Downtown theater costumes were improvised on tiny budgets from found materials.

Evidence

Vaccaro commissioned Robbins, whose EVO comic strip Suzie Slumgoddess served to advertise her East Fourth Street boutique Broccoli, to provide Conquest’s outrageously garish costumes. “I was given a budget of about $20, but the challenge was fun,” Robbins recalled, “For the chorus girls’ wigs, I bought felt hat forms and sewed copper Brillo pads all over them, to look like metallic Little Orphan Annie hair. One scene called for a character to turn into a monster. I gave him huge white three-fingered gloves and mouse ears and he became a giant Mickey Mouse.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1111

Categorization

• XREF: The $20 budget and Brillo-pad craftsmanship is concrete evidence for cheap-rent material conditions enabling invention density — a core test case for the reader’s cultural-stagnation argument.