DEBORAH RODRIGUEZ
WHO takes a closer look at the costumes in the latest reimagining of Charlie’s Angels
The US-born author, 59, gained recognition for The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, based on her experiences living in Afghanistan. Now based in Mexico, her new novel is Island on the Edge of the World (out now). Rodriguez tells WHO about the book that …
… captured her imagination as a child
The first book that really grabbed me was I Can Fly by Ruth Krauss. I love the last sentence: “I’m anything, that’s anything, that’s my way.”
… she remembers reading to herself I remember reading Charlotte’s Web by
E.B. White over and over. I understand death is a big theme in this book, but what caught my attention was the unlikely friendship between a spider and a pig.
… she was affected by as a teenager
My mom forced me to read Go Ask Alice [by Anonymous], a truly disturbing anti-drug book that seemed to work. I can’t say it was my very favourite book, but I do think it had a massive impact on my life. I never did drugs.
… she wrote, which has a character that’s stayed with her
Sunny from The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul. There is much about her that is very similar to me. And I was able to have Sunny accomplish things in Kabul that I was unable to, which felt very satisfying. … she would loved to have written Caravans: A Novel of Afghanistan by James A. Michener. I wish I had seen and experienced Afghanistan in the ’60s, and could have written such a classic book about such an amazing country.
… she has just written
Island transports readers deep into the complicated country of Haiti, where four very different women band together to find a lost child. Their search leads them into the dark world of the Haitian orphanage system.
Rebooting Charlie’s Angels (out now) presented Elizabeth Banks with a welcome challenge. “It was an opportunity to have fashion meet an action movie,” says the writer-director, who also appears in the film as boss Bosley to a new generation of Angels.
But that doesn’t mean the movie’s stars were dripping in couture. “Every girl that sees the movie should believe they could also be one of them,” says costume designer Kym Barrett, who looked to street style for inspiration to assemble a wardrobe that was both accessible and aspirational.
Banks agrees: “We wanted our girls to feel like real women who had [access to] a great closet.”
Sounds like heaven!
1
Jane (Ella Balinska) and Sabina (Kristen Stewart) have a sparkly “team dressing moment”, Banks calls it, in the movie’s finale. 2
Elena (Naomi Scott) takes down a thug in this ladylike frock. Barrett did a lot of shopping, but “we made the pieces that had to be very stunt-versatile”, she says.
3
“I tried to play with some tropes,” Banks says. “The closet is a great trope of so many women’s movies, and it’s also in, for instance, Bond.” 4 In a nod to past Angels, Barrett got this dirndl (Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore each wore one in the 2000 film) from the Columbia Pictures archive. 5
Banks says her Bosley dresses like “your chic aunt”. And like a fond relative, she kept giving her best costumes to the Angels. “They got the first pick,” Barrett admits, “so I’m surprised that Bosley came out as well as she did!”