Walking into the costume room at LSU felt like time travel. There was a smell — fabric, maybe, or sewing machine oil.
Whatever it was, for a moment, I wasn’t in Baton Rouge anymore. I was a little girl in my grandmother’s garage-turned sewing room, surrounded by fabric, jars of buttons and a rainbow of zippers on pegs.
I spent huge swaths of time there as a child — sorting buttons and my personal specialty — coordinating prints that most people wouldn’t think went together.
The room had a particular logic and language…