SNL Costume Designer Tom Broecker Looks Back at His 30 Years on the Show

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Some of the costumes from famous Saturday Night Live sketches are as recognizable as the jokes themselves. The costuming is often so essential to a character it feels impossible to imagine a sketch without it. Tom Broecker has been the costume designer on the show for over 30 years. His body of work at Saturday Night Live has made him an industry legend and a key part of making SNL as iconic as it is. For the latest episode of The Who What Wear Podcast, Broecker shares how he got his start, how they determine which costume will go to the archive, and more.

For excerpts from the conversation, scroll below.

There are a wide range of things that you can do within the fashion industry, and I'm curious about how you narrowed in on costume design.

There was a part of my time when I was contemplating doctoring and such. I also was contemplating performing. came to New York as a dancer and studied at Juilliard and did some musical theater things on the road. There was a part of me that also knew that that was temporary. That was not really an avenue that I was going to really pursue.

I've worked in fashion, but ultimately, I felt fashion was so changeable. You're relying on the whims of people and the ideas of people. One minute, you're fashionable—one minute, you're not.

The idea, ultimately, of going into costumes… It was really truly a way to combine everything I loved into one job, which was performance, actors, history, language. … Language is so important in understanding a script and how to break down a text—psychology, anthropology, art history, color, fabric.