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Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.
In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Ms. Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as the syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie.
Ms. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink poodle skirt out of her own bath mat and furry toilet seat cover.
The poodle skirt practically became a mandatory feature of “Grease” shows. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a production of “Grease” backstage, she saw a man taking a red Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she told him that the wardrobe department surely could afford a high-end custom hairpiece. He replied that only a Magic Marker would be authentic.
In a CUNY TV interview with Ms. Robbins in the mid-2000s, the Newsday theater critic Linda Winer commented, “She defined forever our memories of the ’50s.” She also praised Ms. Robbins for her “creative obsession with detail and period accuracy.”
Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’s costumes over the years for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London and the ruined South during the Civil War. For “Grease,” she studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s. For a 1992 musical version of “Anna Karenina,” she found ball gowns from the turn of the 20th century.
“They are underwear-y colors,” Ms. Robbins told The New York Times about the gowns in 1992, “softer, muted, much more alluring than today.”
Describing Ms. Robbins’s work on a 1985 Broadway production of “The Octette Bridge Club,” a play by P.J. Barry set in the 1930s, The Reporter Dispatch of White Plains said she seemed “to have raided every thrift shop in town.”
Her devotion to period costume, Ms. Robbins told the journal Theatre Design & Technology in 1987, was not an entirely artistic matter.
The field allowed her to avoid, she said, “the entire city telling me what it should look like.”
Ms. Robbins won four Drama Desk Awards for costume design — for “Grease,” “The Iceman Cometh” (1974), “The Beggar’s Opera” (1972) and “Over Here!” (1974). She was also nominated for Tony Awards for her work on “Grease” and “Over Here!”
Over the course of her career, she made costumes for Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall and Anthony Hopkins. In 1985, as the staff costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” she turned Madonna into Marilyn Monroe. She also designed the outfits for the staffs of the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center.
Ms. Robbins was also admired as a draftsman. She studied the tricks of master illustrators like Maxfield Parrish, and she would regularly spend eight hours on a single costume sketch. “I believe that drawing is thinking,” she told the online theater journal HowlRound in 2014.
“No one drew a costume more beautifully than Miss Robbins,” said Ann Roth, the revered costume designer.
Carolyn Mae Fishbein was born on Feb. 7, 1943, in Baltimore, where she grew up. Her father, Sidney, taught history in Baltimore public schools, and her mother, Bettye (Berman) Fishbein, had worked as a seamstress before marriage.
When she was 3, her parents, concerned that she was drawing on the walls of her nursery, sent her to a therapist, who told them to enroll her in art classes. As a teenager, she found work singing and tap dancing at a hofbrau in New Haven, Conn.
She studied art and drama at Pennsylvania State University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964, and she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1967. She married Richard D. Robbins, a surgeon, in 1969.
She taught costume design at New York University from 1972 to 2004; a number of her students went on to win major awards for costume and set design, including Tonys.
In recent years, Ms. Robbins focused on writing plays of her own, including several adapted from short stories her husband had written during his retirement, which was cut short after a few years by his death in 2003.
Ms. Robbins leaves no immediate survivors.
Her biggest thrill in designing costumes, Ms. Robbins told Ms. Shelton, was watching actors transform.
“The guys in ‘Grease’ were no less than a little reluctant to have their hair cut,” she said. “But when we cut it, put them in tapered pants and a jacket with the collar turned up, there they were — swaggering around the stage and flipping grease off their combs.”
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