“My mom and my grandmother were both seamstresses,” says Nicole McGraw as she describes her introduction to sewing, “so I grew up kinda in that world.”
Her world is not only one of sewing but the interjection of sewing and performance. McGraw is a student and costume director at Los Medanos College and has a history of creation that spans nearly her entire life.
“I started sewing on a sewing machine when I was eight, with my grandmother,” said McGraw. ”And then as time went on I got involved with theater.“
McGraw describes her experiences with junior high and high school theater and the introduction to being the head of the clothing operation in performances she works on. She continues to work diligently on sewing a piece for the LMC theater performance of “Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue,” the latest show in a plethora of shows she’s worked on with LMC.
“I wanna say it was my junior year, there was a play called Big River, and that was my first time actually like— being in charge of other people’s costumes besides just the stuff I’d been doing for myself,” said McGraw.
This trend of working on costuming goes on, from Halloween costumes to family theme parties, she even eventually found herself in the position to work on costuming for drag shows.
But before drag, she spent many years as a member of a dance troupe, performing in variety shows in night clubs and traveling throughout the U.S. and Canada performing in shows and competing in festivals. They performed locally in the Bay Area, and she of course–did all of their costuming for their shows.
She met people in the drag scene through her costuming and dance, and with that connection, she got to be a dresser, who helped dress drag queens, at the Tiara Sensation Pageant at the de Young Museum for two years. She even got the opportunity to be a backup dancer in her second year there.
“When I came to LMC as a student, I got cast in the very first semester I was here in a show called ‘Ole for Hollywood,” said McGraw.
There was a customer for this performance and because of McGraw’s prior experience with performance art, she knew how to make headdresses quickly and cost-effectively. It was that experience that got her nominated to present her costume pieces at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in the following Spring.
During the school’s second production of “Ruined,” she helped organize costumes and assist the actors in helping them get ready backstage. The head of the theater department and theater teacher Nicholas Garcia asked her if she wanted to continue helping in the theater department, and after that, she’s done the costuming for every theater and film project at LMC since.
For McGraw, this was a natural progression–from being in plays to solely costuming. She’d always been sort of interested in the dress aspect of performance, and simply clothing by itself. Halloween was her favorite holiday, naturally of course—for the opportunity to be extravagant and creative in your clothing wasn’t something a creative child would take lightly. Even younger, when she was a kid—where other kids her age were playing pretend with their dolls, she was satisfied with dressing them and braiding their hair.
With theater, it’s like you have Halloween every day, and with her continuing to do the costuming for LMC, she decided that since she liked it and was already doing it, she should get her business license and start doing it more often.
As is the life of a creative, prejudice is hard to avoid. The prevailing idea that’s prominent in the media and many homes is that creative jobs aren’t “sustainable” or “real”. This wasn’t something she could escape from, even with a creative family. It was thought that being artistic was more like hobby work, not something you could do as a profession.
The arts weren’t important enough to make a career out of, and when this idea is not only enforced by your family but the world around you—it gets hard not to believe it.
Luckily, she has a great support system that uplifts her creative passions, and with that support, she was able to find a way to channel her lifelong interests into something lucrative and have her own business in something she loves. Whether it be a new sewing technique or new ideas on what materials to use, there is always a way to improve and expand her skill set while creating new art.
