The Layers of Meaning Behind the Suits in TV Series 'It's A Sin'.

 According to John Flügel in The Psychology of Clothes (1930), the emergence and diffusion of men’s suits was “a move away from flamboyance and individuality”. In the following decades, they also became a symbol of economic and traditional state power in the hands of men who would suit up every day to go to work.

Perhaps said powerful men would go to Savile Row, famed for its tailors, to find their best uniform. In It’s a Sin, Colin, played by Callum Scott Howells, has just moved to London to start his training in a tailor’s shop on the same iconic street. He is shy, self-effacing, and has not had the opportunity to meet anyone from the LGBTQIA+ community he knows he belongs to. The suits he wears onscreen tell the same story.

“When working on Savile Row, Colin is adopting this brown tailoring because all the other tailors within this environment are wearing the same colour palette and style,” says the show’s costume designer, Ian Fulcher. “In a way, he hasn’t found his identity. It’s almost as if his inexperience of the greater world is reflected in these browns and earthy tones. He is blending, not standing out in the crowd.”

Having his queerness constrained by a suit is something the flamboyant Roscoe (Omari Douglas) goes through, too. In order to please the Tory MP who ends up becoming his sugar daddy, he has to tone down his exuberance by wearing grey and navy suits in spaces where he is the only subordinate gay Black man — his true self sacrificed on the altar of fitting in.

When he has to dress up just like his father (Delroy Brown) to attend his sister’s wedding, he looks imprisoned by the suit he is wearing. “The wedding attire is not his choice,” says Fulcher. “There is no Roscoe here, because he is putting on a uniform. That’s why it’s really important that when he arrives at the wedding and sees his father, he chooses to put his eyeshadow on, to become himself again. He’s embracing who he is.”

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Promising Young Woman: Costume designer, Nancy Steiner, breaks down Carey Mulligan's killer looks

 

After reading the script for Emerald Fennell’s revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” costume designer Nancy Steiner pictured a leading lady who was “disheveled” or, in gentler terms, “less-than put together.”

After all, Cassie — the film’s main character portrayed by Carey Mulligan — is depressed. The 30-year-old medical school dropout never recovered from a mysterious traumatic event, one that’s inspired her to fill her nights exacting revenge on toxic men. Yet in her daily life, Cassie is outfitted head-to-toe in bubblegum pinks and florals, with her long blonde hair often pulled back in a braid and decorated with ribbons. That’s all deliberate.

“Emerald really wanted Cassie to dress as if she was this happy-go-lucky girl. You would never know she’s depressed,” says Steiner, whose resume includes “Lost in Translation,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Virgin Suicides.” “I’ve come to realize that it’s just another one of her costumes she wears to hide who she really is.”

Her girly exterior, what Steiner refers to as a “sweet all-American girl,” is part of Cassie’s chameleon-like tendency to hide in plain sight. Her everyday attire may be full of bold prints, bright hues and multicolored manicures, but rest assured, she’s not trying to stand out.

“I harkened back to the ’60s,” Steiner says. “I had Brigitte Bardot pictures on my mood board — a lot of cute blondes.”

As a costume designer, she views her job as “telling the story without shouting.” But, she says with a knowing wink to the movie’s shocking finale, “sometimes you need to shout.”

“Promising Young Woman” debuted in theaters on Christmas Day and released on-demand last weekend. Here, Steiner details key outfits worn by Mulligan in the movie.

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Killing Eve's Costume Designer Talks Dressing Villanelle

One can tell a lot about a person based on their clothing.

A coffee stain on a shirt, or the lack thereof, can hint at the level of chaos someone experienced that morning. Likewise, the decision to wear a hoodie rather than a coat can indicate whether a person intends to go into an office that day. 

It's these subtle details that Killing Eve costume designer Sam Perry took into consideration when planning out the looks for season three of the BBC America series. 

