Twisted Sister costume designer to join Long Island music hall

When Suzette Guilot-Snider toured LIMEHOF, Long Island's hall of fame for music and entertainment, in October 2023, she found a room of Twisted Sister stage outfits she had sewn decades earlier, part of the museum's opening exhibit on the Island's club scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. The hall says it was the first time she had seen them displayed that way.

"I'm not the kind of person who looks for complements or really shows off my work, but it's pretty amazing to see them on display," she said after the tour, in remarks the hall released.

Next month the hall plans to put her name on the wall beside the costumes. Guilot-Snider will be inducted on Saturday, Nov. 14, and her husband, Dee Snider, Twisted Sister's frontman and already a member, will present her. Organizers say she is the first costume designer the hall has inducted. Earlier classes went beyond performers to include agents, producers, venues and executives.

The hall's creative director, Kevin O'Callaghan, said the group had long wanted to recognize "artists who from behind-the-scenes have shaped and branded the magic of these performers," adding, "Suzette Guilot-Snider is the embodiment of this." In his view, she "branded not only Twisted Sister, but the look of what would become known as the 'Hair Band' period of the 1980s and 90's."

Chairman Ernie Canadeo pointed to "her influence in the 80's rock and 'street rocker' fashion movement, and her many other contributions to fashion design."

Her own description of the goal was theatrical. "To me the excitement of Twisted [Sister] and their costumes was that I wanted that when you stepped in to see a show to see Twisted [Sister], it was like going to Broadway," she said in 2023.

Howard Stern's long-haired 1980s look is among the credits the hall lists for her. She became a stylist on his radio show after finishing Long Island Beauty School in 1987, adding hair and makeup to the sewing that first made her name. The 1990s brought newsroom work at WPIX, the 1996 Olympics and studio junkets for films, plus a steady run of music videos, photo shoots and theater jobs, many of which carried no credit, the hall says. Television later turned the camera on her own household in the reality series "Growing Up Twisted," and she made appearances on "Family Feud" and "Celebrity Wife Swap."

Long before any of that, she was a teenager with a needle. The hall says the Brooklyn-born, Long Island-raised designer sewed her first costume at 15 and was at the Fashion Institute of Technology a year later, after seamstress training through Nassau BOCES. At 18 she was in business for herself, outfitting rock bands and supplying Manhattan boutiques.

Twisted Sister entered the picture when she snuck into a Levittown club to see the band play. Snider, her boyfriend at the time, was her first client in the group, and in time every member wore her bright, color-coded designs. The couple married in 1981 and have four children.

The ceremony begins at 8:30 p.m. at the hall's museum, 97 Main Street in Stony Brook Village. Anyone can attend. Tickets, which the hall says are limited, are sold through its website; members could buy starting Oct. 17, two days before sales opened to everyone else.

More than 130 musicians and industry figures have been inducted since the nonprofit was founded in 2004, the organization says. Its territory takes in Brooklyn and Queens as well as Nassau and Suffolk, it has had a building in Stony Brook since 2022, and it funds scholarships and education programs for Long Island students.