Daily Inspiration Quote by Julie Harris

Harris is talking about costume the way actors talk about lighting: not as decoration, but as collaboration that either flatters the work or swallows it. The line is breezy, even grateful, yet it carries a performer’s hard-won pragmatism. “Nice” is doing a lot of labor here. It’s the polite word you use when you’re describing something that’s actually crucial to whether you’re legible onstage or on camera.

The phrase “an eye for clothes” sounds like surface-level taste, but the subtext is about narrative intelligence. Good costuming isn’t just expensive fabric; it’s characterization, silhouette, and timing. It tells the audience who you are before you speak, and it can protect an actor from the small humiliations of being misread: the wrong cut that ages you, the wrong color that drains you, the wrong detail that pulls focus at the moment you need stillness. Harris is praising the rare wardrobe mind that understands performance as a whole system.

“Will show what you’ve given them” is the tell. She’s not saying costume designers show you; they show your offering: the choices, the vulnerability, the hours of rehearsal. It implies a quiet resentment of productions that take an actor’s best work and bury it under conceptual fussiness or careless presentation. Coming from a stage legend associated with precision and emotional rigor, it reads like a small manifesto: craft respects craft, and the best collaborators don’t compete with the performance - they frame it.