Renee April knew she was playing with fire talking to the press. Over the course of our phone interview the costume designer wrapped her answers in riddles and apologized profusely. "They'll kill me," the French-Canadian added at one point, laughing.
She was referring to the producers behind "Blade Runner 2049," 2017's hotly anticipated sequel to Ridley's Scott's sci-fi masterpiece. April, like everyone else involved, is walking a tightrope of nondisclosure agreements.
Pressure abounds. "Blade Runner" is lauded as one of the most accomplished works of science fiction of all time. It achieved cult status through the years thanks in part to Scott's continued edits, forcing audiences to reevaluate what was once a critical headache -- "muddled," "will turn off many" -- but now a film considered poetic, existential and profound. Three decades after release it stands monolithic, casting a long, intimidating shadow. Who would dare try to succeed it?
Among audiences, April knows there's a certain coterie she needs to satisfy: fashion designers. A week prior to our chat, a friend had showed her pictures of Raf Simons' "Blade Runner"-esque Spring-Summer 2018 collection, staged under the lamps of New York's Chinatown, with models walking under umbrellas in deconstructed macs.
Simons is just the latest designer to draw inspiration from the film.
"'Blade Runner' is one of the sci-fi films that influenced me the most," Jean Paul Gaultier told CNN, one high-profile example and a man not averse to dressing sci-fi movies himself.
Fashion was integral to the fabric of Scott's Los Angeles, circa 2019. Unlike the homogenous look of sci-fi forebears like "THX 1138" or "Logan's Run," "Blade Runner's" costume design was rich, varied and uncannily familiar.
Much of its aesthetic was sourced from the past. Costume designers Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan read into the noir elements of detective narrative and saw Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Orson Welles in the beleaguered android assassin Rick Deckard. Costumes for Rachael, the femme fatale played by Sean Young, drew explicitly from that era: Kaplan has cited Adrian (costume designer for Joan Crawford, among others) as the inspiration behind her '30s and '40s-cut skirt suits.
Deckard's rogue androids, called "replicants," channeled punk in leather, studs and dog collars, affecting the look of a disenfranchised underclass. East Asian looks were prominent among the huddled masses; layered, asymmetrical designs reminiscent of Issey Miyake's '80s output littered the city.
A seven-year-old Jeremy Scott was transfixed. The American creative director of Moschino and his own namesake label recalls watching alongside his older brother in a small-town cinema in the summer of 1982: "I was never the same after that."
"I was mesmerized by the mix of what was then futuristic with what was already retro," wrote Scott in an email. "That is what makes 'Blade Runner' the gold standard (among) sci-fi dystopian worlds, as it's believable. Because we do not live in a world where everything is from today ... We live in a chaotic world of various decades of architecture, automotive design and fashion, combining and colliding all (in) that same moment."
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