For fashion insiders, the star of Phantom Thread isn’t newcomer Vicky Krieps or Oscar contender Lesley Manville. Instead, it’s two people – Sue Clark and Joan Brown. Playing the women who run Reynolds Woodcock’s atelier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1950s fashion tale, Clark and Brown are not budding actors but real-life seamstresses whose hands have touched countless couture gowns. Clark, 67, spent her working life as a fashion teacher, while Brown, 71, learned her trade at Savile Row tailor Hardy Amies and fashion house Worth. They are now volunteers at the V&A’s Clothworkers Centre archive, where they bring their expertise to the museum’s fashion collection. That’s where Anderson, on a visit to study the work of mid-century designers, found them, and cast them in his film.
It is details such as these that make Phantom Thread something of an exception for fashion, a world more accustomed to seeing itself on screen in an exaggerated form, in films from Funny Face to Zoolander.
Anderson’s film is a study of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Woodcock – a mix of mid-century couturiers such as Amies, Charles James and Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the technique and craft that became the objects of their obsession.
Rather than take place in the more familiar environs of Paris, it is set in the postwar world of London couture. Woodcock is a control freak who lives among a coterie of women catering to his every creative whim. These include his sister, Cyril, played by Manville, and Krieps’s Alma, a waitress whom he turns into a muse for his creations.
Read more here
