Death in Venice @50: Piero, I love you

by Cláudio Alves

For a cinephile, costume enthusiast, and Oscar obsessive like myself, there are few things more enticing than the lone nominee. That elusive movie that gets nominated only for the Best Costume Design statuette. Such is the case of Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel Death in Venice. To celebrate the film's 50th anniversary, I decided to explore that wondrous wardrobe that caught AMPAS' collective eye. It's one of the best works of Piero Tosi, a man who may have been the greatest costume designer to ever create for film.

After five unsuccessful Oscar nominations, Piero Tosi won an Honorary Academy Award in 2014, the first costume designer to ever do so. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving artist...

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Lana @ 100: Love Has Many Faces

Celebrating Lana Turner's Centennial. Here's Baby Clyde...

1965 was the year Martin Luther King marched on Selma, The Civil Rights Act was signed and Malcolm X was assassinated. The Vietnam War was raging, London was swinging, The Beatles played Shea Stadium and Dylan went electric. The times they were a changing, but some things stayed the same because this was also the year Lana Turner starred in the trashiest of all her tawdry melodramas, the Acapulco-set potboiler Love Has Many Faces or as it should have been called ‘Lana Has Many Costume Changes’.

In it she plays Kit Chandler a rich, international glamourpuss, with luxury apartments around the globe, who chooses to reside in the luxury Mexican resort with her estranged husband Pete (Cliff Robertson). When a dead body washes up on the shore it transpires that the deceased beach boy was one of Lana’s many conquests and she's the main suspect in the murder investigation....

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Angels & Insects @ 25: Entomological Perversions

by Cláudio Alves

Angels & Insects arrived in US theaters 25 years ago. The picture had had its premiere at the 48th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or but it would take several more months for it to get a commercial release in the UK and the States. Once that happened, Phillip Haas' adaptation of an A.S. Byatt novel received plenty of acclaim from such renowned critics as Roger Ebert, conquering enough buzz to get a surprising, if deserved, Best Costume Design Oscar nomination. Nowadays, the flick isn't talked about, which is a terrible injustice as far as I'm concerned.

To rectify such lack of contemporary discussion, let's try to explore the sensuous perversions and entomological nightmares of this tale insects, incest, and insidiousness…

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One Night in Miami: Telling a story through suits

by Cláudio Alves

Limitations aren't always the enemy of style or art. Tight parameters can be the fertile ground from which creativity grows and thrives. In the world of costume design, the dynamic between restraint and imagination is especially obvious when one needs to dress men in formal attire. Since the early 19th century, western men's fashion has solidified around a masculine uniform with little in the ways of variation – the suit. To find ways to make that fashion standard into a storytelling tool, one must excel at finding the little details that make all the difference. Recently, Regina King's One Night in Miami is a good example of this brand of costuming excellence…

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Restoration @ 25: Honoring the great James Acheson

by Cláudio Alves

In 1995, Michael Hoffman's Restoration adapted the best-selling novel of Rose Tremain into a sumptuous dramatization of 17th century England. Despite some dumbfounding feats of miscasting and a disjointed structure upended by the advent of the Black Plague, the picture's quite beautiful to look at and features some of the best Baroque designs in film history. The scenography leans into the theatricality of Charles II's court, creating an airless world gilded in gold. The costumes, in turn, indulge in the absurdities of 1660s fashion, conjuring a world of radical contrasts between royal splendor and the austere rigor of Puritan charity.

Both achievements won trophies at the 68th Academy Awards. As usual, I'm more interested in the work of Oscar-winning costume design by the great James Acheson. Let's explore the man's genius, his filmography, and the Baroque stylings of the 25-year-old Restoration…

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