Submitted photo Boardman Township native Jill Bream works as costume designer for the film unit of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Jill Bream accompanied her mother on shopping trips to Gabriel Brothers in Boardman when she was a child.

“I remember going rack to rack through every single article of clothing, taking stock of what was there,” she said. “I remember from a young age being able to pick out the better quality and some of the things that were insanely cheap.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but that skill would come in handy professionally for the 1999 Boardman High School graduate, who now works as costume designer for the film unit of “Saturday Night Live.”

She’s done everything from helping turn the show’s female cast members into “Back Home Ballers” to reimagining “Sesame Street” characters for a gritty movie spoof in the style of “The Joker” called “Grouch.”

Bream took a circuitous path to her current career. She majored in film at Boston’s Emerson College, occasionally doing costumes and props for friends’ film projects. During a semester in Los Angeles, she worked on a couple of television shows and landed a job as a stylist assistant on commercials.

“That’s kind of how I dipped my toe in this,” she said.

She liked the job but hated L.A., so she she decided to relocate to New York. Within a week she was hired as an assistant to celebrity stylist June Ambrose, who shaped the look of such hip-hop icons as Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and the Notorious B.I.G.

Celebrity stylists dress artists for awards shows, television appearances and other public events. That may sound glamorous, but Bream said most of the job was, “Being at the mercy of whatever showroom wants to give you clothing.”

She gravitated back to television. A job on the CBS series “Person of Interest” got her into the costume designers’ union, and she’s worked for “Saturday Night Live” since 2014, starting as an associate designer before becoming the film unit’s costume designer last season.

While many parts of the late-night show are live, “SNL” increasingly has become dependent upon segments that usually are filmed on Friday and incorporated into the live show. An average episode has three filmed segments, and those are the sketches on which Bream works.

“I’m the architect of how the clothing looks,” she said. “I do the shopping or the buying of fabric and hand it over to the costumers … who are like the construction workers. I design the clothes and they maintain them.”

Working on “Saturday Night Live” comes with its own unique set of challenges. Movies often have months of preproduction to devote to every detail. Television series normally have weeks after the script is finished for preproduction before the shooting starts.

On “SNL” the sketches are picked late Wednesday evening, and filming starts Friday morning. That gives Bream and her team about 24 hours to come up with everything needed to recreate the look of a Hollywood blockbuster, capture the style of a costume drama like “Downton Abbey” or clothe 100 extras.

“In a really busy week, I’ll work from 6 a.m. (Thursday) until 4 a.m. (Friday),” she said.

Sometimes it’s easy. For one of Kate McKinnon’s appearances as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Bream found the identical dress at Lord & Taylor. But for one of Tina Fey’s spots as former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, costumers had to hand stitch every bead to recreate Palin’s beaded Bolero jacket.

Another requirement of the job is “translating the writer brain,” Bream said, trying to deliver the vision of writers who often are better at crafting one-liners than articulating their fashion preferences.

And in many cases, less is more.

“If the clothing isn’t supposed to be the joke, don’t make it the joke,” she said. “It can distract from the joke too much.”

Her work on “SNL” has led to other projects. She served as costume designer for the Netflix special “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch” (Mulaney is a former “SNL” writer), the Comedy Central series “The Other Two” (created by former “SNL” writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider) and the upcoming film “Vampires vs. the Bronx” (directed by “SNL” segment director Osmany Rodriguez).

Bream was working on “SNL” and “The Other Two” simultaneously when the television industry — and nearly everything else — shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was a real 180, working every day from morning until late at night, and then it stopped,” she said. “The work-life balance shifted.”

Because the coronavirus was so prevalent in New York, Bream and her husband, singer-songwriter Eric Hutchinson, and their daughter have been staying in Delaware for the last four months. She’s waiting to find out whether “Saturday Night Live” will return in late September with something resembling a traditional production schedule.

“Unfortunately, I just don’t know. Everything keeps changing and it’s hard to get a grasp on anything,” Bream said. “By Labor Day, I hope things will be a bit more normal, but you think you have a handle on it and then you’re flipped upside down again.”

agray@tribtoday.com