Engineering Confidence

The man standing high in the air on a metal frame, legs spread wide, is about to catch a flying woman, one he’s just launched up into the air, as hundreds of audience members watch in awe. The circus act that this man is performing, known as the “Russian cradle,” is one of the most physically demanding movements in acrobatics. He needs immense strength, coordination, and balance, but also a totally unrestricted range of motion in his arms and chest, so that he can drop into a deep squat, catch his aerialist in his outstretched arms, and rise up and hurl her back into the air, over and over again.

The strange thing? This heavily-muscled acrobat isn’t wearing a circus leotard. He’s buttoned up in a crisp, formal dress shirt, paired with a tie and a vest. 

It’s a wardrobe choice that looks more suited to a wedding than a circus, and one that should end in a torn collar and a catastrophic fall. But the shirt is Coregami, built with the hidden stretch of athletic apparel, and the woman who put him in it knows exactly what she’s doing. 

In Angela Aaron's world, nothing is as it seems.

As a costume designer and wardrobe stylist for productions like Cirque du Soleil and magic shows like The Illusionists, her work represents a subtle, but wildly unorthodox, marriage between dressing for visual appeal and engineering for physical performance. Aaron has outfitted everyone from chart-topping musicians like Pitbull and Marilyn Manson to world-renowned astrophysicist Dr. Rebecca Bernstein, the Chief Scientist of the Giant Magellan Telescope.

“I just love doing it,” she told me. “I love opening my clients’ eyes to the realm of possibilities that dressing with purpose unlocks, helping people of all types shine and feel the way they need to feel to give their very best performance, from boardrooms to Broadway.”

Although she's a former fashion magazine editor, Aaron’s no snob (she admitted she was wearing sweatpants during our interview). But she also appreciates the power of a deliberate wardrobe. 

“More of my life than not, I'm conscious of what I'm wearing and how it's perceived by others,” she said. “It's non-verbal communication, which is so powerful. You make that first impression before you even speak, and it counts.”

CREDIT: Angela Aaron

A Bohemian beginning

Aaron was born in Wichita, Kansas. “I like to say I'm from the ‘Middle West’ because it sounds a bit more exotic than Kansas,” she joked. But by 16, her independent spirit had led her to San Francisco, California. There, she stumbled her way into a career in costuming by working as a shop girl in the city's high-fashion boutiques. 

Her pivot to styling began unexpectedly in the late 1990s, when friends invited her to visit Prague in the Czech Republic. “I didn't expect to fall in love with the city, but there was this incredible international creative energy,” Aaron recalls. “I immediately sensed the opportunity to build something meaningful there.”

Captivated by Prague’s renowned Bohemian crystal craft, she launched a jewelry line of hair pins, necklaces, and rings that she placed in local boutiques. These connections opened doors into the city's fashion scene, where she began collaborating with an American expat photographer on editorial shoots for Prague’s top modeling agencies. Her styling work caught the attention of Hearst Publications, leading to her appointment as Fashion Editor for Czech Esquire. At the time, she was the youngest fashion editor across Hearst’s international portfolio, which also includes magazines like Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, ELLE, and Men’s and Women’s Health.

“My time in Prague helped me realize that there’s so much more behind the power of dressing than mere fashion trends,” Aaron said. “Dressing is a way to deliver confidence and self-assuredness. Czech men were only just emerging from communism.” The Eastern Bloc Communist state of Czechoslovakia was dissolved on December 31, 1992.

“This was the first time many were presented with options and considering their individualistic appearance,” Aaron continued. “Being part of that transformation, helping them discover personal style as an expression of identity, was profound. I liked the idea that I could arm them with the confidence to enter the rest of the Western world. It wasn’t just fashion. It was finding tools for self-expression.”

Aaron stayed in the role for two years before returning to the United States and California, where she connected with a friend from San Francisco and landed a job as an assistant stylist, working with rock artists from Mick Jagger to Lenny Kravitz to Steven Tyler. She later started working as a costume designer for magicians and circuses, beginning with the creation of a poster for the touring magic ensemble The Illusionists. The photoshoot for that poster took place in Las Vegas, and by the end of the two-day trip, Aaron had found her tribe.

