From Edward’s Scissor Hands to Ariel’s Mermaid Tail: Colleen Atwood Breaks Down Her Best Costume Designs

I m Colleen Atwood and this is my Life In Looks.

[slow jazz music]

Whoa, Edward Scissorhands.

The process of making Edward Scissorhand

come to life was really like a visceral process.

He was born from Orchard Street,

Canal Street back in the day in the eighties

when there was all these boxes of leather and findings

and all these stuff that these guys sold.

His leather suit was mainly from jobbers on Orchard Street

where I d just go get, you know,

a cool piece of leather with a texture

and put the puzzle together gradually

combined with some stretch materials.

Those days we didn t make a lot of multiples,

so there were really only two authentic,

OG Edward Scissorhand costumes around.

And the real part of the costume that I think for all of us,

me, Johnny and Tim were in a room

at Stan Winston s who made the hands.

We were there coordinating the hands and the costumes,

but the minute he put these hands on

that are like gloves was one of those moments

in your life that s, like, magical.

With costumes like this, it s often, you know,

the fear of people,

oh, it s gonna take forever to get in and out of,

and it really is like putting on pants and a shirt

and wrapping it around and buckling it.

Poor Johnny wearing it in Florida

in 90 degree weather the whole time was the hardest part.

Like, just drying it out in between

cause it was really, really hot there.

I was influenced in that period by early Gaultier

who had been using stretch with non-stretch fabrics

to make it fit tightly but still move.

And it was really important to me

that this costume was able to move

and not just bag out like leather does

if you don t have anything behind it.

Back then there wasn t stretch leather like there is today.

Oh, my god, Handmaid s Tale. I forgot about that one.

The color coating,

it was very, very strongly supported by the director

who really wanted the colors symbolizing

the order of the people in the story.

There was a designer, I think, named Zoran in New York

at the time period who was very influential

in how the director wanted the clothes to look.

That kind of Soho kind of vibe,

it really influenced those costumes

in that period in the eighties.

What I remember the most about it is myself

and the head of the hair department

did everybody s ponytails every day

because we were obsessed with them being a certain way,

and then putting on the scarves, right?

Silence of the Lambs.

The way it was written and the way

it was envisioned by Ted Tally, I think,

and Jonathan was so terrifying

that you re kind of in the middle of the night

waking up and checking your doors.

Oftentimes in costuming, you re making things,

you wanna have a feeling of them being manufactured,

not being something that s so craft-oriented.

And in this case Jonathan had a lot of thoughts

about what this mask could be.

Should it be leather,

should it be just rope

and like kind of more basic and old-fashioned.

But I really felt it should be a version

of what s happening today.

And I was looking at all these hockey masks

and I was like, you know,

that s really the best tech that s out there today.

And I found this guy, I believe he was in New Jersey

who made these masks.

The great story about this mask is originally,

we were gonna paint it.

But the first proto came in,

it looked like dead skin.

And we re like, oh, my god,

this is so much better than painting it.

But we didn t even think about it.

It is actually fiberglass,

which probably shouldn t be on anyone s face in that state,

but we didn t know better then.

Little Women, a wonderful job.

It was my first period film,

and I was able to find a lot of authentic fabrics.

I bought a lot of dresses from the period

that were half rotten and things were,

you know, not good about them.

But I took them apart and repurposed the material

and I felt like it really was art imitating life,

because really in that period people did that

with their clothes.

We even had one dress which was, you know,

everyone was terrified about.

But I really wanted Clarie Danes

to wear one of Winona s dresses

because people had hand-me-downs.

And then everyone was freaking out cause, like,

What if we have to have continuity and dah dah dah?

I was like, who cares? Like, we can go back.

You know, it was just, like, a really great movie

for me in the fact that it really familiarized me

with the fabric of the period

and this sort of texture of the production design

and the lighting

and everything really worked together to create that world.

Oh, look at Oprah. Beloved.

My influence with actors in films

is always a collaborative process.

