Zipprodt, Patricia.

Tony Award winning costume designer, Patricia Zipprodt, is best remembered for the designs she created for several famous productions over the course of her long and prolific career, including Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Zorba, Chicago, Sweet Charity, and the film, The Graduate.

Born on February 24, 1925 and raised in suburban Evanston, Illinois, Zipprodt's earliest experience of costume design was as a child, when she would draw paper dolls and costumes for the dolls. Though she always had been interested in art (attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago throughout her teenage years), she studied sociology at Wellesley College. After graduation she moved to New York City to live the bohemian lifestyle. It was a trip to the ballet with the photographer, Gjon Mili, that pointed her towards her destiny as a designer. The ballet was George Balanchine's La Valse and Zipprodt was enraptured by the layers of silk, net, and beads that costume designer, Barbara Karinska, had draped on the dancers.

Zipprodt won a design scholarship to the New York Fashion Institute of Technology (1951-1953) and followed with an internship with Charles James. Both experiences contributed to Zipprodt's talents as a cutter, draper and sewer. Zipprodt began her professional career by assisting the legendary Irene Sharaff, and, by 1957, she had designed her first solo Broadway show, The Potting Shed. She first worked with the director and producer, Harold Prince, on The Matchmaker in 1962, and together they created some of the most memorable shows of the 1960s: Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Zorba (1968), and Cabaret (1966). Prince also put Zipprodt in contact with Broadway and ballet choreographer, Jerome Robbins, another one of her longtime collaborators.

Zipprodt had a comprehensive work method that included thorough research. For example, she had a series of dinners with a Brooklyn rabbi to prepare for her work on Fiddler on the Roof. During 1989-1990, she spent six months in Japan studying weaving methods to help make her designs for Shogun (1990) appear absolutely authentic. Zipprodt would sketch first on tracing paper, so she could turn the figure over and over as she worked to keep it balanced. Then the image would be photocopied numerous times and Zipprodt would begin to experiment with color. In her collection of fabric swatches she claimed to have 500 different shades of red (and that none of them were ever quite right). Zipprodt developed her own fabric-painting technique, perhaps best exemplified by her work on Antony Tudor's ballet, The Leaves Are Fading (1975).

As her career progressed, Zipprodt in turn took on her own interns (such as Ann Hould-Ward who would go on to Beauty and the Beast fame) and taught as an adjunct professor at Brandeis University from 1985-1992. She also lectured and/or taught master classes at many other universities. In 1981, The Village Voice named her one of New York City's 10 best-dressed women. Zipprodt was a 1992 inductee into the Theater Hall of Fame, and, in 1997, she received the Theatre Development Fund's Irene Sharaff Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1993, Zipprodt was married for the first time, to Robert O'Brien, a man whose proposal she had refused some 43 years earlier. Zipprodt was reuinted with O'Brien when he came across her name in a Playbill and learned she taught at Brandeis, where he was able to contact her. For the next several years, Zipprodt would split her time between New York City and O'Brien's Virginia home until her death in July 1999.

From the description of Patricia Zipprodt papers and designs, 1925-1999. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 79409381