Combining the bold graphics and low-waisted sets of Y2K fashion with Ancient Greece at first glance seems like a tricky task. The two are, after all, entire centuries apart. And yet, the Corpus Playroom show Lysistrata does so seamlessly. To better understand how this meeting of worlds was achieved, I sat down with Fatiah Suleiman, Lysistrata’s costume designer, to discuss how she shaped the show’s glamorous (and raunchy) sense of style…
“I feel like I was trying to pull myself back a lot initially because I was like, we’re trying to make a Greek play modern,” Suleiman tells me. But after a call with the show’s director, Flossie Bullion, Suleiman was more certain about moving forward with a brilliantly bold take on Lysistrata’s style: “She was like, you know, I really want you to try and take it to an extreme. She described it as a drag level of excess.”
And this incredible level of excess truly comes across. Suleiman is clearly enthusiastic about the “thousand different influences that all of this is coming from,” naming numerous striking sources of inspiration: “There’s the original Wags, like Cheryl Cole, Victoria Beckham. I think, especially when I was designing for Lysistrata, people like Kathleen Hannah, and Bikini Kill, the Tiger, Bratmobile, all of that sort of found its way in.”
“When we think about the 2000s, there’s so many different sections of that period”
The list of Suleiman’s style references is impressively extensive. We discuss the multiple dimensions of what Lysistrata’s description suggests as its ‘naughty noughties’ style. “When we think about the 2000s, there’s so many different sections of that period. There’s kind of late 2000s, like McBlingy, Lindsay Lohan. Trisha Paytas, even,” she says. Faced with the prospect of deciding between so many iconic styles, she explains how “all of them are so different. And at first I kind of wanted to stick to one, but I feel like just combining it and just letting myself go crazy, I feel, is the right answer”.
To execute this ambitious vision, Suleiman emphasises how vital the DIY aspect of the process was: “Some people are dressing in things just from my wardrobe, but generally I got loads of plain tops, and then I bought a bunch of vinyl stickers. And then I was like, I’ll print messages on them through that. Because I know a lot of the guys are dressed in football shirts, which I had to make using the vinyl stickers. So I was like, why don’t I just transfer it everywhere and have everyone in these crazy slogans, which is a popular Y2K thing.”
For Suleiman, this decision to DIY was not simply a matter of practicality: it was also crucial to the show’s political messaging. “So Lysistrata is about the women organising a sex strike together. So there are lots of different moments of political process. Riot Grrrl definitely plays a big part in what I was thinking about.” A DIY-style, feminist punk movement that began in the 1990s, Riot Grrrl was a revolution against mainstream, patriarchal beauty standards. Its focus on creativity and anti-consumerism is especially apparent in the costume design of Lysistrata, with Suleiman’s emphasis on “cobbled together” outfits.
Suleiman describes to me the evolution of her ideas around this Riot Grrrl aesthetic: “At the start, I was thinking about uniformity and how we’re gonna dress these two different groups, men and women, to look like each other.” But then, “with the women, I wanted it to feel like maybe they borrowed things or, like, got inspiration from each other, even though they are still individuals with their own style.”
She suggests how, in Lysistrata’s costuming, she wanted to replicate political movements “where people are organised and have an outward symbol of their connection to each other or, like, their devotion to a cause”. As a way of illustrating this point, she references ‘The Rebecca Riots’ as one of her inspirations, in which Welsh agricultural workers in the early 1840s protested high levels of taxation by rioting, with the men involved uniformly dressed in women’s clothing.
“We sourced costumes together, which is kind of the vibe that I want for the girls anyway: I feel like it’s a community project and we’re doing this together”
Of course, as in any student theatre production, Suleiman notes how money was tight for bringing this vision to life. Yet the Riot Grrrl style the show so enjoyably embodies was perfect for addressing this struggle for cash, with items repurposed and shared among the cast. “We sourced [costumes] together, which is kind of the vibe that I want for the girls anyway: I feel like it’s a community project and we’re doing this together.”
In so many ways, political protest is at the very heart of Suleimam’s designs. Onstage, the Y2K aesthetic is not only playful and fun but also visually conveys the spirit of activism so central to Lysistrata’s plot line.
Towards the end of our conversation, Suleiman asks if she can show me a quote she feels is essential to her costuming choices. Taken from a New York Times op-ed by Gary Shteyngart, the quote refers to the ‘No Kings’ march against Donald Trump’s policies and corruption in his administration. It reads: “Of course, once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return,” and Suleiman summarises: “He said that in relation to some of the protests going on in America right now, seeing people dress up in costumes and suits, which a lot of people were kind of ridiculing for not taking the political severity of that situation as seriously as it needs to be.”
“It’s really important to me that fun and frivolity and mockery have a place in political protest”
Applying this to Lysistrata, Suleiman emphasises its relevance to the themes she seeks to express through her costume designs. “It’s really important to me that fun and frivolity and mockery have a place in political protest. And I feel like that element of making fun of the people who are trying to subjugate or oppress or put you in a container can be useful and helpful, and it can be an important political tool. And I also thought this quote was just perfect because this play has so much nudity and so much sexuality and so much mockery.”
The brilliance of Fatiah Suleiman’s costume design lies in its devotion to using the performance’s raunchiness, glitz and glamour as an avenue through which to make bold political statements. As we wrap up our conversation, she comments how, “the whole thing’s just absurd and ridiculous, and that, as a vehicle to make a political statement, I think still has relevance today”. And this summarises the show wonderfully: somehow, Suleiman has managed to work the Y2K Riot Grrrl aesthetic immaculately into an Ancient Greek play first staged around 2,000 years ago. Despite being written thousands of years ago, the show has found pertinence in the most unexpected of fashions today…