I always show them a bible that I ve done of the story,

how I see it just kind of a flow of the film.

And it s always a funny process.

Cause some actors are very engaged by it,

and some of em you re just like, What am I gonna wear?

Oprah in this case of Beloved was very respectful

of Toni Morrison s vision of the story,

but also very respectful of having these costumes

that people actually made by hand.

And I think it was really interesting for someone,

you know, as massive as Oprah with style and everything,

to just really kind of hone it down

and appreciate the simplicity of these costumes

and the story that we were telling with these characters.

Ah, Christina, so beautiful. Sleepy Hollow.

It s a fantastical story.

It s a tale. It s a fable.

Chivo, Emmanuel Lubezki s lighting

was a huge part of that show.

The kind of idea that Christina Ricci was this glowing thing

and that it was like a world surrounded by darkness.

And I think that that s what Tim was depicting

in the telling of Sleepy Hollow,

the stuff that wasn t there.

It was my first film in the UK.

And I really was cutting these clothes in a way

that they weren t very happy with me about in the sense

that I really wanted to take em to a different level.

I expanded the skirts,

I did all kinds of things to the shapes.

And in the beginning,

the people in the workroom were just like,

well, it s not Janet Arnold,

which is a familiar face to them in pattern making.

But once we got into it

and they saw what I was doing with the fabrics

and the lighting and stuff,

they were really excited about it.

And it was really a great turnaround for me

as a designer working with fellow artisans.

These kind of movies, especially these sort of period films,

everything then was sewn by hand.

So the hand on everything in the finishing

is really important to me.

In that area,

I had an amazing textile artist that did the horseman s cape

and all the aging on the horsemen

and the screening on that,

which was the first time I d worked

with people of that level in that area.

Catherine the Great, Chicago.

When I started Chicago,

my first meeting with Rob Marshall,

I just finished Planet of the Apes with Tim,

which was such an action movie,

like all these layers on layers

that these guys had to do all this work.

And I was showing Rob the book and I said,

this doesn t scare me at all, doing dance.

I can see what it takes to make these costumes work.

My fashion inspiration from Chicago

really came from the period

and from a lot of Versailles photographs,

different photography like Man Ray,

sort of the grittier side of life.

It was kind of the first time photographs weren t so formal.

It was sort of more journal kind of photography.

And it was really interesting for me to look at that

because I knew the standard pretty photography.

But it was great to go a little bit deeper.

The biggest challenge on Chicago was the budget,

which was very small.

The dance numbers in Chicago

we shot usually in about a 16-hour day.

The dancers and the actors had to perform

that long in one costume.

I did not have multiples.

You just stood on the side poised with a needle in thread

waiting for something to blow up on you.

And that s kind of how we got through the job.

Jim Carrey, Lemony Snicket s.

In Lemon Snicket,

I really made kind of quiet plea to myself

that I was gonna create the textiles themselves.

So I took textiles and took them apart,

applied them to other things.

Jim s suit is like strips of wool cut

with metal base behind it,

which is why the stripes have that strange

kind of iridescence to em.

It isn t just a hard stripe.

I just was really into the baby s dress

is one of my favorite costumes I ve ever made

because it was really dark tafetta

with a layer of baby pink on top,

and it just made it the sickest most amazing color.

And every element of it had a feeling

of something being made by hand.

Memoirs of a Geisha, that s a good memory.

In Memoirs of a Geisha,

it was a really terrifying project as a designer

because you re honoring a 500-year-old culture.

It was really important to me to know

what was real in what the geisha wore.

So I had a lot of research that I went by,

then I got the cast,

and the cast were quite tall and willowy beautiful women.

The actual real geisha clothes were made

for people much more compact and smaller.

And I was totally, like, going, what am I going to do?

But I went to a show in Tokyo,

an art exhibit of an illustrator from the thirties in Japan.

He set me free,

because he d done all these illustrations

that were kind of the idea

of what I wanted to do with the costumes.

