With Halloween over and the holiday theatre season soon approaching, costumes are on the minds of many creatives. On stage or on a night out, costumes hold a unique power to create character, and a sense of time and place. As a tool, styling and costuming help develop and solidify the vision of a project. Let's look at a few movies that understood the assignment when it came to costuming.
Costuming in period dramas is one of the most important visual cues, letting the viewer immerse in a time long passed. The costumes in Emma (2020), designed by Alexandra Byrne, not only kept a level of historical accuracy rarely seen in film, they successfully communicated the humorous tone of the movie. Light and vibrant colours paired with direct silhouette recreations of dress artifacts helped to place viewers, and the characters, in a whimsical world set in the regency era.
Costuming is often used as a conduit for storytelling. In Mean Girls (2004), Cady's costumes (by Mary Jane Fortare) are used to showcase her character arc from outsider, to plastic, to simply herself. The costumes let us peer into the mind of her character, showing us where she is on her journey as she experiences it.
At times, costumes reveal less about the setting a movie is placed in and more about the goals of the filmmakers, reflecting modern values into stories of the past. The costumes in Pride and Prejudice (2005), designed by Jacqueline Durran, tell more about the overall tone of the story than they do about the time it is set in. As a romantic story with humble country characters, Pride and Prejudice benefits from a more naturalistic palette. The costume's silhouettes are not quite accurate and the hairstyles with their wispy bangs lean more towards the modern era. Their strength lies in the mood they create for the characters to live in, lending more to the story than accuracy ever could.
Costuming and styling are important tools in a storyteller's practice. Stepping into a character often begins with stepping into their costume. The decisions costume designers make carry diverse motivations, always with the goal of realizing a story through the actors or models wearing the costumes. These are similar goals we have as creative directors at Elevation Hall photoshoots, where styling and costuming is used to help the models step into their power as storytellers.
To learn more about the costume design process, watch this Vanity Fair video with Mary Jane Fort as she delves into the costumes of Mean Girls.