Van Smith, 61, Dies; Created Divine’s Distinctive Look

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Van Smith, 61, Dies; Created Divine’s Distinctive Look
NY Times December 9, 2006

Van Smith, who was admiringly called both an artist and a terrorist for the costumes and makeup he designed for the films of John Waters, died on Tuesday at his home in Marianna, Fla. He was 61.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

An early exponent of the trash aesthetic, Mr. Smith was widely credited with having created the public face — once seen, not soon forgotten — of Divine, the seventh-of-a-ton transvestite star of Mr. Waters’s early movies.

Mr. Smith designed the costumes for all of Mr. Waters’s films, and the makeup for the first six of them.

In unleashing Divine on early-1970s America, Mr. Smith helped set a new standard for drag that endured long after Divine’s death in 1988, Mr. Waters said in a telephone interview on Friday.

“When we started in those days, drag queens were square,” he explained.

“They hated Divine: they wanted to be Bess Myerson. And Divine would show up in a see-through miniskirt with a chainsaw instead of a pocketbook.”

The Divine look, which Mr. Smith first created in 1972 for “Pink Flamingos,” had three components. First was the hair, shaved back to the crown to allow more room for eye makeup.

Second was the makeup, acres of eye shadow topped by McDonald’s-arch eyebrows; lashes so long they preceded the wearer; and a huge scarlet mouth.

Third were the clothes: shimmering, skintight numbers that gave Divine (né Harris Glenn Milstead) a larger-then-life female sensuality.

The net effect, as Mr. Smith ordained it, was a cross between Jayne Mansfield and Clarabell the Clown.

Where major Hollywood designers have large staffs, fat budgets and access to the best materials, Mr. Smith, early on, had none of these. The entire budget for “Pink Flamingos,” Mr. Waters said, was $10,000.

That left little to spend on costumes beyond sequins (absolutely essential), staples (to hold the costumes together) and lentils (see below). But these, combined with Mr. Smith’s magnificently fevered imagination, ably conjured up the John Waters universe, a world of glittering campy decay.

To outfit some characters, Mr. Smith haunted the thrift shops of Baltimore, where Mr. Waters’s films are made. Dumpsters came in handy on occasion.

But for Mr. Waters’s biggest star, economy measures would not do.

“If you look at anything that Divine wore, you sure couldn’t find that off the rack,” Mr. Waters said.

Mr. Smith designed all of Divine’s costumes, which were constructed by a Baltimore woman who made outfits for strippers. Subtle they were not.

There was the red fishtail dress from “Pink Flamingos,” in which Divine looks equal parts mermaid, Valkyrie and firetruck. And there was the sheer wedding gown he wears in “Female Trouble” (1974), underwear not included.

Other actors’ outfits were equally memorable, among them the pink satin ball gown adorned with huge cockroaches worn by Ricki Lake in Mr. Waters’s 1988 film, “Hairspray.” (Mr. Smith did not work on the Broadway version, for which the costume designer, William Ivey Long, won a Tony Award in 2003.)

The more outrageous the costume, the more uncomfortable it tended to be.

If actors complained, Mr. Smith had a kindly way of putting them at ease. “Shut up,” he would say. “You’re wearing it.”

Walter Avant Smith Jr. was born in Marianna on Aug. 17, 1945. In the mid-1960s, while a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he met Mr. Waters. (They both ran with a crowd of Baltimore bohemians united by a shared interest in art, film and LSD, Mr. Waters said.) Mr. Smith went on to work in New York as a fashion illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily; he later ran an antiques shop in Baltimore, before moving back to Florida several years ago.

Mr. Smith is survived by his mother, Eloise, and a brother, William, both of Marianna; and a sister, Cynthia Van Voris, of Tampa, Fla.

Like his costumes, Mr. Smith’s makeup was the stuff of riotous nightmare. It was often made from common household ingredients, including dirt (used as foundation), egg whites (when dry, they lent the face a scabrous look) and potato chips (the crumbs made teeth appear plaque-ridden).

Then there were the lentils. These, as Mr. Smith discovered after much experimenting, made natural-looking prosthetic breasts for Divine. They moved better than socks.