And at that point,

I took the proportions and played with them

and made them work better on our cast.

Sweeney Todd.

Sweeney s neck tie was actually one piece

of fabric I had very little of.

It was an old handwoven piece of fabric.

It was blood everywhere in that movie

and you re just like,

everyone s freaking out about the scarf, this tie, the tie.

And I was like, I don t care. I want this tie.

And then Steve Gell was my textile artist.

We printed fake ones so they looked good for,

you know, the blood work.

I really wanted it to be

a black and white and gray character.

So I liked using all the warm and cool tones

of all those colors together to evoke, you know,

the moodiness of Sweeney.

Nine, with beautiful Nicole.

The early sixties, high Italian fashion

is one of my favorite periods.

It s just so classically elegant

and it s throwaway at the same time.

It isn t as stuffy as the Americans were.

It s a little more real.

Like, it s really glamorous,

but you believe people actually wore it

and lived in it and that was their lifestyle.

And then you have Sophia Loren, Marion Cotillard,

Penelope, Nicole, like, you know, on and on.

I mean, just amazing cast of actors for this movie.

It was all made costumes.

We did have jewelry from Chopard in this photo.

Nicole s bracelet, a Chopard bracelet.

Queenie, we called her.

This collaboration with Tim was really special to both of us

cause we both loved the tonal drawings of the early Alice.

And then we knew that the audience

was slightly more familiar with the Disney version

of Alice than Lewis Carroll s novels.

To juggle, like, taking something

that s a beloved sort of image of a character like Alice

and putting her into a new vibe

was something that we re like,

we re just going, the blue dress, how do we lose it?

Tim really figured it out.

He goes, How come when she shrinks and grows, her clothes,

they just shrink and grow with her?

Let s have her just, like, shrink,

and then she s in like this kind of underwear thing,

and then she grows and she s in something else.

So it really set us free from that

and it was a really fun thing to collaborate with.

We were also dealing at a time

before technology was quite what it is today.

Helena s costume was an especially big challenge

where we had to have the collar

and cheat the neckline lower

in order to make the head fit on the body

in a way that worked low tech,

which was a fun learning curve for me.

Meryl as the blue Witch.

My research for Into the Woods was somewhat fairytales

but also is like Meryl s opening in the show,

she comes out of a tree

and I really liked her being the textures of bark.

And I d fooled around on something else

with these leather cords put on chiffon.

You could twist it like bark.

It was like Fortuny,

but a little bit more dynamic

in a sense of what you could do with it.

So I did that with her initial costume,

which is really a ratty, you know,

she d been living in the woods forever,

like a mad woman s costume.

She comes in and we re thinking, do you need a hop?

And like we put the thing on and we have the big sleeves

and everything and she, like, stoops over in it

and we re like, you know, she doesn t really need it.

She can do it with her acting

cause she s such a great movement actress.

This costume here was her fancy, high-end witch,

is concept of a beautiful mother witch,

which we also had fun with,

made with the same technique

but with ribbons in with the cord

so it had a little bit more silky quality to it.

Eddie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

When I first read a script,

a lot of times I see the character,

like I see this little guy

that s introverted and shy in the world,

and think of how to make clothes

that make him like that.

In a same way, in a kind of whacked out way,

I thought of him as a bird, like a robin.

And I don t know if it s cause I d seen a robin

in my yard that day,

but I like the colors of robin s a lot,

and I thought, oh I ll make his waist coat

kind of like the color of a robin, but a little bluer,

not quite so sad.

I think when I do a show like Wednesday,

you never know what it s gonna mean to anybody.

It s fun to see it go on the street.

It s fun to see how people interpret it

and people reinterpreting each character

and how much they embrace Enid

and how much they embrace Wednesday.

And it s fun to see on Halloween that, you know,

people are coming to your door,

they re like Wednesday Adams.

So are their moms.

And so you re just like, oh, wow,

this is, like, something to people.

I ve had a few great costumes in my past for Halloween,

like the Martian Girl, Edward Scissorhands,

Wednesday, Hannibal Lecter.

