"Working Girl" Immortalized the ‘Staten Island Ferry Look’
As one looks back at Working Girl across more than three decades, the makeup, hair and wardrobe of the secretaries who commute to Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry might seem somewhat over-the-top. Yet assistant costume designer Gary Jones maintained that working with costume designer Ann Roth and director Mike Nichols on the movie was in fact “a big exercise in reality.”
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| Melanie Griffith as 'Tess McGill' and Joan Cusack as 'Cyn' in Working Girl |
“A great deal of research was done on the Staten Island Ferry, which is full of women who look just like Tess and her friend Cyn,” said Gary Jones. “In fact, when we started filming, we were in all sorts of downtown Manhattan office buildings, and you couldn’t tell our people from the real people.”
Jones said that in 1988, New York secretaries “were very much into their eye makeup, their hairdos. That’s their persona. That’s the way they go to work. Once they’ve achieved a look, they work on it and improve it.” He noted that secretaries who had seen the movie “love Cyn’s wild skirts, funny jackets and her eye makeup.”
Joan Cusack did her own study of New York’s “boat people” to come up with Cyn’s personal fashion sense. “I did the ferry thing for several mornings,” Cusack recalled. “I brought my makeup and applied it on the boat – all the secretaries do – and I made my hair very big. I made it stand straight up, aerodynamically correct, and then shoot straight backward and down. And I carried plenty of hairspray with me – that’s very ferry.”
Screenwriter Kevin Wade – who was inspired to write Working Girl after seeing those same secretaries rushing off the Staten Island Ferry in Battery Park one morning – felt that the extravagant fashion of Manhattan’s “working girls” was a kind of uniform. “The corporate battle atmosphere is a lot like the military, and you can tell someone’s more powerful just by looking at the uniform,” he explained. Yet not everyone in an army aspires to be a general – or to look like one. Wade noted, “Most of the secretaries I talked to made no attempt to look like the boss. And why would they? They look great. One girl prided herself on the days when she would wear yellow leather. She got tons of attention from the men in her office.”
Rose-Marie Turk, “Real Workers Spark Working Girl Wardrobe,” Chicago Sun-Times, 1/25/89
Alison Kalfus, “Funny Girl,” Elle, 12/88
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