worked really closely with the creator, showrunner Annabel Oaks, and of course the director, producer, Alethea Jones and we started to begin the journey of the Pink Ladies jacket.

So we started with sketches, research, and then we finally came to the classic Harrington jacket that James Dean wears in Rebel Without a Cause. So this jacket ended up being our guideline in moving forward with our design.

We chose a tensile fiber material that had a real soft drape to it. The original jacket was a lot stiffer, so we definitely wanted that to have a difference there, allowing the cast to have movement in the jacket.

We started with white fabric. I worked very closely with the DOP, the producers, the cast in finding and doing different dialogues and looking at it all and then finally we came with the with this perfect pink that had the saturated 1950s quality to it.

Looking at the original jacket, the lining was as important as the outer fabric was and the same for us. We found the poppy pink lining. We found this in Italy and it had this beautiful sheen to it and this pop. It was important when we saw our cast pull their collars up or open up ,that we saw this pop of color. The lining had structure to it, had this two-way stretch to it, which gave our cast this unrestricted movement in being able to do all the different dance sequences.

From there, we brought in each of the casts, we started to tailor the jackets to each of them and I will never forget this moment and this is when it became real for the cast. When each of them came for their final final fitting of the jacket, each of them became so emotional. All of us that were in the fitting became emotional with them because this is when it became real for them that they are the Pink Ladies. So for me that was probably one of the most exciting moments. You have the original jacket designed by Albert Walski and I get to be part of that and design the prequel.

Episodic Photos by Eduardo Araquel/Paramount+