If anything is likely to send us rushing back to sculptural jewellery and matching earrings and necklace sets, it’s Carol, Todd Haynes’s film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, which opened yesterday. Mara may have won the best actress prize in Cannes, but Blanchett gets the best (Prada-edque) outfits. Her brooches and earrings (all sourced by costume designer Sandy Powell) are scrupulously accurate, character-revealing and complementary to the film’s moody palette of greens and dirty pastels.
“Those faded blues and taupes were very fashionable at the time. I checked in old Vogues,” says Powell. Which is lucky, because Haynes’s vision was always to imbue the film with a grainy, downbeat beauty that owes to the photography of Saul Leiter, who loved to frame his mid-century photographs through windows and doorways...
Film influence on fashion generally tends to be subliminal, the timing hard to pin down. Sometimes fashion influences film – you can usually tell when a period film was made, however historically punctilious it tends to be. But with Carol? Stand by for those jewellery sets and a collective moué of red lips.
More on ‘Carol’ here
