Horror Costuming: Stoker

by Cláudio Alves

We carry part of our parents with us at all times. Whether through the body their genetics defined, or the mind molded and perchance scarred by their influence, their absence, their love, we are made in their image. Some might rejoice in that intrinsic truth, others resent it. Park Chan-wook's only English-language feature, Stoker, understands this with caustic assuredness. From its opening salvos, the script and images call attention to matters of blood and descendence, materializing the familial bonds through costume design…

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Doc Corner: 'Mucho Mucho Amor' and 'House of Cardin'

By Glenn Dunks

When we look back at our 2020 times stuck indoors for endless hours, I wonder what people will remember. Among the much more high profile television series and surprise album drops, I suspect one title many will find themselves reaching for in their memories is Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado. I have to admit to being entirely oblivious to the focus of Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch's documentary except a well-timed ‘appearance’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race just a week before the film premiered on Netflix. Unless I caught him on an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael, I guess. 

What I discovered—and what I imagine is what will allow for fond remembrance of the movie once we are long out of isolation hubs—was something so very sweetly tender. A film that’s every bit as fabulous as the elaborate, bejewelled cloaks and capes its subject was famed for.

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Clueless @ 25: The Best Costumes!

by Cláudio Alves

As previously mentioned in my "Emmas of Yore" miniseries, Clueless is one of the best cinematic adaptations of a Jane Austen novel. By modernizing the core narrative of Emma and stripping it of historical detail, Amy Heckerling was able to create a teen movie classic whose biting satire exists hand-in-hand with a sense of overwhelming affection for every character on-screen. Humor and romance are well-balanced, with the comedic element always taking precedence over the love story – as it should be when tackling one of Austen's prickliest and funniest novels.

That being said, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Clueless' release, we're not going to focus so much on its genius screenplay or how it updates Regency-era social commentary to the Beverly Hills of the 1990s. Fashion is our concern this time around or, more accurately, we're exploring the costume design of Clueless. Since 1995, Mona May's colorful stylings have become as iconic as the screenplay's witty dialogues and, in a fair world, they might have even won the designer some well-deserved Oscar gold… 

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Hepburn, Givenchy and "Funny Face": A Match Made in Heaven

by Cláudio Alves

Throughout the histories of cinema and fashion, there has seldom existed a more glorious collaboration than that of Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy. The English actress and the French couturier first worked together in the 1954 movie Sabrina, a costuming masterpiece whose iconic fashions and contentious crediting have been previously written about at The Film Experience by abstew. After his uncredited contribution to that Billy Wilder classic, Givenchy would go on to dress Hepburn on and off-screen many more times, though he always got the credit he deserved after the Sabrina kerfuffle.

That was wise of him since, in 1957, he received an Academy-Award nomination for what is one of Audrey Hepburn's most stylish screen adventures, the indelible Funny Face… 

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Phantom Thread: When bad fashion is good costume design

by Cláudio Alves

There are many ways to talk about Phantom Thread. My favorite Paul Thomas Anderson production is, among other things, one of the best films about romantic love I've ever seen, looking at the way that loving another person is to willingly become vulnerable to them. To love is, in essence, to open ourselves up to the possibility of mutually assured destruction. The picture is also a canny dissection of the muse/artist relationship, one that illuminates matters of obsession, dynamics between the sexes, the luxuriant pleasure of touching silk, and gazing upon that which is beautiful. It's all that and much more, a multifaceted jewel of cinema about which I could write endless rhapsodies of passionate praise.

Still, for this piece, let's look at the aspect of the movie that earned one of its makers an Oscar (and a jet ski). I invite you all to peruse the costumes Mark Bridges created for Phantom Thread, a film which proves that lackluster fashion can be masterful costume design…

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