Talking to E! News on the phone from her home in England, Perry shared that ahead of filming she would look over the script and talk to the art department to determine how the characters' own journeys would be reflected in their wardrobe. And since this season largely focused on Villanelle's (Jodie Comer) mission to understand who she is, it makes sense that a large part of her time was dedicated to dressing the complex lead.

To learn of Perry and her team's process, continue reading below.

Starting the discussion with Villanelle's wedding in episode one, Perry explained that she dressed her in a black Comme des Garçons tailcoat and Simone Rocha blouse, because it simply isn't "her vibe" to wear a white bridal gown. As Perry remarked, "She just does whatever she feels like in that moment, on that day, regardless of whether it's right or not. She just doesn't want to answer to anybody."

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Netflix's Hollywood's costume designer on the power of 1940s dressing

 

It's Friday, which means Netflix has dropped a shed load of new stuff for you to indulge in while you embrace lockdown. And the top hitter this week, which we're going to binge this weekend, is Ryan Murphy's Hollywood. 

With a stellar cast consisting of big names including Darren Criss, Patti LuPone, Holland Taylor, David Corenswet and Laura Harrier, it's escapism at its best and focuses on the golden age of Hollywood. Set in Tinseltown, the seven-episode series focuses largely on a hopeful young war veteran who has aspirations to become a movie star. 

While it seems like glitz and glamour on the surface, the series highlights the underworld of the star-making machinery: where sex, prostitution, drugs, racism and disappointment are rife. But Hollywood also highlights the fashion of the 1940s. The women are in tiny cardigans and power suits, and the likes of Criss and Corenswet don oversized, single-breasted suits and serve high-waisted trousers, larger-than-life overcoats, knitted sweater vests and camp collar shirts aplenty. Hollywood is an education in how to channel the 1940s properly, even in the 2020s.

Hollywood costume designer Sarah Evelyn dressed the actors alongside Lou Eyrich. GQ sat down with her to talk inspiration, what goes into a big budget production and the biggest challenges she faced.

How did sourcing costumes for Hollywood begin?

Sarah Evelyn: Screenwriter Ryan Murphy comes to every project with a clear idea and distinct vision. So Lou Eyrich and Ryan will meet and talk about that vision and refine it and then she and I will come together as codesigners to make a moodboard. Ryan saw Hollywood as an ode to the old glamour of Hollywood, to the golden age of cinema and so gold and the idea of golden was a starting point – we wanted the show to have a golden sheen.

What were the big inspirations for you both?

Lou and I began our research and we started with some of the amazing films of the 1940s. These included The Maltese Falcon, Gentleman's Agreement, Double Indemnity, The Killers and Laura. So we’d then branch out from there and look at street style images and there’s this one great book called Jean Howard's Hollywood and it’s one of the very few books out there that gives a behind-the-scenes look at that era through natural imagery, as opposed to these posed photographs you're used to seeing. 

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A Behind the Scenes Look at the Costumes of 'Hollywood'.

 

How does one define glamour, or even begin to contemplate it, at a time when everything around us seems so bleak? It’s difficult to conjure visions of over-the-top excess or ultrabeautiful clothes, but it’s also not impossible. Social distancing during this pandemic, we’ve turned to movies and TV shows for small injections of escapism, often involving some form of glamour, and it can help add a little bit of glitter into our lives, even if only for an hour or two.

Beginning Friday, we’ll have another source of transportive entertainment, another way to internalize a little glamour. Ryan Murphy’s anticipated new series Hollywood premieres on Netflix, starring Patti LuPone, Holland Taylor, David Corenswet, Darren Criss, and Laura Harrier. Other cast members include Jeremy Pope, Mira Sorvino, and Samara Weaving. The story takes place in the 1940s, the golden age of Tinseltown, where dreamers once came to try and make it big in the movies. It was the era of Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh and a young Judy Garland. It was also the era that a Hollywood-branded version of glamour was born.

