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Filming sex scenes can be fraught. These New Yorkers want to make them safer.
By
Precious Fondren
Published Feb 16, 2024
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Photo by Precious Fondren / Gothamist
By
Precious Fondren
Published Feb 16, 2024
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When the film and TV industry returned 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.
Covvier's modesty garments.
Photo by Precious Fondren / Gothamist
Shapiro and Smith spent years working on sets and in overlapping production jobs, and 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 although 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.
Shapiro works on a modesty garment.
Photo by Precious Fondren / Gothamist
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 the 1972 classic “The Last Tango in Paris,” said she had felt “humiliated” by the film’s infamous sex scene, which she said wasn’t in the script. Schneider added that she hadn’t known how to advocate for herself.
Smith and Shapiro say that these kinds of pressures are not wholly a thing of the past.
“It's truly heartbreaking and you feel so bad for these actors who are in these scenes,” Smith added. “And you're a part of it in a way because you're on the job and you feel helpless.”
They recalled a situation in 2018 when an actress on a TV set was worried she might be fired if she spoke up about how uncomfortable she was filming numerous sex scenes with different men.
“We would try to protect her the best we could,” Shapiro said. “We gave her nude underwear with foam inserts that we made ourselves, but she never felt comfortable.”
Smith and Shapiro came up with the idea for their company while on the set of the HBO series “Mrs. Fletcher,” which featured many intimate scenes.
Shapiro said they were also encouraged to start their business by the show’s intimacy coordinator, Claire Warden, who has worked in the film, TV and theater industry for more than 20 years.
Warden noticed the pieces Smith and Shapiro created on “Mrs. Fletcher” provided coverage, were durable, and had a barrier to prevent skin-to-skin contact between actors.
In a phone interview, Warden said actors traditionally weren't given quality coverings until intimacy coordinators' jobs became more formalized on movie sets around 2018.
She said men were usually given flimsy products, akin to what she called a “cock sock,” which didn’t provide a barrier to skin-to-skin contact, and that women were often coerced into on-screen nudity.
“Actors were taken advantage of,” she said.
Actor Matthew Bishop used one of Covvier’s padded pouches for his nude scenes in “American Horror Story,” in which he played “Big Daddy.” He said wearing the garment made his job easier because he didn’t have to worry about the pouch falling off.
“The garment really just makes it so that we can keep it as real as possible, but there is that separation, which keeps it as professional as possible given the circumstances,” he said.
Shapiro and Smith said they're working on a fourth style. It’ll be a “low-profile” version of their pouch, designed for scenes featuring nudity but little contact.
For now, they gather about once a month in Shapiro’s Williamsburg apartment to fulfill dozens of orders, and have shipped their products as far as Australia.
“If I can't make sets safer in any other way, this is the way I know I can make a set safer,” said Shapiro.
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Precious Fondren
Precious is a former WNYC & Gothamist culture reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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