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

Welcome to The Who What Wear Podcast. Think of it as your direct line to the designers, stylists, beauty experts, editors, and tastemakers who are shaping the fashion-and-beauty world. Subscribe to The Who What Wear Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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. [I] 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.

Can you tell me about some of your early experience with Saturday Night Live while working in the costume department?

I've been at Saturday Night Live forever now, but I didn't really grow up watching Saturday Night Live. I landed here as a production assistant. … When Lorne [Michaels] came back in '85, there were new people who came in. There was a new costume designer who came in in 1986, and she hired a friend of mine, Melina. I was living in California at the time, and Melina said, "Come work on the show with us." Finally, I was on a plane coming back to New York working on this show, and that was in 1986. It really did feel like the beginning part of a home. Cut to 1000 years later, here I still am at this amazing home.

There is an actual archive. How do you know that something makes it into the official archive?

The archival process started 20 years ago. … The show started, and it was throwaway culture, so we still believed that any day the show is going to be gone, and we won't be here, and there's still this temporariness to everything. But we began to realize that maybe this wasn't going to be temporary. [There are] those early things we knew … were truly archives, like the Conehead pajamas and the Conehead capes.

What happens when each cast member leaves now is that their costumes are boxed up, and for the most part, we take a guess at what we think their archival pieces might be. Sometimes, it's obvious. Their "[Weekend] Update" characters. If a character's been on more than twice, it generally means that it should have an archival aspect to it. It gets photographed, described, put in a box. The box has a number, and then it goes into the computer database. All of that is stored in a giant warehouse in Brooklyn.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.