Inês Salgado designed the wardrobe for Lucia Murat’s three last fiction films: ‘Doces poderes’ (1997), ‘Brava gente brasileira’ (2000) and ‘Quase dos irmãos’ (2004), but the partnership started long before, in ‘Daysy das almas deste mundo’, Lucia’s episode in ‘Oswaldianas’ (1992), one of the few feature films made during the crisis of the Collor years. Her première in cinema was in ‘Sermões – A história de Antônio Vieira’ (1989), by Júlio Bressane. With her sister Bia Salgado, she did the wardrobe for Fernando Meirelles’‘Cidade de Deus’ (2002), and soon after the wardrobe for‘Cidade dos homens’, in the versions for TV (2003-2005/Philippe Barcinski and César Charlone) and for the cinema (2007/Paulo Morelli), and ‘Mulheres do Brasil’ (2006), by Malu de Martino. She has also worked in theater, where she started her career almost by chance. With Moacir Chaves, she designed wardrobe for various plays, including her last work, ‘Macbeth”. For 2008, she will be involved with designs for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio.

What were the basic directives you followed for the wardrobe design?

It was defined that one gang would have hot colors and the other, cold – to identify the rival drug gangs. As this was a musical, we could use a margin of fantasy. The actors on the ‘hot’ side then had stronger tones of yellow, red, pumpkin, gold. The exception was the dance of the ‘Pneu furado’ (Flat Tyre) where we used dark colors to give a sombre tone. In the funk ball the order was to us lots of sparkle, and the costumes had to have movement. Lots of movement so as to accompany the leaps and twirls. The clothes had to emphasize the movement, help the choreography. For the classical ballet group the ideal was tighter clothes, such as tights, socks, full skirts, while the hip-hop people wanted wide pants, looser clothes without hindering their movements.

Was it difficult to convince the hip-hop crowd to take of the cap?

The instruction was that each should act his character, without losing the personality. The mix of dancer and character was confusing. The wardrobe had to follow the style of each. Whoever was hip-hop and had to dance hip-hop kept the cap on. The main difficulty was in dealing with 32 adolescents.

How come? Did they fight over the costumes?

No, but sometimes, I would define something and they would want to swop among themselves. Or they wanted to try everything. Controlling professional actors is difficult enough, but with them, where everything was new, it was a madhouse. Of course we had costume trials, but on the set everything is different, hot or cold, you get a better idea of the whole... Another problem was the feet, as being a musical and they were dancing in many of the scenes, the shoes were a worry – and they were all donated! Imagine the cost? They wore out a lot of shoe. In the beach scene, we couldn’t use thong sandals – or flip-flops, because they had to dance, so we had to use trainers – sneakers.

What was your training?

I even did a course in Fashion Design, at Modena University, in Italy. But everything I know I learned doing. I started in the profession casually in theater, and since then I haven’t stopped!