Ariel, The Little Mermaid, a challenge and fun.

I designed all the tales for all the sisters and stuff

with the digital artists that used them in the movies

with depicting actual fish from the Seven Seas.

To have that vibe,

even though it s not really a big part of the story,

it was a really fun element of the design,

the embracing of the sea world

and human world of all different cultures.

With Ariel s costume above land,

she was going into the palace

and the palace was dressing her

so she couldn t really look like the queen,

but she couldn t really look like the servant.

She was somewhere in the middle.

So the blouse is, like,

more like an aristocratic

kind of beautiful little silk blouse,

and the corset is handmade like somebody s made it.

And then the skirts like tucks and tucks of coral,

reminiscent of the ocean.

And of course she had to be the color of the sea.

I messed around with a lot of blues and stuff with it,

but I ended up in this kind of pale turquoise color.

Creating a a character within the IP

of an existing character is always a challenge.

But I think if the actors can do it,

then you can just kind of follow suit and make it all work.

Masters of the Air, a huge challenge.

It was hundreds of costumes manufactured,

so I sourced really good materials from all over the world.

I found real pieces and redid patterns

that were currently being sold by leather manufacturers.

So I had to go into the manufacturing world,

but I controlled it by the pattern making side of it.

Also, a lot of times in these shows, nothing s really aged,

nothing looks like people really wore it for a long time.

And it was really important to me

to have it really feel worn in and real on all these guys.

The beautiful Monica in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

So funny thing about Tim,

I ve been working with him for 30 years,

and I always read about, like, Tim Burton s doing this,

and then he calls me, he goes,

You know, I might be doing this thing.

Like it s a secret.

Cause he doesn t like to talk about stuff

until he s doing it.

And I always act surprised. Oh, really?

It s an interesting challenge to take something

as contemporary as Beetlejuice and do your version of it.

Cause people really remember it, you know?

The main thing is I got some of the real stuff,

I had him fitting with Michael,

and he s like, I remember the tux was my favorite thing.

Where s the real one?

And I was like, I got it.

And he s go, Oh, wow. [laughs]

It s just like people remember things

in a way when they see it,

the memory is more beautiful

than what the actual reality of the object is.

Leo, in probably the most disgusting costume

he s had to wear.

The process of working

with Paul Thomas Anderson is like no other.

We had all these sessions at his house

where he d take pictures of stuff,

we d talk about stuff

with Leo s character especially and with Willa s.

And we d try on things and take pictures and he d,

you know, do different things with the army guys.

And as stuff came along and it worked,

then it became the costume for the movie.

We did fittings, proper fittings as well.

But it was mainly that fluid process

that brought together the look of the film

for Leo and for Chase Infiniti s character.

And it was really a road movie,

so stuff was in all kinds of environments.

We didn t have tons of multiples.

I got the fabric for Leo s robe

and made the robes and then we needed more.

And I called them and they go,

Oh, we don t have that anymore.

So we were stuck with like six robes for the whole movie,

which is not that many for what he had to do in it.

But, you know, it just worked in a way that, you know,

you don t need sometimes so much stuff.

Sometimes it s good to not have it.

Jennifer Lopez as the Spider Woman.

The use of color in Kiss of the Spider Woman

was really inspired by the films of the forties,

the musical films where color was really choreographed,

orchestrated, and we really dove into it that way,

which was a lot of fun

because you really could control all the color in the room,

was a great process.

It was a fantastic job.

Bill Condon, the director s a master at musicals.

He knows everything there is to know about them on film.

And her chops as an actress

and as a dancer are beyond belief.

I think my favorite part

of making musicals is actually making costumes for actors,

but also the dancers

and what they have to do in the costumes.

It s really fun to do that. I like music a lot.

I do stuff for bands sometimes every once in a while.

And it s just really great part of making things

to bring joy to people.

Wow. That was my Life in Looks,

at least half my Life in Looks.

[gentle music]