The plot revolves around a hopeful young war veteran who moves to L.A. with his pregnant wife and aspirations to become a movie star. Murphy sets you up to believe that this is another vintage Hollywood fairy tale but very early on you realize this story is a different one. Without giving too much away, Murphy, whose coproducer and director on the project is Janet Mock, introduces very contemporary story lines into the squeaky-clean exterior of the golden age of Hollywood: sex for hire, orgies, racism, and sexism. More than anything, Hollywood is an allegory for a town that, no matter the era, has swept people in and dumped them out, over and over again in a vicious cycle. That said, it is a hopeful show, one that shows the power and necessity of, say, putting a woman in charge or putting men and women of color at the forefront of a creative project. It is also a beautiful show to watch, full of bright colors and brimming with spectacular costumes.

There are bold women wearing bold suits; young starlets cinched into embroidered pencil skirts topped off with tiny cardigans; men with giant lapels and high-waist trousers; and plenty of old-school Oscar gowns too. Many of the ensembles recall trends that are relevant today, like the loose suiting for women or the cardi-and-skirt sets. Glamour has evolved, but one fact remains true eight decades later: Wherever there is glamour, there is a way to be carried off somewhere else, to a different time, a different place, and the clothes in this show are what help to get us there.

Here, Hollywood costume designers Sarah Evelyn and Lou Eyrich discuss how they created a dreamscape onscreen with a wardrobe from a bygone era in Hollywood.

The show sort of mashes up historical narratives with fictional ones. Did this affect the way that you approached the costumes?

Sarah Evelyn: The initial aesthetic vision—golden sheen, Old Hollywood vibe, and period—came from Ryan and then some other specifics per character. We took his vision, and we researched a ton, pouring through resource materials such as books and magazines, and we watched hundreds of movies from the period. Lou had just come off Ratched (an upcoming Netflix series based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), so she was up to speed on 1940s-era fashion. But I had to catch up pretty quickly. We also hired a terrific researcher named Raissa Bretaña. She’s based in New York and is a fashion historian. She had access to some really fantastic photographic and written source materials. We love researching and found it really inspiring.

Regarding the fictional narratives, I think the idealistic and hopefully dreamlike quality that the fictional narratives infused into the story allowed us to create some dreaminess in colors of the costumes. The color palette came from Ryan Murphy as harvest tones, golden hues with a bit of Technicolor. He wanted Archie [Pope] and Raymond [Criss] in some pinks and purples, and while that might not have been period correct, it worked within the context of the aspirational, could-have-done-it-better vibe of this story.

If we re-created any historical events in the show, it was Hattie McDaniel at the 1940 Oscars. Ryan wanted us to re-create the costumes as close to the real thing as possible. We deeply researched that dress and put a premium on re-creating it.

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Dressing the Walking Dead

What would you wear in a zombie apocalypse? Hit AMC show The Walking Dead has for the last 10 years, followed a group of modern day survivors in Midwest USA who live a day to day battle on the road when the world has been overrun by flesh eating ‘walkers’. Costume designer for the first 8 series, Eulyn Womble is tasked with dressing not only the cast, but also the hundreds of zombies which feature every season. In the following interview, she discusses how the costumes of the main protagonists have changed over the three seasons . This, she claims, is to reflect the change in mindset as the survivors slowly realise that they have left their old way of life far behind. And it is not just the human protagonists who have gone through an evolution as the show progresses. For she claims even the idea behind the zombie walkers’ outfits has changed, in order to reflect how the walkers are viewed by the survivors – in earlier series as individuals, and then in later series, as a more unified swarm.

Eulyn Womble face to face with a Walker

The Walking Dead's costume designer Eulyn Womble describes how to make fake pus and chooses her ideal wardrobe for the zombie apocalypse.

