Meet “Stop Kiss” Costume Designer Khamphian Vang

By Lianna Matt McLernon

During Khamphian Vang’s first five shows with Mu as a costume designer, she created a magical snail (as well as human-sized turd emoji costumes) for Katie Ka Vang and Melissa Li’s “Again;” decked out a psychedelic rock band for Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band;” and most recently hand-sewed fabric vines and leaves to the dance ensemble in Ankita Raturi’s “Fifty Boxes of Earth.”

For her upcoming show with Mu, “Stop Kiss” (June 14-29), the premise may sound simpler – a love story in present-day New York – but her approach to it is the same: start with reading the script and see what stands out.

“The script is really interesting where, from scene to scene, it goes back and forth into different [times],” Vang says. “Just thinking about how memory functions or behaves – some things we fixate on, right? Like if we’re retelling something, something really sticks out to us. We retell it again; we might remember something new about it, or something that could be this insignificant thing stands out. In terms of costuming, I’m thinking about memories and the fluidity of memories, and how it could change.”

How did you get started in costume design?

I had a lot of interest in fashion, and I didn’t really think about costume design until I took a costume class. I did theater in high school, and when I was in college, I was interested in doing some theater again. I had done the acting and directing thing – it was fun, but not really my thing. And so, I decided to take a costume class and just kind of fell in love with it in the process.

Backing up a little more, what sparked that original love for fashion?

Growing up, my mom, she sewed a lot. She also made us clothes, me and my sisters – there’s a lot of us. She made us clothes ever since we were little, even like our traditional Hmong clothes. My grandma also made clothes, so I was always around that. Just being around that, observing – that probably is where it came from.

Did you learn most of your skills before your costume design classes, then, or during them?

I started sewing as a kid doing cross-stitch, but I didn’t really gain actual costuming skills until I took a class in college. I didn’t machine sew until I was about 18, 19. I think the foundations of sewing, I’ve learned in class[es], but each show is really different. There’s a lot that I had to do – a lot of trial and error. Especially with costume changes. If they have to be done really quickly, how do you make it the easiest possible for an actor to get in and out without compromising the look?

This is your sixth show with Mu, and you’ve worked at other theaters. Could you talk a bit about representation behind the scenes as well as onstage?

I find on the technical side, there are not a lot of Asian Americans. A lot of the people I’ve met in theater are more on the acting and directing or playwright side. But there’s still not a whole lot there, either. That is something that I’m thinking about a lot. How do we get more people interested? Maybe there is interest, and they just don’t know how to get involved or even where to start. I don’t know where I go from there, but that’s something that’s on my mind.

I know you said it’s something you’re “thinking about,” but a couple years ago, you led a costume design class with New Native, didn’t you?

I did an introduction to costumes. So, there were three separate, two-hour classes. I designed it in a way where if you didn’t know anything about theater, you were going to learn… what different terms might mean, what different jobs there are, like stage manager, production manager, director – going through all of that.

This was really designed for someone who would come on as maybe a wardrobe tech person or a dresser, so really starting with those basic sewing skills; talking about what a wardrobe tech might do, or a dresser, and what those jobs look like. We also practiced sewing different kind of stitches. How to sew on a button, or how to sew on a snap. How to mend something.

We’ve talked a lot about your costume design work. You also work as a therapist – do those mindsets feel like they overlap at all?

In the mental health world, it’s all about conceptualizing, too. You have to understand really deeply this person’s history, how does that impact them? What are some experiences they’ve had in life? Where has it led them? And so, yeah, there are similarities I have found in both, just thinking about individual people and really understanding them as a whole person, right? There’s so many different layers to a human. It’s sort of peeling back the layers.

This interview has been edited for length, style, and clarity.

Images courtesy Rich Ryan.