'Worn Stories' dazzling animation is unlike anything you've seen on TV

When it came to adapting her bestselling collection Worn Stories for a TV show, Emily Spivack had a mighty task and a powerful vision.

Worn Stories illustrates the deep emotional connections humans form with pieces of clothing — whether through a sense of community, nostalgia, confidence, or more. In the book, these stories come with a simple photo, but for the Netflix version, “I wanted to really amp it up,” Spivack tells Mashable. She knew she wanted animation, a mix of archival and original imagery, different mediums, and different artists. So how the heck did she pull it off?

She asked.

It seems more than obvious, but in a time when Hollywood repeatedly reckons with poor representation as a result of untapped markets, Spivack’s audacity to exhaust research and resources is tremendous. An artist herself, she tapped into her network of friends and friends-of-friends while the show’s producers and directors did the same. In some cases she would reach out to someone whose work caught her eye on social media.

"The animation... made it so much more textural and gave a different level of depth," Spivack says during a recent phone call with Mashable. "That's where it came from: A desire to take these stories and bring them to life in a different way."

Via Giphy

Spivack's team then met with the artists and figured out which visual styles should be paired with which story. The story of Simon Doonan's biker shorts would draw on archival imagery from the 1980s, amidst the aerobics craze and the AIDs epidemic. The story of Ben Bostic and his boots had to be understated, given how it intertwined with life and death. Charo's story would mirror the sparkly, DIY aesthetic of her beloved dress, and astronaut Michael Massimino's story came to life with collages, retro and futuristic at the same time (above).

Other than a rough draft or video, the artists worked with relative freedom and regular notes from production. Half the stories came from Spivack's book, while the rest were brand-new for Netflix. Spivack and her team could easily have settled on one animator or style to tell their subjects’ stories, but she says it was never even a conversation.

“We approached each story on its own, because we knew that the themes were overlapping, and the way in which we shot the interviews were overlapping,” she says. “There would be a lot of things that would tie the stories together, but we did want each story to have the benefit of being able to expand on its own through the animation.”

The only exception is episode 1, “Community,” which features multiple segments animated by Ariel Costa a.k.a. BlinkMyBrain, but that was a deliberate choice based on the shared sensibility of the anecdotes.

"My vision for the show was to make something really beautiful, to interpret these stories with respect and kindness and creativity and thoughtfulness, and having fun with the interpretation," Spivack says. "It wouldn't have served the stories to just have had a talking head, in that that the stories were so brilliant and colorful and rich. I felt like they needed to have animation to to bring that out."

Worn Stories is now streaming on Netflix.