‘Fancy Dance’ Costume Designer Amy Higdon On Jax’s Romantic Swagger and Familial Connection

Fancy Dance is one of the best films of the year so far for how it immediately connects us with the bond between its two lead characters. The importance of family is never lost throughout Emily Tremblay’s film, and costume designer Amy Higdon didn’t let a tight timeline and a small budget from creating pockets of magic with color, texture and tradition. This is the type of film where the clothes signify history, strength, and identity.

I remember seeing Roki’s purple jacket in a production still when Fancy Dance played at queer film festivals last year before Apple acquired it. The still, included above, shows the jacket tied just under Roki’s chest as the fringe snaps and dances about as Isabel Deroy-Olson moves her arms. I couldn’t stop thinking about the selection of that particular shade of purple or how long the fringe is. It’s such a pivotal piece to the film itself, and it was the only clothing that the film was budgeted to make.

“I don’t think there was any other way to bring it to life, honestly,” Higdon says. “It was scripted as a purple jacket with long, shiny fringe that Roki finds that’s part of like a cowboy performance dancing set that like her mom would have worn at work. The first time I read the script, I was like, ‘Okay, cool. I’m not sure what that looks like.’ She puts it on and never takes it off again, and I knew that it had to go over thirteen year old clothes. At the end, when we get to the powwow, it all kind of clicked into place, and I realized that this is a dancing shawl. Symbolically, it’s meant as a stand in for her mother.

I think Erica [Tremblay] was just drawn to the color purple–it became the color of love and family connection in our movie. There’s an elder in one scene where they’re walking through a field calling for Tawi, and she is head to toe in purple and wearing a Wampum jewelry set, which wampum is a seashell that’s really important to the Haudenosaunee people. [That is] the society that the Seneca Cayuga are a part of, so, in my mind, that’s kind of where the purple came from. There’s powwow supply stores all over Oklahoma, and I wanted to get get that fringe that we put on all of our dancing shawls so that the Native audience that is watching this will recognize it for what it is. And they did.” 

Higdon knew that her vision aligned with Tremblay’s from the very beginning, and it led to the development of character through costuming. Higdon’s face lights up when she talks about how Lily Gladstone’s Jax is not just comfortable in her own skin but that she she expresses herself with the clothes she chooses to wear. Since she holds a lot of influence over her niece, that confidence is inherited by Roki but interpreted in a young point of view.

“Erica and I started out on the same page in a lot of respects, which was wonderful. As I was reading the script, Jax reminded me of girls that I went to high school with, and it felt so obvious to me what she was wearing. I put a mood board together with those looks like the cutoff t-shirts and the more kind of masc athletic type wear. Luckily, that’s kind of what Erica had in mind too. Along the way, we discovered that Jax has a bit of a swagger. She’s really cool, and there’s a romance in it. She has this love interest at the club, so we wanted her to look really cool. We knew the baseline we were starting with was this very sort of reservation style with like a t-shirt paired with athletic pants–that was kind of our starting place.

Jax is very secure person and a very strong person who knows herself and her mind really, really well. I think that comes across in the confidence in her clothes and how she dresses and how she expresses herself as a queer woman in a rural community. With Roki, it was kind of similar. She is in this moment of girlhood right before you’re hyper aware of how you’re being perceived by everyone around you. There’s also sort of like some hero worship she has for her aunt and even her mom. She’s very obviously seeking to emulate them. In the first scene, she’s wearing a cutoff t-shirt like Jax and mimics her body language. She finds her mom’s jacket and her high heels and puts those on. It’s that moment of girlhood right before you start to let all these outer influences in on your clothes.”

When Roki is taken in by Frank and Nancy, it’s abundantly clear that they have a different way of shopping for clothes. We can imagine that Nancy might make pitstop at a Wal-Mart or even a few regular shops where she knows the owner. Her perspective is entirely different that of Roki and Jax. The florals in Nancy’s clothes almost feel like they are too bright or too pink as if to knock us off-kilter even more.

“I think, especially with Nancy in particular, it was this really very traditional feminine aesthetic for her,” she says. “In her house, there’s a certain amount of control that she’s just comfortable with and that she’s maybe unaware that she has that level of control over her environment in a way that other people don’t have the privilege of. I took inspiration from what Charlotte Royer and Tavf Sampson, the production designer and set decorator, did with all the florals. Nancy decorated this house–Frank did not offer any opinion on what the house looked like. That’s reflected in her clothes a little bit. I wanted to drive home that this is Nancy’s world and she is an outsider when she steps into another person’s world. Everyone can be uncomfortable, and there’s this gap between them in this family. When Jax goes to their house for dinner, Roki is in a white floral blouse that looks like nothing else she wears the entire movie, and the idea was that Nancy had gone out and bought clothes for her and maybe suggested that she wear it to look nicer for dinner.”

The powwow that closes Treblay’s film is moving for how much it means to Roki and her aunt. There is so much color and texture that you almost don’t know where to look, and Higdon reveals just how personal these garments were to the people on screen.

I get a little overwhelmed with emotion when I watch that, and I’ve seen the movie like three or four times now,” Higdon says. “We were still kind of in COVID times in terms of production protocol. When they were thinking of shooting the scene initially, they thought they might go to a powwow that’s being held and shoot after it was done. Due to the circumstances of the protocols, we had to throw our own powwow. You can count on one hand the number of productions that have actually staged a powwow for storytelling purposes, but that’s the beautiful thing about the Native community and especially the Native film community in Oklahoma. Tavf knew people to call. Erica did, too. Our choreographer, Haili Gray, plays Tawi in the film, and she’s well-known powwow dancer. 

The regalia that they’re wearing in the dance arena that’s in the backdrop of Roki and Jax is all the performers’ regalia that they brought from home. Regalia is so personal and so priceless, and it’s made in the home or by the community. It’s bespoke to the person, so that’s partly why that final scene is so moving.”

Even though I don’t have Jax’s swagger to pull off one of her sleeveless shirts, I would want to nab it for my own closet. I thought that Higdon would take the purple jacket, but she surprised me when I asked what she would take for herself.

“I think the easy answer is the purple jacket,” she says. “I think really it’s the wolf t-shirt that Roki wears in the very opening scene of the movie. We did a lot of thrifting for this and we found that thrift store in Tulsa and I immediately knew that it had to be in our film.”

Fancy Dance is streaming now on Apple TV+.