Q: Any big wardrobe changes this season? Do our survivors finally get a fresh set of clothes?
A: They never get a fresh set of clothes. [Laughs] It wouldn’t be The Walking Dead if they looked clean... Maggie is much much tougher this year. She's left the whole farmgirl thing behind. Nothing cute or frilly anymore. Daryl is also changed. This season he has a poncho. It’s not quite Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It's got a little bit more edge than that.

Q: What’s the biggest thing you've learned since Season 1 about dressing the cast and the walkers?
A: In Season One, the walkers had a lot more personality. We made them individual. As the story progresses, we’re trying to turn them into a herd, with one mind. So you’ll find that when we dress them, the tops and bottoms match, so it's gray on top, gray on bottom so they melt away and blend together. In the cast, from the first season to now, they didn’t know if this whole apocalypse thing was going to last. They had more hope that it would just fix itself and they were clinging desparately onto who they were, onto their jewelry, their fancy little earrings and sandals. Now they know they have to be prepared.

Q: Greg Nicotero told us that the walkers are becoming more decayed and putrefied over time. Are their clothes getting more decayed as well? 
A: Absolutely, they are. If you look closely, you’ll actually see pus [on their clothes]. We actually paint it on. We’ve got the clothes more tattered, but they’re rotting from the inside. And I’ve said this before, I really do want the audience to smell them when you see them on camera. We try to make them as gross as possible.

Q: What’s the pus made of? 
A: Paint. It’s different colors that we mix up to match the clothing that we create... We’re like, ‘add more pus’ or ‘add more blood.’ Blood is a huge deal on the set as well. They’re all different and they’re all labeled, and it’s very specific how we know what’s fresh zombie blood, what’s old zombie blood, what’s fresh human blood, what’s old human blood.

Q: You burned some of the walkers’ clothes with a blowtorch last year. Got any new gadgets to beat up the clothes? 
A: We’ve got some specially made graters...that we had made by construction. Very dangerous. They look like cheese graters, but more hardcore, attached to wooden pedals. It’s a hell of a tool.

Q: What can you tell us about Michonne’s wardrobe? Where did you find her cape? 
A: Oh my gosh. So much fun to do... I didn’t want to get too futuristic with the cape. That’s why we used burlap. I think it just adds just nice texture and a great silhouette. Her boots are amazing. They have studs on them. Everything she has she can be used to kill zombies.

Q: How about the Governor?
A: [David’s] gorgeous and he has a presence. He doesn’t need a whole lot. I wanted him to look like the everyman but with a little bit of edginess... He has a couple of signature pieces that look like modern day armor I suppose. He has a vest... and then I’ve introduced a coat. I [want people] to question why he has too many nice things compared to what his people have.

Q: You’re originally from Cape Town, South Africa, home of the Great White Shark. Do you have an opinion on the infamous Shark vs. Zombie battle in the Italian film Zombie? Who should win?
A: [Laughs] I think probably the zombie because they just don’t stop. The shark is practically prehistoric so it probably doesn’t know to bite it in the head, to pierce it right in the brain to stop it. It would probably swallow the zombie whole and get eaten from the inside out.

Q: If you were living in a zombie apocalypse, what items of clothing would you never leave home without?
A: Hershel’s pants, Michonne’s vest, Maggie’s tank top, and it would be a toss up between Glenn’s boots and Michonne’s boots because they’re both pretty hardcore. And Dale’s hat!

Interview from
http://blogs.amctv.com/the-walking-dead/2012/08/eulyn-womble-interview.php

Costumes with character: The best costume design of 2017

Atomic Blonde

Great costume design furthers the narrative and reveals character — after all, what could tell you more about a person than how they choose to present themselves to the world every morning? Whether the film is set in 1800 or 2017, costume design is one of the most expressive, and undervalued, tools in a filmmaker’s creative arsenal. We’ve picked our six favourite examples of costume design in 2017, analyzing how they enliven films beyond the surface.

