page_title: William Ivey Long
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: William Ivey Long / Biography / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: A family portrait of the characters in the 2008 production of Paul Green's The Lost Colony.
context_page_description: William Ivey Long Jr. is an American costume designer for stage and film. His most notable work includes the Broadway shows The Producers, Hairspray, Nine, Crazy for You, Grey Gardens, Young Frankenstein, Cinderella, Bullets Over Broadway and On the Twentieth Century.
context_section_description: Upon his graduation from Yale in 1975, he moved to New York City where he worked for couturier Charles James as an unpaid apprentice until James's death in 1978. A friend of his from Yale, Karen Schulz, who was the set designer for a Broadway revival of Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General, suggested that Long be hired to do costume designs for the show. This marked Long's first Broadway production; he has since designed for over 60 Broadway shows.
  He has been nominated for fifteen Tony Awards, winning six (for Nine, Crazy for You, The Producers, Hairspray, Grey Gardens, and Cinderella). He has also won the Drama Desk Award for outstanding costume design for Hairspray, The Producers, Guys and Dolls, Lend Me a Tenor, and Nine.  Other recent credits include Young Frankenstein, The Ritz, Chicago, and Curtains.
  In 2000 Long was chosen by the National Theatre Conference as its "Person of the Year" and was honored with the "Legend of Fashion" Award by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame for 2005.
  He remains active in many local activities throughout the state of North Carolina including working with Paul Green's The Lost Colony Outdoor Drama in Manteo, North Carolina which he and his family have been a part of since he was a young child.  The Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina featured an exhibition of Long's designs titled "Between Taste and Travesty: Costume Designs by William Ivey Long."
  "Long's creations have had a tendency to become as much of a celebrity as the people who wear them," wrote Encore Magazine's art columnist, Lauren Hodges. "His pieces are so lively that they seem to have personalities on their own. The movements the costumes were made for seem to reflect in the fabric. Each detail is lovingly stitched for the characters of the stage and speaks of the story itself, giving the viewer a little taste of the spectacle that is Broadway."
  Long has also costumed for Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage Hotel, Leonard Bernstein's operas A Quiet Place and Trouble in Tahiti, and ballets at the New York City Ballet for Peter Martins, Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp.
  In June 2012, he was elected Chairman of The American Theatre Wing. He is the first working theatre artist to hold this position since Helen Hayes.
  In August 2018, Long was accused of having sexually harassed a props assistant while working on The Lost Colony in 1996.
caption: The principal characters of The Lost Colony outdoor drama from the 2008 production. Costumes and scenery designed by William Ivey Long