“I met these world-class magicians, and they were all just really clever, hard-working guys, who had spent lifetimes on their craft and relatively no time on their appearance,” Aaron said. “That was the ‘aha!’ moment that changed the course of my career in a significant way.”

With that job, she got her foot in the door in the live performance and costume design space. It's been 13 years, and she hasn't looked back.

CREDIT: Angela Aaron

Formal on the outside, athlete underneath

Dressing artists and models for photo shoots is one thing. When it's time to get on stage and deliver a performance as a musician, magician, or athlete in the circus arts, it becomes an endeavor requiring an entirely different level of engineering.

“The concept of apparel that appears one way but has another function behind the scenes, that duality is the ethos of what I do in all my work,” Aaron explained. “It looks like a beautiful costume, but it's also a functional athlete's leotard. In Coregami's case, it looks like a stiff dress shirt, but it stretches and breathes. It appears formal, but underneath it all, there is measured engineering taking place to support the artists and allow them to perform at their peak ability and it can be thrown in the wash and hung to dry for quick turnaround and low maintenance.”

Aaron said the Russian cradle is the perfect example of an act that demands this measured engineering behind the scenes.

“I didn't want the performer sleeveless,” she explained. “I needed him to look like he was wearing tailored clothing, but again, he needed to feel like he was wearing athletic wear so that he could perform. He needs to get down in a deep squat, throw a woman in the air, and catch her as she falls back down.”

She paused. “In the past, one of our strategies with dress shirts was to cut off the sleeves and stitch the cuffs back onto the sleeve hems just to give performers the range of motion they needed. But with Coregami, we don't have to compromise the design anymore. The engineering is already built in. I've put these performers in Coregami shirts, and every single person says, ‘I've never felt or seen anything like this before.’ They get the polished, formal look without any of the restrictions.”

Puzzles, not problems

Aaron may work with everyone from scientists to magicians to movie stars, but she carries a few common principles with her no matter the job. The first is the mindset. “It's puzzles, not problems,” she says. The second is to remember the tools in her toolbelt. 

“Thank God I've dealt with so many puzzles that I have a sense of the tools that are available to me,” she said. “So when I run into a problem, I know the tools I have with alterations, changing the color, ways I can customize garments, and so on. I've learned on every job, and from every client.”

Aaron said a major misconception about working in the costume and fashion industry is that it's glamorous, or some overblown dress-up game.

“It's hard, hard work,” she said. “The amount of time that goes into the creation of a particular piece is monumental.”

When we spoke in 2025, Aaron had just returned from outfitting a cirque show in Australia via Thailand. She needed to design about 40 costumes for the show, and from the sketches to opening night, she worked on the designs for an average of 14 hours a day, six days a week, for four months.

“For a cirque production you design with function in mind, then you're searching for suitable materials,” she explained. “The hard part is that 99 percent of all the fabrics on the planet are not suitable for the work that I do. I need the rare fabric that can stand up to the physical and the longevity requirements. I need fabric that looks good on stage, but can be washed a thousand times and be worn by a person flying through the air. I need stuff that looks great, feels great, and lasts forever.”

She added that, in a world where AI seems to be streamlining every job, her work remains painstakingly analog. “There aren't a lot of automations,” she said. “There are just things that have to be done the long way to do it right.”

Despite all the effort, Aaron says the payoff is real and tangible. “It's an honor to do what I do,” she said. “The people I work with are high achievers in their respective fields. They’ve devoted their lives to their careers, art, profession, and talent, and they trust me to package them, so that their brilliance shines through. Their costumes need to be as good as they are, if not better.”

The honor is enormous, Aaron said, but there’s also no shortage of pressure. “I try not to think about it too much because I don't want it to cripple me, you know?”

The best preventative for that crippling anxiety, Aaron says, is simple: to care, deeply, about the work she does.

“I take it very seriously,” she said. "The garments have to be in service of the wearer; it's about them, not the clothing. So I bring them into the process. I ask them how they want to be seen, what they want to project. I ask them to give me adjectives that communicate what they want to deliver, and then I work with them until we deliver that.”

“The costume is enormously important,” she added. “It's there to support the artist, to communicate non-verbally what they need to project. When the person can walk into any space and deliver their best performance, that's when I know I've succeeded.”

But in the end, the costume is not the trick. The trick is making all that labor disappear, so the artist can step into the light and look like they were always meant to be there.

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