Atomic Blonde
Atomic Blonde’s entertainment value relies entirely on the thrill of watching Charlize Theron’s MI6 agent, Lorraine Broughton, ruthlessly murder her enemies. The plot is nonsensical, an excuse to watch Theron as an action star. The film just about skates by on the ‘cool’ factor, because of Theron: her star charisma and her look.


As a film directed by a man that heavily relies on its audience’s desire to gape at its female lead, there was a danger Atomic Blonde would be another sexist action-thriller shot through the male gaze. However, costume designer Cindy Evans presents Theron’s character as self-possessed and intelligent: her outfits discourage gross objectification and encourage us to instead be awed by her physical strength and command. Lorraine only wears revealing clothing when it makes sense: she tries to seduce French operative Delphine (Sofia Boutella) in skimpy leather, and when she’s alone in her hotel room, she lounges in nothing but her underwear and a loose-fitting, comfortable sweater.

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How Edgar Wright Uses Costume to Color Code His Characters

Baby Driver

With all the flash and bang that appears on screen in Baby Driver, it’s easy to overlook one of the film’s most expertly crafted pieces of production: the costume design. What can a costume tell us about the character? For Edgar Wright, the answer is a whole bunch. 

Wright's attention to detail within all aspects of his direction is unmatched, but the costuming in his films draws little attention. “As far back as the TV show I did before Shaun of the Dead, Spaced, I remember someone saying something about that show which always stuck with me," Wright remembers of his earlier work. "They said, ‘Well, the characters are all really easy to draw.’ And from that point on in all of my movies, with Baby Driver being no exception, I’m always looking to color-code the characters.”

Baby's own morals are quite literally brought into a gray area which is reflected in costume.
Not only does this help the audience keep track of who’s who once the action gets going (which often strikes very abruptly in Wright’s films) it also reveals personality traits of each character. At some points, the director even employs costuming as a foreshadowing device.

Wright works closely with costume designer Courtney Hoffman to establish a different color set for each character to have his or her own look. See a few examples from Baby Driver that Daniel Netzel of Film Radar lays out in the video essay below, and read on for our takeaways.

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How do they design the costumes in Doctor Who and Sherlock?

Think of your favourite TV drama. A show of any size. It doesn’t matter: whether you chose Game of Thrones, Poldark, Doctor Who or got flustered and answered that question with a film, its clothes were probably plucked from the 8.5 miles of rails based at Angels Costumes.

They’re truly cut from a different cloth. Although only staffed by 120 costumiers, the north London warehouse’s 1.5 million outfits make it the largest privately owned collection of costume for film, theatre and television anywhere in the world. And through its 176-year history, Angels has supplied outfits to 37 films that received a Best Costume Oscar and the costumiers won their own special Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Bafta in 2016. These guys know how to dress to impress. 

But they don’t just know the difference between a cross stitch and Lazy daisy. We spoke to Jeremy Angel, 6th generation Angel to champion the family business, alongside Doctor Who and Sherlock costume designer Ray Holman to find out what tricks screen’s wardrobe department hides up its sleeves.

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How Costume Design Influences the Way You Watch Movies

Costume designers are often overlooked. But their craft is as essential as any other aspect of film making. It expresses a character’s style and personality, but it also serves a deeper purpose: to reinforce the film’s themes without the audience even realizing.

The five stars of The Breakfast Club

“The Breakfast Club”
In John Hughes’ classic, the characters’ wardrobes visually depict the differences between the five teens stuck in detention. We see these characters “in the simplest terms.” Costume design is used against the audience, to trick us into regarding the ensemble by merely their archetypes, giving them the chance to prove us wrong.
These characters go into detention early in the morning, dressed in heavy winter layers. Over the course of the film, they take off their layers as they open up to each other about their lives.
This use of visual storytelling might not be as memorable as the banter or dance sequence, but it continually reminds the audience that these teens are, for the first time in their lives, exposing who they truly are.

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