The Garbs of DOOM
A conversation with artist Eliza Douglas, who designed the costumes for Anne Imhof’s ambitiously dark spin on “Romeo and Juliet.”
- By: Ruby J. Thelot
“It’s a way to add another messaging system in the work,” muses Eliza Douglas over the phone, reflecting on the costumes she designed for DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE, the latest performance of German visual artist and choreographer Anne Imhof, which premiered on March 3 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York for a sold-out run. Douglas, an American multimedia artist and model, called me from Paris in the midst of rehearsals for the Fall/Winter 2025 Balenciaga show to discuss the process and intent behind the outfits donned by the performers in the piece.
Douglas has been a longtime collaborator of Imhof, first appearing as a performer in Angst I in 2016. In addition to styling, casting and performing, she cocreated the music for Faust, Imhof’s Golden Lion–winning piece for the fifty-seventh Venice Biennale in 2017. DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE marks the continuation of their creative partnership, with Douglas taking on the role of performer, assistant director, and costume designer.
Top image: Photos by Nadine Fraczkowski and Eliza Douglas.
DOOM is hard to explain. Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a group of performers move from SUVs to stages across the Armory as different vignettes are acted out over the course of three hours. The crowd, dwarfed by the installation, plods along, tailing the group of performers as the story unfolds. A large ticking doomsday clock looms over the murmurations of the intelligentsia as bold red numbers illuminate the face of vague acquaintances. The experience is eerie and bemusing. I let myself be carried by DOOM. Bewitched by Douglas’s voice, confused by the erratic motions of the crowd, I waited anxiously for the final grand resolution as the countdown ended over Douglas’s original song “We Can.”
The play-performance-installation features a dozen youths dressed in contemporary urban clothing, somewhere between Bushwick and Berlin but animated by the tribal characteristics of the Capulets and Montagues. These aesthetic groups fight as the tragic heroes’ love-stars cross.
In their first few collaborations, Douglas dressed the models from her own closet, adorning the performers in her vintage tees and denim. This time, she repurposed found garments through screen printing, designed school uniforms, jewelry, and created Elizabethan custom lace collars. The work, which revolves around youth and our current “doomed” generation, presents a uniform for our era: light-washed low-rise jeans, a mix of old and new, transatlantic styles inspired by the internet and SoundCloud.
Ruby J. Thelot
Eliza Douglas
You’ve designed the costumes for many of Anne’s pieces. How have they changed over time?
The costumes have remained fairly consistent over the years. Of course, there are always some new elements, but I think there’s a distinct aesthetic to the work that we don’t want to abandon with any big, dramatic shift. It also still aligns with what I wear myself: T-shirts, hoodies, jeans, pieces that are easy to fit, comfortable, and allow for movement.
When people look too dressed up, like they’re heading out for a night on the town, it feels unnatural, as if we’re trying too hard.
For this show, I riffed on what we’ve done in the past, but because there was a narrative and thematic structure—especially with the Romeo and Juliet reference—it gave me more to work with. It was really fun to explore the dynamic between these two groups and find ways to differentiate them. But honestly, I wouldn’t even know how to make the costumes look more cutting-edge or trendy. I think people assume I’m out in the world more than I actually am.
DOOM draws direct and abstract inspiration from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a story which comes with its own heavy aesthetic baggage. How did you approach that legacy and, in turn, create costumes that reflected a unique and novel perspective?
One thing I did when preparing for this was research the costumes of the original production of Romeo and Juliet. I found that red and blue distinguished the Montagues and Capulets. Anne wanted to transform the two families into “House of Wolves” and “House of Tigers.”
This is especially exemplified in the middle of the piece when the majority of the main performers, who were also joined by some ballerinas, change in the locker rooms into prep-school looks. The two schools have their distinct colors—tigers: navy and white; wolves: light blue and maroon—and I made school uniforms, basketball uniforms, and cheerleading looks. I liked the idea that we could, in a basic sense, follow the costume tactic used in Shakespeare’s time.
In their “street looks,” I put signifiers to the various houses on each look. Some are very obvious, a large wolf or tiger face, and some [are] more subtle, like bracelets that say “wolves” or a small tiger patch hidden somewhere. One performer has wolf boxers that peep through the holes in his jeans.
I wanted basic looks that felt contemporary but have one twist that references the Elizabethan era, so I also designed a variety of lace collars that performers wore over their T-shirts and hoodies.
A notable element of the costumes are the “DOOM” tees. What was your inspiration and intention behind this?
I like T-shirts and have used them in the past as material in my paintings. T-shirts are statement pieces that people use to express themselves. I had a T-shirt sculpture in one of our performances and one of the performers walked up to it and switched their T-shirt with one from the pile. I am also often attracted to self-referential/meta components, and also humor. I printed DOOM over Coca-Cola shirts, The Beatles, and HARVARD, etc. I love custom one-off merch items.
Do you see DOOM’s fashion reflecting a larger trend in how youth dress today, or is it more of an idealized fiction?
I think it is impossible to disconnect from trends and I would never claim to be immune to that. Naturally, that partially informed what the performers ended up wearing. Anne’s work is often celebrated for reflecting something current, so I think the costumes must be an aspect of that.
The work is steeped in a sense of pre-armageddon inertia—bodies in suspended rebellion in a choreography of disaffection. How does clothing play with that emotional atmosphere?
One concept I presented to Anne which we ended up using quite a bit was to have some of the performers’ looks appear to have been faded by the sun. It felt romantic in a nice way, and it could fit both in a hopeful and apocalyptic visual landscape, which I think is a line that the show tried to ride a lot.
Relatedly, in moments of crisis, often fashion prefigures collapse: see punk’s revolt in the ’70s or the rave aesthetics of ’90s ecstasy culture. The costumes in DOOM carry that same pre-apocalyptic charge. Do you see them as a lament for a lost future or as a manifesto for a new one?
I always see Anne’s work as deliberately ambivalent and ambitious. There is an openness in terms of meaning-making that I appreciate. Just like there are so many different possible experiences within the show—given that there is no fixed seating and often multiple scenes going on at the same time, there are infinite viewing perspectives. Moreover, the show often evolves a bit from night to night. I love the way it can be experienced and resonate with people in seemingly an infinite number of ways.
Youth subcultures oscillate between uniformity and individuation. That tension is very present in Shakespeare’s play through the gregariousness of the Montagues and Capulets and the lovers’ ill-fated self-determination. How would you say the costumes reflect that tension—being yourself but also being a part of something?
We get to see this represented overtly when the performers get in and out of uniform. There is always something visually in the costumes that ties them to their “group,” but we see this done in both a very individual way, in their “street clothes” look, and then in a homogenized way with the uniform looks.
What time and place were you thinking of when designing the costumes?
I am usually thinking of exactly where the show will be, so NYC in 2025.
Is there a specific costume that, for you, encapsulates the spirit of DOOM? One look that felt like the purest expression of the work’s ethos?
I particularly like this vintage pink bunny tee I found. It says “Still cool… after all these years.” It felt oddly resonant with the work.
Ruby J. Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer, and artist based in New York.
- By: Ruby J. Thelot
- Date: March 13, 2025
