When the film and TV industry went back to work last fall, so did New York City based set costumers Lucy Shapiro and Taylor Smith. But they hope audiences never see their work.
In September 2022, Shapiro and Smith started Covvier, a “modesty garment” company. The name is a portmanteau of “cover” and “barrier” and the products, which cost around $60 each, are designed to cover genitalia during sex or nude scenes.
After spending years on sets, in which they’ve overlapped on production jobs, Shapiro and Smith said they often found themselves scrambling to produce cover-ups out of yoga mats or foam shoe insoles.
“There’s nothing worse than going to your actor and being like, ‘Alright, these are the garments that I tried to make for you,” said Smith, 35, in an interview at Shapiro’s Williamsburg apartment last month.
She said modesty garments “should be as standard as giving them a bra to wear for a scene.”
And yet there are no standards in the industry around what actors wear during sex scenes. Smith and Shapiro said that, while wardrobe departments have always used some kind of covering for scenes, the pieces were often “frankensteined” together.
At a time when the movie and television industry is increasingly recognizing the need for intimacy coordinators on sets, Smith and Shapiro want modesty garments to be written into actors’ contracts. And they want theirs to be go-to pieces.
Smith said that too often, actors are put in situations where they feel obligated to go completely nude for a scene or lose their job.
Sharon Stone has famously said she was tricked into not wearing her underwear in her infamous scene from the 1992 thriller “Basic Instinct.” And in 2007, actress Maria Schneider, who starred in 1972 classic “The Last Tango in Paris,” said she had felt “humiliated” by the film’s infamous sex scene, that it wasn’t in the script and that she hadn’t known how to advocate for herself.
Smith and Shapiro say that these…
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