How Little Women‘s Oscar-Nominated Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran Shaped the Story
We’re looking back at some of our interviews with this year’s Oscar nominees in the lead-up to this Sunday’s telecast. This story was originally published on January 2. In the opening scene of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s adaption of Little Women, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) walks into the New York offices of the Weekly Volcano and ...
The Gentlemen’s Costume Designer Breaks Down the Felonious Finery
Early in his career, British director Guy Ritchie specialized in making good movies about bad guys. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and RocknRolla told stories about pugnacious criminals plying their trades in and around London’s working-class demimonde. His latest romp The Gentlemen (now in theaters) marks a return to form with its cast ...
Servant Costume Designer Caroline Duncan on Dressing M. Night Shyamalan’s Thriller
M. Night Shyamalan and Tony Basgallop’s Servant is one of Apple TV+‘s weirdest, wildest new shows. As always with a Shyamalan production, there are creepy twists aplenty on offer here, but there’s more to Servant than narrative surprises—there’s bracing oddness to it, amplified by terrific performances from a great cast and technical mastery from Shyamalan and Basgallop’s talented ...
How Color and Cut Transformed the Characters of Little Women
In the opening scene of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s adaption of Little Women, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) walks into the New York offices of the Weekly Volcano and offers a novella to its publisher Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), who chuckles at its jokes, editing as he reads. Jo sits across, hiding her ink covered hands and ...
Best of 2019: Watchmen’s Costume Designer Meghan Kasperlik on This Extraordinary Series
*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays! Now that Watchmen has made its glorious debut on HBO and confounded just about every expectation, we can say with confidence that Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons iconic graphic novel is a remarkable testament to the original and a bold, powerful piece ...
Sandy Powell & Christopher Peterson on Dressing De Niro (and More) in The Irishman
In Martin Scorsese’s three and a half-hour Netflix gangster opus, The Irishman, Robert De Niro plays real-life Philadelphia mobster Frank Sheeran across five decades. The film’s VFX team had their work cut out for them during Frank’s early years, while hair and makeup were responsible for the much aged De Niro who directly addresses the ...
Watchmen’s Costume Designer Meghan Kasperlik on This Extraordinary Series
Now that Watchmen has made its glorious debut on HBO and confounded just about every expectation, we can say with confidence that Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons iconic graphic novel is a remarkable testament to the original and a bold, powerful piece of original storytelling itself. The reason is Lindelof and his incredible ...
Costume Designer Mark Bridges Deconstructs Joker’s Bespoke, Lunatic Elegance
Joker last month became the highest-grossing R-rated motion picture in history, which means Joaquin Phoenix’s candy-colored three-piece suit created by costume designer Mark Bridges has imprinted itself on millions of eyeballs worldwide. Elegant, vivid and draped just so across the anti-hero’s frail frame, Joker’s outfit merits a permanent place in the movie villain hall of ...
Motherless Brooklyn Costume Designer Amy Roth’s Period Perfect Detail
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York. Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played ...
How Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Detailed the Look of Dolemite is My Name
If you ever meet Ruth E. Carter you’ll be enamored by her kindness. Her humbleness. The costume designer has seen her name pinned on multiple Spike Lee films like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam and Chi-Raq. She detailed Spielberg’s Amistad and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. In February of this year, she ...
How Us Costume Designer Kym Barrett Spooked Audiences With Jumpsuits
Happy Halloween! Quick, how many of you are donning red overalls and going as the deadly doppelgangers from Us? Even if writer/director Jordan Peele isn’t really into the idea, there’s no denying the power of this simple garb to instill terror. The monsters in Us are hatched not from labs or lagoons or outer space, ...
Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky on Ending Avengers: Endgame on a Muted Note
What do you wear when your schedule includes traveling through the quantum realm, reversing half of humanity being killed off, and attending the funeral of one of your most iconic comrades? In Avengers: Endgame, all the remaining characters from the Marvel universe get together to undo super-villain Thanos‘s work in the preceding Infinity War when ...
Jojo Rabbit Costume Designer Mayes Rubeo on Outfitting Taika Waititi’s Vision
Writer/director Taika Waititi, who is half Polynesian, half Jewish, had a very clear vision for his new film Jojo Rabbit. Inspired by the novel “Caging Skies” by Christine Leunens, this coming-of-age satire follows German boy Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) during the later part of World War II, as he shifts the opinions and beliefs with which ...
How Harriet Costume Designer Paul Tazewell Helped Portray an American Icon
For the last two decades, costume designer Paul Tazewell has been conquering Broadway. His eclectic range of work spans from revivals of such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Raisin in the Sun and Guys and Dolls to newer hits like The Color Purple, In the Heights, Memphis and Ain’t Too ...
How Joker Costume Designer Mark Bridges dressed The Clown Prince of Crime
The wait is over. Todd Phillips’ Joker dominated the box office with a record-breaking $93.5 million opening weekend. The fresh origin story is set circa 1980s Gotham where Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) lives a mundane life working as a clown to scrounge up enough cash to take care of his ailing mother Penny (Frances Conroy). ...
Digging Doom Patrol‘s Signature Look With Costume Designer Laura Jean Shannon
The members of the Costume Designers Guild who joined the panel at San Diego Comic-Con hope you watch their shows multiple times in hi-def and that you hit the pause button now and then. They have always been obsessed with detail and they have always enjoyed putting little in-jokes and Easter eggs into those details ...
How Dark Phoenix‘s Key Costumer Handled a Mutant Wardrobe
Co-writer and director Simon Kinberg’s Dark Phoenix was a very different kind of X-Men film for a variety of reasons. One is the fact that he removed X-Men from the title altogether. This was done to put the focus squarely on the troubled shoulders of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), whose evolution, so to speak, into the titular Dark Phoenix is ...
John Wick 3 Costume Designer Conjures Elegance Amid the Carnage
Italian-born costumer Luca Mosca pulled off a major sartorial coup in 2014 when he designed the instantly iconic suit worn by Keanu Reeves in John Wick. The elegant silhouette impacted pop culture to the point where Amazon now sells $139 “John Wick Suit” knock-offs. But to see the real deal, action fans have been flocking ...
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson on Outfitting the Live-Action Aladdin
In Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin, Disney revisits Agrabah, the fictional Arabian land where a plucky street thief and his incorrigible monkey sidekick cross paths with an unlikely love interest, the local sultan’s daughter, Princess Jasmine. Similar to the 2017 Beauty and the Beast remake, turning a bustling, fictional historic animated township into a ...
Costume Designer Jennifer Rogien on Outfitting Netflix’s Brilliant Russian Doll
As Nadia, Russian Doll’s wise-cracking heroine who dies repeatedly only to be reborn in the bathroom of her birthday party, Natasha Lyonne looks the part of the quintessential New York woman (which, in real life, she is), her all-black ensemble from boots to blouse easily complementing the withering energy with which she confronts her friends, ...
