The film making the Sixties more stylish than ever
Hats, bags and gloves at the ready, says Emily Cronin
As fantasy holiday destinations go, you could do worse than to dream of the South of France circa 1965. In The Last Letter From Your Lover, the setting is as postcardperfect as it gets, full of the sea, sailboats, bougainvillea – and immaculate Sixties couture. When socialite Jennifer Stirling (played by Shailene Woodley) visits, she beachcombs and bicycles in silk dresses, wide-brimmed straw hats and white gloves. One night, she hosts a dinner in a bubblegum-pink gown with a chiffon shoulder train that billows in the breeze, in just such a way that you can almost smell the salt coming off the sea.
“‘It made me think of a warm evening breeze being able to pick up that chiffon,” says Anna Robbins, costume designer for the film. She based the design of that dress on a fashion plate from a magazine. “I loved the diaphanous chiffon in the image, and the tone of the pink against the production design and that inky blue night – it was just stunning.”
Last Letter … is a time-jumping epistolary romance for fans of The Notebook (plot) and Mad Men (look). Thanks to Robbins’s work, it also seems likely to ignite a run on the sort of Sixties vintage pieces Jenny favours, much in the same way The Talented Mr Ripley makes every woman who watches it want to wear a tied-at-thewaist button-down shirt with a full midi skirt.
The film is a two-strand love story, plaiting together past and present. The main strand is the one that takes us to 1965, when Jenny finds her cool, orderly world disrupted by a love affair with journalist Anthony O’hare (Callum Turner). Ellie Haworth, a present-day London journalist played by Felicity Jones, unearths a love letter to Jenny from O’hare, spurring her to find out what happened to the lovers (with a little help from archivist Rory).
Jenny’s Sixties is less swinging, more an annexe of the Fifties. Instead of flower-power florals and Mary Quant miniskirts, she wears lots of just-so hats, matching gloves and shoes and neat shift dresses. “When you go into the Sixties, you expect Carnaby Street and mod culture,” Robbins says.
‘It’s a lovely tipping point between the decades’
“But we’re just preceding that. It’s this lovely tipping point between the decades – there’s a classicism and elegance to Jennifer and her wardrobe.”
In fact, Robbins reserved many of the stylistic flourishes audiences typically associate with the Sixties for Ellie, the journalist. “I was always conscious of how Jennifer and Ellie would interact throughout the script.” She sought “little links” between the characters, from dressing them both in houndstooth weaves to giving Ellie Sixties vintage pieces to wear. “We actually put more Sixties into Ellie’s wardrobe – more of that Carnaby Street flavour, the Liberty prints and shorter hemlines – to convey the sense of freedom that Jennifer would have been so envious of.”
All of it – the Sixties and the now – represents a departure from Robbins’s best-known work, on Downton Abbey.
She’s just wrapped the second film. “This is different, and therefore lovely and refreshing,” she says. “I do feel like I’ve been in the 1920s for many years, and it’s nice to punctuate that experience with other costume eras.”
Part of what made it refreshing was the relative ease of sourcing authentic pieces. “There are more original garments intact and wearable, where I didn’t have to worry from dawn till dusk that a costume wasn’t going to
withstand the rigours of filming.”
Robbins sought to use as much original vintage clothing for Jenny as possible, but it had to be museum-quality.
She worked with dealer William Banks-blaney – the man who matches Victoria Beckham, Amal Clooney and Rihanna with their most precious vintage pieces – to source mint-condition designs from Lanvin, Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Courrèges. The effect is such that when Jenny’s best friend insists that she has “the perfect life”, you’re sure the statement is false in every way – except vis-à-vis Jenny’s wardrobe.
Among her best finds were a hand-painted Lanvin dress that Jenny wears to drive along the Riviera coast in an opentop car. “As soon as I found it, I realised it was the colour of the sea,” Robbins recalls. In London, Jenny wears a beautiful Courrèges coat over a green dress when she’s waiting for O’hare (she calls her journalist “Boot’” after the main character in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop) in a park. A houndstooth Balenciaga suit makes a graphic, modern outfit for a pivotal scene.
Where Jenny’s look is controlled and correct, Ellie’s is more eclectic. “She was so fun to do,” Robbins says. “There was a kind of Diane Keaton vibe to her alongside a French-scandi cross.”
She gave Ellie a vintage Burberry trench in blue-grey that felt “a bit detective”, along with blazers, berets and vintage shoes from the Sixties. Her clothes tell us that Ellie enjoys style, even if she’s too distracted to overthink what she wears.
“Costume is one of the many layers of storytelling within a film. Everything matters and everything means something,” Robbins says. “Hopefully it gives a sense of who each of the characters are.”