Marina Draghici, Fela! Costume Designer, Shops for Inspiration IF you plan on conjuring up a 1970s dance club in Lagos, Nigeria, on Broadway, a fine place to start is a patch of Africa tucked along a Harlem cross street. Through a cheap pastel archway on West 116th Street stands the Malcolm Shabazz Market, better known as the African market. And there, on a recent bitter cold Friday, was Marina Draghici, a set and costume designer whose work can be seen in both "Fela!," the surprise Broadway hit about the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, and in movie theaters across the country, where the director Lee Daniels's equally surprising and Oscar-favored film "Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire" is still in release. Ms. Draghici is the wizard who glamorized the overweight, unknown Gabourey Sidibe for dream sequences in "Precious"; who transformed Mariah Carey into a drab social worker (with a faint mustache, as Ms. Carey pointed out) in the film; and who pulled off the feat of recreating the aura of funk and the signature Afrocentric look of the dancers at Fela Kuti's legendary Shrine club in Lagos, on the stage of the Eugene O'Neill theater. Making Ms. Carey mousy may have been a challenge. Making Africa come alive on West 49th Street was easy enough, for reasons that could be discerned as Ms. Draghici rummaged through the tiny, cramped booths at the Shabazz Market. Wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, the booths there are jammed with indigo, mud cloth, tie-and-dye, batik, wax-resist prints, cowrie-shell waistbands, and ropes of beads thick as hawsers or as finely wrought as a micro-braid. "I've bought a lot of things here, a lot," said Ms. Draghici, visiting a booth run by Sabina Migan, an immigrant from the Republic of Benin in West Africa. Layered for the weather in a black puffer coat, a black wool cap and sturdy black lace-up shoes from Jil Sander, it was Ms. Draghici whose Western-style severity seemed exotic, set against the clamorous hues in Ms. Migan's shop. "We made a decision early on that recreating 1970s costume was not that interesting," Ms. Draghici said. What we were trying to do was a piece that had a fresher look, a modern look rather than to literally recreate the Shrine. The traditional clothes worn by Fela's so-called queens, some of them also his wives, at his Lagos nightclub risked losing something in translation to Broadway, Ms. Draghici explained. They don't hang well. "Look at this," she remarked as she yanked out bolts and lengths of cloth from Ms. Migan's trove, unfolding a length of electric-blue cotton stamped with acid-yellow flowers and printed at the hem with the manufacturer's name: Mulato Wax Prints. Isn't that color beautiful? Stuff like that gives you ideas. That the fabric was indeed gorgeous reminded an observer of a little-remarked truth behind the lushness of fashion in much of Africa. Color is among the least costly elements of adornment; the more materially straitened a culture, the more color one tends to see. This fact also helps explain the persistent popularity of black in the wealthy industrialized West. "When we looked at Fela's costumes, he had in his closet every color possible," Ms. Draghici said. But we had to focus on colors that would let Fela be the focus on the stage. The original turquoise jump suits worn by Sahr Ngaujah and Kevin Mambo, the actors who alternate in the taxing lead role, were made of double-knit polyester, a fabric that for all its onetime ubiquity is hard to find nowadays. Tracking down rare bolts of vintage cloth, Ms. Draghici had them overprinted in period blues and pinks by a manufacturer in the Midwest. "You'd think that double-knit polyester was the most common thing in the world," she said. But when you go to look for it, you find maybe a half a yard. In undertaking both "Fela!" and "Precious," Ms. Draghici was keen to sidestep what she called the brightness trap, the tendency, particularly when working with African or African-American actors, to scatter vivid hues around as a design default. "Red is overused anyway as a theatrical color, and I know because I've used it a lot," said Ms. Draghici, whose resume includes stints at the Public Theater and the Paris National Opera. "In "Precious," the scarf that Gabby carries throughout the movie is actually a tomato-ey orange color," she added, referring to Ms. Sidibe. "I didn't want symbolism that makes you think of "Schindler's List." " If Ms. Draghici employed color judiciously in "Fela!," when it came to pattern she held little back. It helped that riotously printed fabrics are so readily obtained from dealers like Ms. Migan, whose imports from Benin, Nigeria and Ghana are sorted in categories descending, as the shop owner explained, from "super classy" to "very cheap." At $45 for about 10 feet of fabric, the flower-printed stuff from Mulato Wax Prints falls into the "middle class" range, and though one can spend a lot more for goods at the African market, it is also possible that, for $60, a tailor like Sheik Diop can run up an entire ensemble consisting of a billowing gown and a head wrap known as a gele on his weary old Singer sewing machine. "Geles are a nightmare," said Ms. Draghici as she pushed open the sliding door to Mr. Diop's booth, where storage shelves sagged under the weight of pastel colored eyelet, and whose walls seemed to bulge outward from the sound of keening Islamic devotional music. A single gele is used in "Fela!," an elaborate wrap for the head of Fela Kuti's mother, the Nigerian activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. "The fabric is some bizarre stuff that is basically like vinyl," said Ms. Draghici. Two women came in and demonstrated for us. They wrapped it around and fastened it with straight pins until you got this thing you could lift off and put on like a crown. So towering and architectonic is the head wrap that it reads as a regal symbol from even the nosebleed heights of the Eugene O'Neill. Like Ms. Sidibe's fantasy gowns and boas in "Precious," it telegraphs the nobility of a character with a difficult, if not an altogether benighted life. "You can say about both projects, that you have to know where to stop," Ms. Draghici said. You have to ask where do you push the envelope to communicate your impressions of a character to an audience clearly, without ever falling into caricature.