Recreating WWII WAC Uniforms For Tyler Perry's “The Six Triple Eight”

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Sarah Jeffrey as Dolores Washington, Pepi Sonuga as Elaine White, Kylie Jefferson as Bernice Baker, Shanice Shantay as Johnnie Mae, Moriah Brown as Inez and Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Laura Radford / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

Laura Radford/PERRY WELL FILMS 2/COURTESY NETFLIX

“We did a really deep dive when I was first starting this project,” Karyn Wagner explained to me. We had met to talk about the costumes she designed and recreated for Tyler Perry’s latest film, The Six Triple Eight, which is now streaming on Netflix. The film tells a tale which has gone too long untold, the true story about the only all-Black Women’s Army Corps battalion to serve in Europe during WWII.

The film opens before Black women were allowed to serve in the American military. Though the US entered WWII after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 8, 1941, it was not until July 30, 1942 that Black women were allowed to apply for Officer Candidate School, and they were not allowed to enlist until September of 1942. The Women’s Army Corps, the WACs, grew out of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, WAACS, which began as a white-women-only support branch of the American Army formed during WWI, in 1917.

Kylie Jefferson as Bernice Baker and Moriah Brown as Inez in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Laura Radford / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

Laura Radford/PERRY WELL FILMS 2/COURTESY NETFLIX

When we meet our main character, Lena Derriecott King, portrayed by Ebony Obsidian, it is during the early days of American participation in the war. She is in high school, living with her mother, Donna Biscoe, and Aunt Susie, Baadja-Lyne Odums. I asked Wagner about the beautiful floral dresses we see Lena wear, as it was easy for me to see them being made for her by the women in her family.

“You know,” Wagner said, “Black women were not allowed in department stores then. Or if they were, there was a separate floor for them. There was no one to do their alterations, as there would have been for white people shopping in the same department store, so most black women either knew how to sew or someone in their family knew how to alter their clothes. So yes, Lena's clothes were definitely made at home. Lena's clothing arc starts at the beginning,” Wagner continued. “She is very young. She starts in flat shoes, and then we graduate to that dress in the car.”

A costume illustration and swatch, by Karyn Wagner, for the character Bernice Baker (Kylie Jefferson) to wear on the train to start her WAC training.

Courtesy of Karyn Wagner

While on a shopping trip, Wagner stumbled onto something perfect for the scene. “I just walked into a fabric store, and I went, ‘Oh, my God! There's the dress.’ Like, the fabric literally leapt off the table and wrapped itself around my neck and said, I must be made into Lena's dress. Well, that's not exactly true, but you know what I mean.”

The scene where the dress was worn was intended to show the unspoken, and ultimately doomed, love between Lena and her best friend, the Jewish (and white) Abram David, played by actor Gregg Sulkin. “I wanted that dress to be full of the joy of their young love,” Wagner explained. “The bullet hasn't been made that can kill me. No sorrow will ever touch me. I wanted that dress to embody that, and I also made his clothing colors echo the color of the dress, and I did that on purpose. Then we met the production designer, and I picked a car that went with the clothing. Because it needed to, because there's not a lot of capsules of joy in this movie. And when Abraham is killed, she really becomes a different person. We see her going away to change. She really is going to fight Hitler, because Hitler took her Abram away.”

Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams, inspecting the ladies of The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Bob Mahoney / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

Bob Mahoney/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy of Netflix

Lena joins the WACs, I promise I am not giving anything away, which led to a literal odyssey in costume design. Please pay attention to the numbers I’ll recount for you below. The scale is immense. I’m not sure that I can articulate the scope of what Wagner and her team accomplished.

“My assistant, Josh Mar, and I scoured the earth for existing uniforms. We begged to borrow.” Acquiring actual WAC uniforms, let alone those worn by Black women who served around 1944, was impossible. “When Tyler first hired me, I thought, oh, you know this is going to be great. I'll go to the rental house, and surely there will be racks of stuff for me to rent, right?” But, aside from a few odd pieces of uniforms, there was nothing. No existing uniforms to use, not even costumes that had been created for another production.

