FASHION WITH CRUELTY
Award-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan on clothing a villain vamp…
What was the starting point of creating costumes that were iconically Cruella, but also completely different from what we’ve seen before?
Well, the script is always the starting point, and the director’s vision. Obviously I did look at the animation, and I briefly looked at the Glenn Close film, but I tried not to look too much. But the arc of Cruella is very clear in this script… this was a child who did really interesting things with clothes. Then we start to see her as the young child, who’s obviously in a school uniform, and what she does to that. It’s actually all there in the script, that she becomes more and more the smart, stylish, wicked, evil Cruella. It’s set in the ’70s but not what I’d really call punk. It’s very much her own thing that she gets into.
How does Emma Thompson’s Baroness differ in style?
They are so different, it’s chalk and cheese. The Baroness is a very good fashion designer but by now slightly old-fashioned – slightly Dior in the ’50s. I did her in shades of browns and golds to give her a symmetry. Whereas Cruella – it’s just using things in a much more modern, interesting way. And then when the denouement comes where it all goes horribly wrong and the revenge element comes in… then Cruella goes off on a wild, very evil track. At that point, the clothes actually got more formal.
Is there a Dalmatian fur coat?
Yes, but obviously we did not steal the Dalmatians! It’s completely printed Dalmatian fur by my textile artist, Jo Weaving.
One of the most striking outfits is the black-andwhite ball scene where Cruella arrives in a red dress… [see page 37]
The dress had to be a real standout because she’s obviously in a different colour to a black-and-white ball. That dress was made by Ian Wallace, who was one of my amazing costume designers. We bought this dress in LA, in a really cheap sort of prom dress shop, which was a wonderful red Lycra dress, just to see what red looked like on Emma Stone. She looked just phenomenal in it and so that was the base of it, but it was also made out of a dress you see in a vintage store earlier in the film. It did look extraordinary.
Is creating ’70s London an easier task than something like Mad Max: Fury Road that’s sci-fi?
Mad Max and Cruella are equally difficult. Mad Max is not actually that big. It’s a group of people but they never change. And so the challenge was finding the look of each person – but then once you’ve done it, you just have to make a massive amount of repeats!