FANTASY LOOKS KEEP IT SIMPLE AND SO RETRO
BY JANET KINOSIAN >>> Science-fiction film costume designers create sartorial future worlds and, if they get it right, can influence current trends along the way. (Note: Ryan Gosling’s shearling coat in “Blade Runner 2049” is already a big winter men’s trend.) Here, we ask a few forward-looking costume designers to describe their favorite piece from each of their current films and, interestingly, the choices were anything but outrageously fantastical — they ranged from the lovely and nostalgic to the manly and the fussy.
‘THE SHAPE OF WATER’ LUIS SEQUEIRA
‘It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film.’ — LUIS SEQUEIRA, costume designer for “The Shape of Water”
Luis Sequeira’s favorite costume is Elisa’s (Sally Hawkins) enchanting dreamsequence dress. Set against the film’s lush, dark, moody world of the early ’60s, the black-and-white dream sequence “is pure light and love,” says Sequeira. “It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film.”
Director Guillermo del Toro wanted to use the 1930s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies that Elisa and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) watch within the film as inspiration. The challenge was “to not copy any one outfit but use them as an inspiration for Elisa’s daydream,” Sequeira says. He collected fabric swatches from Los Angeles, New York, Montreal and Toronto, and combined his favorites to create the fluid ivory palette for the dress.
“Guillermo was always interested in seeing the process throughout the project,” he explains. “We were lucky as almost every day he came by to see us.” The design team started with a half-scale muslin version and ultimately made five full incarnations of the dress, several of which Hawkins wore for dance rehearsals. As most of the fabrics ranged in price from $80 to $450 a yard (with a final cost of over $9,000 in materials), “we needed to be certain of the final design before proceeding with the real fabrics.”
Says Sequeira: “Although the sequence in which the dress appears is so short — I think it’s a striking piece of cinema. It was magical when we shot the scene and even more so when we all watched it on the big screen.”
‘It’s pretty clear what he loves and what he doesn’t love. He loved this.’ — RENÉE APRIL, on director Denis Villeneuve’s reaction to Agent K’s coat ‘It was important to tread the edge of discomfort and over-fussiness to give Gal plenty to react to. It was very funny.’ — LINDY HEMMING, on a particularly uncomfortable period dress
‘BLADE RUNNER 2049’ | RENÉE APRIL
A favorite costume? Naturally, Renée April loved “the most difficult one, the principal piece, his coat,” she says. “He wears it all the time, so you have to be very precise and sure of what you’re doing.” She notes that part of the challenge was the fact that there were so many copies of the jacket needed: “When you have one costume you have to repeat it about 15 times and you need hundreds of meters of fabric; and then we had to laminate and paint all of it.
“People think the coat is leather,” she continues, “but it’s really cotton that is then laminated. And when we did that process the color became a bit dark so we had to paint over all the fabric.” The fur collar is “cheap fake fur, since if it were real it would have looked too lush, too perfect. Of course, we had to paint that as well,” she says and laughs. Her original sketches and prototypes were furless, but director Denis Villeneuve kept saying “how cold and brutal the weather was, and I thought, why not try fur? I liked it so we kept it.”
Gosling’s only request was that the coat for his Agent K be shortened a few inches to help with his action work — and Villeneuve, with whom April has done four previous films, “is not one to talk specifics on what he wants. You show him things and when he loves it, it’s ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ It’s pretty clear what he loves and what he doesn’t love. He loved this.”
“The fact that you can see this coat for about two hours and you don’t get sick of it, to me, at the end of the day, that makes it my favorite.”
‘WONDER WOMAN’ | LINDY HEMMING
There were numerous fantastical costumes in “Wonder Woman” from costume designer Lindy Hemming. Yet her favorite is a throwback 1918 costume: the fussy purple silk dress Diana (Gal Gadot) tried to make sense of in a scene trying on clothes at Selfridges in London.
“It was great fun working with Gal on the costumes she had to reluctantly try on [for that scene] where nothing must be comfortable or understandable to Diana, who has never worn such clothes,” says Hemming. “It was important to tread the edge of discomfort and over-fussiness to give Gal plenty to react to. It was very funny.”
Hemming notes this costume had something of a role-reverse: “Here, our work, which is normally to make an actress look as stunning as possible, was not where we were at. Diana had to be visibly irritated by her costumes and the costumes had to perform. They had to be damaged by Gal as her character tries to understand how to wear them. This necessitated making many multiple incarnations of this difficult and thinnest of silk dress. Also the color that we dyed the fabric was stunning and until I saw it on set, it was rather terrifying!” she says.
“Working with Patty Jenkins as the director was wonderful,” she adds. “She loves costume and is a true collaborator in the world of costume design. She also has excellent and fun ideas about character and dares to let us design for the enhancement of the characters. We worked very closely together on everything.”