Miles White

Miles White

Miles E. White (July 27, 1914 – February 17, 2000) was a top costume designer of Broadway musicals for 25 years. He is known in the entertainment industry for his well rendered, prolific, imaginative and witty designs. He won recognition, including four Donaldson Awards and two Tony Awards. The Donaldson Award was established in 1944 in honor of the founder of Billboard, W. H. Donaldson (1864–1925). These awards were offered in numerous categories, including best new play, best new musical, best performances, best debuts, and best costumes and set designs. These awards were discontinued in 1955, when it was recognized that they were redundant and overshadowed by more prestigious honors.

Miles White only designed five movies, but three of them garnered him Oscar nominations. These were The Greatest Show on Earth, There's No Business Like Show Business, and Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days.

White designed costumes for Rodgers and Hammerstein's first two Broadway hits, Oklahoma! and Carousel, and dozens of other musicals as well as ballets, ice shows, circuses, and TV productions. His career spanned seventy years. His last Broadway show was Tricks, in 1973, for which he received a Tony nomination. As musicals were revived, the productions occasionally used his designs. This was true for Fall River Legend for the American Ballet Theater. In 1989 he redesigned the "High Button Shoes" number for Jerome Robbins' Broadway.

Broadway's current top costume designer, William Ivey Long, referred to Miles White as "his hero," in a recording made of the March 20, 2000, memorial service at the York Theater. In this audio recording, he also cited White's "exquisite drawings," works of art in themselves, in addition to their role as working design sketches.

Douglas Colby, expert on theater design, tells the story of accompanying Miles to a performance of Fall River Legend several years ago. He said, "The distinguished costume designer Patricia Zipprodt approached the urbane, monocled gentleman I was accompanying, my friend Miles White, and introduced him to her guests as 'God.' One understood what she meant," Colby concluded. This information appears in the Playbill booklet distributed at the March 20, 2000 Memorial Service.

In her book Theater in America, Mary C. Henderson mentioned that Miles White's designs were molded by both dance and the circus. "His costumes are constructed to move with the performer's body, not an easy feat," she wrote. After Oklahoma!, she noted, he dominated musical comedy costuming for more than 25 years."