Costume designer Qween Jean reflects on her historic Tony Award nominations

In her Broadway-debut season, Jean is doubly nominated for her lovingly detailed, community-driven work on the musical Cats: The Jellicle Ball and the play Liberation.

Summary

• Costume designer Qween Jean is nominated for two Tony Awards for her work on the musical Cats: The Jellicle Ball and the play Liberation
• This theatre season marked her Broadway debut
• She shares how artists past and present inform her work and how her costumes on both plays nod to long histories represented in the shows

Costume designer Qween Jean remembers a key visual from the 1997 film Cinderella. After Brandy, in the title role, transforms for the ball and dons her baby blue dress, Jean noted, “Oh, even her shoes dazzled.”

Jean has an eye for detail, one so fine it helped her score her own fairytale moment: earning two Tony Award nominations, for Best Costume Design of a Play (Liberation) and Best Costume Design of a Musical (Cats: The Jellicle Ball), in her Broadway-debut season. She is the first out Black transgender woman to be nominated in either category.

“There are so many descriptions, but it feels like flying,” the designer said. “I’ve been really overjoyed and deeply grateful.”

Before designing shows, Jean was a draper for a decade, making costumes and patterns. “That is how I started, as a maker, but I always wanted to build relationships with artists,” she said.

And she has. After designing costumes for three Tony-nominated actors this season — Cats's André De Shields and Liberation's Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem — Jean is quick to also name the artists who have made her feel seen.

“Pioneer mothers Dorian Corey, Crystal LaBeija, and Angie Xtravaganza — their legend supersedes us all,” she said of ballroom icons who helped inform the 500 looks she assembled for Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

In that reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, the "cats" are ballroom scene stealers competing in various dance and fashion categories for a new life. Each act — and costume — tries to outdo the last. With hundreds of looks, the design feels like “a magnum opus,” Jean said.

“That grandness — it speaks to a five-decade legacy of ballroom. We wanted to authentically capture the soul of each [category] and celebrate the internal feline power each artist brings to that runway.”

And Jean knows not all runways have been inclusive. “That is shattered here,” she said of Jellicle Ball, which gives Black and queer artists a chance to “show up and show out.”

“I am the community that I serve,” Jean said.

That mantra extends to her work that may be invisible to an audience. Jean has advocated that her team be fairly compensated, and she has advocated for artists from all over the industry to be brought into the fold.

“There are people in our community that are beyond talented, that are beyond worthy of opportunity, and if young Black queer people can’t get an opportunity on Cats, then where can they get it? Our producing team said 'absolutely' so that the love on stage is represented backstage as well,” Jean said. “I will push until the people have what they need.”

That comes with a lot of labor and passion. She described costume designers as “an army of lovers that come together to make this impossible thing happen.”

In the instance of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, “Every garment in this show [has] to sustain what is being asked of each and every performer,” Jean said. “That is armor, and I create armor for every character I am blessed to dress, and they have to wear that armor eight times a week.”

Costumes take a beating, and Jean saw opportunities to toughen some for Broadway following the production's downtown debut in 2024. “We learned a great deal off Broadway at PAC NYC, so a lot of that reconnaissance allowed us to make informed decisions about textiles,” she said. “We had to dye, customize beading, appliqué; a lot of these costumes are hand-painted.”

All this amounts to an astounding sight. “In Jellicle Ball, at the end of Act 1, we create a visual feast of ballroom categories. It is this beautiful fantasia,” she said. “What you would experience at a real ball, at what would be a 6-, 8-, 10-hour event, we have constructed in 2 and a half hours. Unreal.”

Jean sees similar themes of resistance through community in Bess Wohl’s Liberation. Following suburban Ohio women who form a consciousness-raising feminist group in the 1970s, Wohl’s play is nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

“Liberation has reminded me about how important it is that we don’t give up on love, that we don’t give up on ourselves because the system tells us no, because we don’t want to believe women,” Jean said. “It reactivated a light in my own life — here we are, traveling back into the 1970s, and yet outside of the theatre doors, there’s protests happening in the same breath.”

Jean narrowed her research to ensure period-perfect attire, but she was also moved by a scene in which the characters get naked.

In Wohl's play, the women are “shedding their armor, but the armor is within,” Jean said. “That is the beauty of that production — the women shed their clothes in order to discover a real truth and that internal beauty is not only unstoppable but it is the thing that will continue to allow them to heal with each other.”

Like Jellicle Ball, Liberation transferred from its own Off-Broadway premiere last year, which Jean said doesn’t mean “bigger, but better.” With more time, resources, and understanding of the characters’ and productions' needs, Jean felt set up for success to do her “best possible work.”

Both shows, per Jean, also “help us have empathy — we have powerful, brilliant elders in both worlds that are able to be seen, that say I also deserve to be here, that our elders deserve to have resources.”

Jean often looks back in order to go forward. For example, taking inspiration from the additive AIDS Memorial Quilt, De Shields's costume features patches with the faces of queer icons. Just as cats have nine lives, Jean said, “these legends continue to live infinitely” through this design.

But for now, Jean is also considering her own look for Sunday’s Tony Awards ceremony.

“I’ve got something up my sleeve, and I will pray that the ancestors guide my light and path,” she said. “There have been countless moments where I was like, 'Should I be doing this?' And this year I was reminded that our power cannot be broken.”

Get Cats: The Jellicle Ball tickets now.

Top image credit: Qween Jean. (Photo by @GatekeeperAdrian)
In-article image credit: Cats: The Jellicle Ball and Liberation on Broadway. (Cats photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade; Liberation photos by Little Fang)