(February 7, 1943 – April 12, 2024)
Carrie Robbins, whose more than 30 years as a Broadway costume designer saw her involvement in 1972’s Grease, for which she contributed the production’s signature poodle skirts, and the nuns’ habits of 1983’s Agnes of God, died following a brief illness with Covid on Friday, April 12, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death was announced by her friend Daniel Neiden.
Robbin’s Broadway career began somewhat inauspiciously with Leda and the Little Swan, a play that closed on Broadway before its scheduled opening at the Cort Theatre in 1968. Written by Amber Gascoigne and dealing with sex between generations of one family, Leda was called by William Goldman in his classic theater book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway “the hardest show of the season to sit through.”
Robbins rebounded quickly on Broadway with a revival of You Can’t Take It With You the following year, and, in 1970, The Good Woman of Setzuan.
Robbins also designed the costumes for the 1985-86 season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
Among her other endeavors, Robbins turned to puppet-making in recent years, using life-size child puppets to depict the story For the List Children of Paris about French-Jewish children who were captured and taken to Auschwitz. Her designs for opera include Death in Venice for Glimmerglass and Samson Et Dalila for San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera. She designed, as well, for Lincoln Center, Acting Company and New York Shakespeare Festival. She co-curated an exhibit of designs by women for the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center in 2008-09.
