Six Costume Designers on the Year’s Most Stylish Film and TV
Whether you tuned in religiously to watch Ryan Murphy’s Chanel-clad mean girls commit murder on Scream Queens or were captivated by the louche loungewear Angelina Jolie-Pitt wears in By the Sea, chances are you saw some great fashion on screens big and small this year. Over the past 12 months, Vogue.com has been prodding, polling, and questioning the costume designers behind such sartorially minded films and TV shows to get the real story on Chanel’s furs, Jolie-Pitt’s silk robes, and more of the year’s best costumes. Here, the six most interesting things we learned.
Photo: Courtesy of Jolie Pas1/6By the Sea costume designer Ellen Mirojnick on Angelina Jolie-Pitt:
“She’s very, very, very hands-on. When she has an idea, she really expresses it clearly. She likes to be absolutely participatory in the designs and the choices. All of her costumes were made, so she really likes to participate in that process and actually have a bit of a selection. Working with her is a dream. She is very articulate, very knowledgeable of what she wants to convey as a director, and as an actor she’s great in the fitting room. She always carries as much of the film as she can, and it’s a difficult job for a director, to always carry the totality of the film in your head while you’re making it.”
Photo: Courtesy of Universal Studios2/6Straight Outta Compton costume designer Kelli Jones on NWA’s agenda-setting style:
“I think the beauty of NWA is that even in their rise to fame, they were never slaves to fashion. They didn’t follow the trends, which is what helped set them apart. It was like they were saying, ‘Listen to my voice and the words I’m saying. Don’t get distracted by a flashy outfit.’ They were unwavering, and I think that’s why they had such a powerful look. . . . They don’t follow anything—they’re the ones people follow. I wanted to make sure to capture that.”
Photo: © 2015 FX Networks. All Rights Reserved.3/6Fargo costume designer Carol Case on how current fashion’s ’70s mania helped her design the show:
“It was good to see [the ’70s] coming back and see it again through [modern] eyes. We didn’t use a lot of modern, ’70s-inspired pieces, but we did use a few, particularly things like footwear and accessories. We ended up building a lot of the stuff, especially for the women. Those high-waisted pants and that sort of thing needs a lot more fitting than your Lululemon yoga pants.”
Photo: Courtesy of Jenny Eagan4/6Beasts of No Nation costume designer Jenny Eagan on working in the jungles of Ghana:
“I took some dyes with me, but then they sent me to a market to get dye. There were not many color choices, and they said, “Oh yes, you need the acid.” And I said, “Excuse me?” You had to mix it with acid. I thought, I’m going to blow somebody up. What I did do—because I thought, I don’t have time to teach a whole group of people how to age clothes, it’s really an art, a technique, and if you don’t do it right, it can be disastrous—I did this before on True Detective. I’d seen a cement mixer. You just get dry gravel and you throw all that dry gravel in there with your clothes and whip for about 15 minutes. If you get some pointy edges, it’ll put rips in it; if you get round edges, it just kind of softens it a bit and puts a dust layer over it—that saved us weeks of work. This was in the middle of the jungle. If somebody needs more, just pick up the dirt, put some water on your hands, and rub it in and go. It’s old-school—it got to the point where we felt there was nothing that we couldn’t do.”
Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company5/6Macbeth costume designer Jacqueline Durran on the film’s minimalist wardrobe:
“I wanted to pare it down and try to discover a sort of elemental kind of clothing. Given that this place was at the far reaches of civilization, one has to imagine that they would only have the most basic things, so by using only the simplest things, the simplest shapes, and trying to get back to the core idea of clothing and then work from that back into what the characters would be like. All the time it was about paring it down and keeping it simple, and the palette really goes from black to cream and that’s it. . . . Everything they have in the world should be very simple and look like it’s come from their world, which is a very primitive, distant place on the edge of Scotland.”