Kylie Jefferson as Bernice Baker, Shanice Shantay as Johnnie Mae, Sarah Jeffrey as Dolores Washington and Pepi Sonuga as Elaine White in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Bob Mahoney / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

BOB MAHONEY/PERRY WELL FILMS 2/COURTESY NETFLIX

“Okay, this is not good.” Wagner remembers saying something like that to herself. “I called all over the world,” she told me, trying to source existing costumes. “So then the search went wider. I mean, we were trolling ebay, every day. Josh was absolutely instrumental in helping me get this done. I could not have done it without him, and he totally deserves a shout out. He and I scoured the earth, and we started finding bits and pieces in people's collections, or that were for sale. Some people's grandmothers had been WACs, and they just sent us pieces, and they were so thrilled.” But the pieces they received were tiny, “negative size 00,” is how Wagner described it. “They were not made for people of color, and people of color are curvier. They have beautiful, gorgeous bodies that are not pencils.”

Wagner reached out to a friend she works with, Heidi Hafer, who does cutting and fitting. “I had her start redrawing the original patterns,” she explained. “I sent her the garments we had. And I was like, Okay, but now make this for curvy women of color from size six to 14 instead of double zero to four.”

Costume illustration and fabric swatches, by Karyn Wagner, for one of Lena's costumes early in the film.

Courtesy of Karyn Wagner

All told, Wager designed, and then supervised the production of 1,200 uniforms. This is akin to making a well-performing brand’s entire season, it is a massive amount of work. “We had factories on three or four continents,” Wagner told me. “I think the only thing we did not make was bathrobes. I made 1,200 uniforms. I made 1,600 pairs of shoes. I want to say, it was 1,400 pairs of gloves, because I assumed some would get lost. I made a thousand purses, because those are harder to lose. But still you needed some extras and we made four kinds of hats. We made the coveralls.”

To ensure that the ladies’ uniforms all matched exactly the way they needed to on screen, Wagner even made panty hose. “2,000 pairs of hose,” Wagner said, adding to an already impressive tally of pieces made. “We made foundation garments, because bodies of color are different shapes, and the characters still needed to have that very upright posture, which people are not used to anymore. When you put them in period foundation garments, all of a sudden they stand upright.” She had a hard time sourcing wool. As you can probably tell, there is nothing that can stop Karyn Wagner on a mission. She just figured out how to get 12,000 yards woven especially for the film. “We made 1,200 uniforms. Uniforms with eight buttons per jacket, 10 or 12 buttons per coat. Where are you going to find all those thousands of buttons? We cast them.”

Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Bob Mahoney/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy of Netflix

Bob Mahoney/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy of Netflix

“We had the shoes, boots and galoshes made,” Wagner said. “I was particularly proud of the galoshes because I wanted those. You know how you can just get attached to one thing? It's like I became obsessed about these galoshes,” Wagner told me with a smile, “ and galoshes we had. You can tell how proud I am.” And with good reason. The attention to detail in this film is incredible, as it reminds us that these incredible, American women have been forgotten for too long.

Kerry Washington plays Captain Charity Adams in this film, the real leader of the Six Eighty Eight, and per usual, she is incredible. “Kerry's so awesome to dress,” Wagner said, “and I mean, all the ladies were. But Kerry was so thoughtful about her fitting.” Part of Wagner’s research involved reading Adams’ autobiography, among many other contemporaneous historic sources. When Wagner understood that Washington wanted to think about her costumes in character, she just made that part of her own process.

