How Did the Muppets Get Dressed? A New UMD Libraries Collection Shows Us.

Costume designers are trained to create clothes that fit any shape or size of body. But what if the wardrobe is for a subject who resembles two basketballs stacked on top of each other? (Sorry, Miss Piggy, but it’s true.)

Polly Smith dreamt up a ship captain’s coat and hat for Kermit the Frog; sequined-and-feathered dresses for Miss Piggy; and a George Costanza-esque flannel shirt for Fozzie Bear to wear in a “Seinfeld” parody, among hundreds of other looks as a longtime costume designer for “The Muppet Show,” “Sesame Street,” and other films and television shows created by the Jim Henson Company. Now, much of her creative output during her 40-year career is housed in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library (MSPAL), thanks to a gift she made in 2024. 

It adds to a trove of other materials housed in the University Libraries honoring the work of Jim ’60 and Jane Henson ’55, who are being celebrated on campus and in the community Sept. 20-26 for Henson Week.

“I’m very happy it’s at the University of Maryland,” Smith said of her memorabilia. “I’m happy it’s somewhere where it’s appreciated and not going to land in a landfill.”

Smith, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fashion design at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and a master’s degree in costume design at New York University, was working in the human realm, largely in Manhattan theater, during the ’70s. She had a major breakthrough in 1977, when she and two other women designed and patented the first sports bra, called the Jogbra. 

Not long after, a friend connected her with Calista Hendrickson, the lead costume designer for the Muppets. Hendrickson hired Smith to work on “The Muppet Movie.” 

Smith only had a few weeks before leaving for a previously scheduled vacation, enough time for her to make a shirt and jeans for Gonzo. After she returned, Hendrickson “bless her heart, tracked me down,” said Smith. “That little blue work shirt was so perfect that she wanted me.”

That was the beginning of Smith’s nearly 30-year relationship with the Jim Henson Company. She helmed costume design for the last season of “The Muppet Show,” designing and creating some 15-20 costumes a week. “There wasn’t time to sketch at all,” she said. “There was one other woman there sewing, and we pretty much had to talk it through.” 

Henson, Smith said, was “pretty much as advertised”: kind, supportive, appreciative of his employees’ work. Face time with the big man was at a premium. “If he was walking by, I could grab him and go ‘How about this?,’ but that would be all you could get.”

Muppets can’t pull off all kinds of clothes, Smith learned. Their unnatural skin tones mean that careful attention must be paid to what colors look good on them, and on camera. “Their body types are a little bizarre,” she said. “Very few of them have any shoulders to speak of.” 

For the 1982 film “The Dark Crystal,” Smith took inspiration from the clothes of ethnic groups around the world for her designs for the puppet race known as the Pod People. Their costumes were full of beadwork, embroidery and hand-painting done by Smith. “I made all these beautiful shoes for the species, but I should have been focusing on hats,” she said. 

Retired for the last five years, Smith had been ready to free up some much-needed real estate in her one-bedroom New York City apartment. In 2023, she was seated next to then-University of Maryland, College Park Foundation trustee Eric S. Francis '71 at a dinner in Washington, D.C. They chatted about her career, and when he asked what she was doing in retirement, she told him that she was cataloguing her library—drawings, television and film scripts, Muppets books and magazine articles, personal photos, records and CDs, and more—and hoping to donate it somewhere. 

Francis expressed interest in the collection and connected Smith to UMD Libraries to talk about an acquisition. 

John Davis, curator of MSPAL’s Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA), said that Smith’s collection is an opportunity to enhance both the library’s Henson-related holdings—about 70 videos of “Muppet Show” episodes, movies, a few of Henson’s creations from his time as a UMD student, and publications and ephemera related to the Muppets, “Fraggle Rock” and more—and its broader collection of materials related to costume design. Smith’s collection includes books about art, fashion history and clothing around the world.

Already, several classes and researchers have visited the collection to pore over its contents. “We yearned for more archival materials at SCPA related to Henson that we could display and that researchers could come here to work with,” said Davis. “Smith’s collection helped make that a reality for us.”