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Entries in Costume Design (370)

Friday
Dec112020

Between Anachronism and Pastiche: The Look of "Mank"

by Cláudio Alves

After months of great anticipation and even greater expectations, David Fincher's Mank is here. For some, the picture's a rousing success, a politicized look at Old Hollywood's insidiousness through the eyes of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. For others, it's a disappointment, history and fantasy mushed together with pretension and aggrandizement. I find myself in the middle of these reactions, though my immediate feelings were probably more inclined to the latter than the former.

Still, a good way to consider a film's power is to see how it lasts in one's memory. For me, Mank has aged oddly in the last week. It's not that my perspective is warmer but that I can't shake it off. As the days go by I find myself ruminating on David Fincher's formal conception of this manky flick, its weirdness and intrinsic contradictions…

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Thursday
Dec102020

Michael O'Connor and the costumes of “Ammonite”

by Cláudio Alves

As L. P. Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." When looking back at times gone by, filmmakers often find themselves as the intermediates between the audience and that strange land. Most try, in some regard, to be interpreters, translating foreign tongues to recognizable idioms, adapting what came before to contemporary sensibilities.

Others, like Michael O'Connor are more pedagogue than translator. In his work the oddities of the past are shown naked, and it's the audience that learns how to comprehend a new language. The British costume designer has made a name for himself with great feats of period couture. While purposefully austere, the Victorian wardrobe of Francis Lee's Ammonite is one of O'Connor's best creations yet…

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Saturday
Nov212020

The Best Costumes of 1987

by Cláudio Alves

Before we say goodbye to 1987, our final "year of the month" to coincide with the Smackdown events, we must look at one final Oscar category: the Best Costume Design race. It was a stellar line-up, dominated by films set during the first half of the 20th century, whose designs spanned from epic opulence to modest realism. The nominees were…

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Sunday
Nov082020

The animated couture of "Over the Moon"

by Cláudio Alves

As computer animation evolves, the making of these features becomes ever more complex. A few decades ago, it might have seemed silly to have cinematographers collaborating with cartoon filmmakers, but that's no longer the case. Roger Deakins, for instance, had a crucial part in making the How to Train Your Dragon movies look the way they did. The same goes for costume design.

Once upon a time, what an animated figure wore was, more or less, inseparable from character design and you rarely had a specific costume department in such productions. With films like Disney's Frozen and Laika's gigantic stop-motion projects, there's increasing space for costume designers in the making of animated movies. The latest example is Netflix's Over the Moon

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Saturday
Oct312020

Horror Costuming: Bram Stoker's Dracula

by Cláudio Alves

For the past few weeks, I've been exploring the greatness of costume design in the realm of horror cinema. None of the movies we discussed, not even those somewhat embraced in the awards circuit, got many golden laurels for their feats of costuming. That's, unfortunately, what usually happens to cinematic excellence that happens to manifest outside the boundaries of prestige drama. However, there are always a few exceptions that prove the rule. Such is the case of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The picture won three Academy Awards, including the prize for Best Costume Design.

The creations of the late Eiko Ishioka are some of the weirdest and most spellbinding costumes ever made for cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, she's the greatest recipient of my favorite Oscar. Michael has recently explored his first foray into the dark marvels of Dracula, and Jason has previously explored Eiko's Oscar win. Nonetheless, I couldn't let Halloween go by without revisiting this most wondrous of big-screen wardrobes. Join me on this deep dive into the nightmarish fantasy of Eiko Ishioka's Dracula

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