HEROWORSHIP
Superheroes and villains join forces in a new Marvel exhibition where you can get up close to some of its most famous and elaborate costumes.
Get up close to some of Marvel’s most famous and elaborate costumes.
Tilda Swinton swoops across the screen clad in an elegant yellow concoction, all layers, grace and mysticism. She is the Ancient One, the film is Doctor Strange and as she dispatches villains with strategic chops and kicks, fire curls off her hands, accessorising beautifully with her golden outfit. What more could we want: Swinton’s otherworldliness, the multi-layered Marvel universe and some really great threads?
That’s the thing about Marvel Studios films (17 so far, including three this year): these luscious outfits manage to remain subtle yet still full of superpower cred. And they reward close inspection. Swinton’s garb, for example, resembles complicated origami, folded into majestic resplendence.
Curator Amanda Slack-Smith has been getting this and 62 other outfits ready as part of the big Marvel exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). But, some traditionalists may ask, what is Marvel doing in an art museum? As she catalogues Swinton’s costume – silk and linen robe, tabard, bodysuit, sash, trousers, belt – Slack-Smith says there is no question of all this being artwork.
“We look at film as an art medium, in the same way as painting and sculpture, and we wanted to interrogate what Marvel is doing,” she says. Along with the costumes, Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe presents hundreds of artworks, sets, props and a moving image program, and even set pieces from the coming Thor: Ragnarok, starring Chris Hemsworth and Cate Blanchett, which was filmed on the Gold Coast. And while the outfits from the likes of Captain America, The Avengers, Iron Man, Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy in the exhibition are enormous fun, there is certainly a serious side to it all. The clothing, after all, is symbolic of how far a film studio will go to make its manufactured worlds realistic. Forget CGI: this is all about investing in needle-andthread human labour, where an impressive 10 to 15 per cent of each film’s budget is devoted to costumes. Wendy Craig, Marvel’s senior costume supervisor, doesn’t like being asked what her favourite outfit is. “It’s like asking me which is my favourite child,” she says. She is attached to the Ant-Man outfit and favours the costumes from the Thor/Asgard universe, but she also loves the Doctor Strange costumes. “Alex Byrne, the designer, has this inexplicable ability to layer detail, function and reality. Alex was very proud of the fact that there was no stretch fabric used in the construction. All the allowances for movement and stretch were accomplished through cut and design.”
Craig says the biggest challenge designers face is “making the stunning functional”. While craftspeople working on Marvel clothing are all highly skilled at translating an illustration to reality, the main difficulty is “the functional reality” of filmmaking. “That sleek cat suit that looks so incredible also has to run, fight, sit and fly, so there has to be stretch, and it has to be made in multiple sizes so the actor (and the stunt person) can wear a harness, and it has to look beautiful just standing there,” she explains.
Slack-Smith, who has a background in theatre, has been astonished by the investment in the costumes. “You think of these [blockbuster] franchises as being these big corporations, that it is all about punching them out, making the money and moving on, but there are so many dedicated people trying their utmost to make this the best [costume] they possibly can. That’s heartening.” Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe is on at Brisbane’s QAGOMA until September 3.