Sarah Jeffrey as Dolores Washington, Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King, Pepi Sonuga as Elaine White and Shanice Shantay as Johnnie Mae in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Bob Mahoney / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

Bob Mahoney/Perry Well Films 2/Courtesy of Netflix

There is an early scene in the film when some of the young women who will become soldiers in the Six Eighty Eight meet en route to the base where they will begin their training. It's important to acknowledge how much the United States needed the support of its citizens if our country was going to have a chance of turning the tide of war in the Western Theater. When the Army and Navy finally were willing to admit women, it was only because there were few other choices. Black women, regardless of their personal reasons for joining, were never as accepted as the white women who joined military ranks. It is hard watching these young women be treated so shabbily. It is hard to watch them be dismissed. I think it is important to sit through that.

For the scene, Wagner explained, “I designed the fabrics for their going away dresses, like the very, very patriotic flag dress you’ll see. We designed the fabric before we made the dress. I found it somewhere, and I found a woman who had these amazing buttons, but she only had one of each. One was this amazing airplane button.” At this point, the man who had been casting buttons for the film loved Wagner. He was more than happy to help her recreate any pieces that would help the film. “So, we painted them all red,” Wagner told me. “It’s like a little nod to Abram.”

Susan Sarandon as Eleanor Roosevelt and Sam Waterson as President Roosevelt in The Six Triple Eight. Cr. Bob Mahoney / Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

BOB MAHONEY/PERRY WELL FILMS 2/COURTESY NETFLIX

For those of you, who like me, are fascinated by World War II, it will be a treat to see Sam Waterston and Susan Sarandon as FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. “An interesting thing about them is they were not fashionable people like she's wearing dresses from the 1930s,” Wagner told me. “She is not interested in being fashionable. She wears good dresses. They're well-made dresses, and they suit her. Women wore what they had, especially during wartime, and Eleanor wanted to set an example.”

Through the Roosevelts, we are introduced to Mary Mcleod Bethune, played by Oprah Winfrey, Head of the National Council of Negro Women during the Second World War. “Bethune, who also wore things that were more dated, she did love fashion,” Wagner explained. “There's this whole thing about black women, I mean, even now, but especially at that time. If you were too fashion forward, or too expensively dressed or showy, you were seen as fast. Then you must either be sleeping with somebody who buys you new dresses, or you're stealing them. And It's the part of Jim Crow. It's something we're still fighting to this day. So there's a quiet sort of elegance in all of Mary Macleod's Bethune's pictures. Like all the research I found about her, there's a very quiet elegance to her. There's a respect for the past in everything she wears, so I incorporated like the lace in her collar, it was from the 1890s. Maybe it was her grandmother's.”

Tyler Perry and the cast of "The Six Triple Eight."

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

When we meet people in real life, it is hard, perhaps impossible, for us to not look at their clothing and how it is worn, and not walk away having made certain judgements. “This is something that costume designers talk about a lot,” Wagner told me. “Because, its sort of our tenant, you need to know everything about the character before they open their mouths. We do the same thing. You scan all these characters and you feel like they're traditional. They've got good values. They care more about doing good than they care about being fashionable. They're not flighty people. there, you know, and and then, at the same time, you see the power of the Mcleod suit right? It's a power suit. It's a late 1930s, early 1940s version of a power suit. The dark color and the and the texture of it says, the texture of it, says grace, but grace and strength.”

Before we ended our conversation, Wagner brought something up that I think is really important, something I’m making a point of including here. “There's something that I was thinking about this morning because of the publication that you write for,” she told me. “What I wanted to talk about was kind of the I feel like Captain Adams is very much in the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. You know, the upper 10%. I was thinking about how a lot of these women joined the army because their economic possibilities were not as great for Black women in America. Which then led me to thoughts about generational wealth. And this was it, maybe they started to build it because there was the GI bill that was attached to all of this. I think that's very much an elephant in the room in this movie, that Charity Adam's fashion nodded to, but was never spoken aloud. What Charity Adam says to that general who comes in. She tells them, ‘our war starts with our skin color.’ You know, and it's not just a part of the power structure, it's the economics of it. To me, that was a very important part of the story.”