The costume designer Martin Pakledinaz died earlier this month, after a years-long struggle with cancer. Pakledinaz grew up near Detroit, where his father worked for General Motors. His first big theatre job was as an assistant to Theoni V. Aldredge on “Ballroom,” the 1979 Michael Bennett show. “All I did was buy shoes and deliver them,” he said. “It was fun, and I didn’t know what I was doing.” He went on to more musicals, as well as plays, opera, and dance. His great gift was an ability to design lovely, stylish, wearable clothes that looked like real clothes but then went a little further, to the edge of fantasy. I will remember him especially for the sumptuous silver-laced black gown that he created in 2004 for Stephanie Blythe in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Rodelinda”—she looked so glamorous—and for the Greek tunics, in muted colors, that he made for the dancers in Mark Morris’s “Socrates,” in 2010. Showing just enough of the body, but not too much, and trailing on the air softly, they seemed to symbolize Socrates’ dignified death, and the passage of his soul. Now, in memory, they speak of Pakledinaz’s end. He was fifty-eight. ♦
