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Academy Award–nominated costume designers bring films’ characters to life

From a costume sketch into a three-dimensional world—costume designers offer audiences some of the most spectacular designs on the silver screen. Whether working on a period, contemporary or fantasy film, costume designers seek to capture the essence of each character through concept, character and color. It’s an art form that supports the narrative while creating a whole new world for filmgoers. California Apparel News Contributing Writer Claudia Schou recently spoke with the five Academy Award nominees for Best Costume Design in 2004.

Oscar Costumes: From Concept to the Silver Screen

Colleen Atwood “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”

Two years ago, Colleen Atwood received an Oscar nod for her 1930s-era costume designs in the film adaptation of “Chicago,” and her longtime design collaboration with director Tim Burton had already earned her a solid reputation in the fantasy genre. Her next film is “Memoirs of a Geisha,” directed by Rob Marshall.

Your costume designs for “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” are just as imaginative as your design collaborations with director Tim Burton, which began in the early 1990s with “Edward Scissorhands” and more recently included “Big Fish.”

There were similar motivations for costume designs for all of those films, but they were all very different. “Lemony Snicket,” directed by Brad Silberling, is a film that uses imagination, just as “Sleepy Hollow” did. For “Big Fish,” I designed a mixture of contemporary and imaginary costumes. For “Lemony Snicket,” I mostly used 19th century design inspiration from around the world. For example, there is a wedding scene where the costumes are inspired by early 19th century literature like “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and the Napoleonic period. I also used Eastern European inspiration for the firemen’s uniforms, which I saw in a vintage photograph.

Count Olaf (played by Jim Carrey) is a poor actor who lives in a dilapidated house and wants to inherit money for taking custody of the Baudelaire children—Klaus, Violet and Sunny—after their parents die in a horrible fire. This triggers a series of unfortunate events for the children. It’s sort of a dark film—how did you convey that feeling in your designs?

The silhouettes are made with a lot of layering and deconstruction for tattered looks. Olaf’s costumes had to have lots of personality because he is so wicked and funny. Olaf likes disguises, and he’s very theatrical, so his costumes were designed to stretch with Jim Carrey’s movements. His visions are grandiose, and I wanted to incorporate that into the costume design, too. For the first scene, I designed a tattered pin-striped coat—inspired by the 18th century men’s fashion—that he could wear when he makes a grand entrance into his first scene, almost as if he were making a grand entrance onto the stage.

How many costumes did you design for the film?

I designed 100 costumes for the principals, acting troupe and extras. Prep time was four months. I bought the fabrics from textile makers in Europe, a vintage textile dealer in Los Angeles and, yes, online at eBay. What I loved about making costumes for this film was being able to do a lot of handcrafted work on the textiles. Several pieces were layered and deconstructed.

The clothes were like drawings: I cut up the clothing and reconstructed them to appear three-dimensional, especially with Meryl Streep’s costumes. Streep’s character, Aunt Josephine, had eccentric hair, so I created large muttonshaped sleeves so she could peek-a-boo behind her puff sleeve.

Olaf’s deconstructed pin-striped suit was one of my favorite costumes in the film; the pants and coat were pieces of fabric mounted onto a net base.

The Baudelaire children’s wardrobes were equally eclectic.

Klaus was a reader and a thinker so I felt his costume should be simple: a cotton-striped shirt with silk wool and a rayon knit sweater and really simple moleskin trousers. That look for boys and men is very timeless. For boys, it’s more apparent if they’re overdressed. I wanted to design something that would accentuate his youthful form, long arms and long legs.

Violet was an inventor, so I wanted her to look gorgeous but also hip and smart. She wore a green-and-black striped dress with a spiky hem and Victorian fishnet sleeves—sort of gothic–meets–“Alice in Wonderland.”

Sunny’s costumes were made of fine materials but definitely had some punk sensibilities like the little bondage buckles on her sleeves. I like the idea of heavy metal buckles with a lightweight silk dress. That aspect of the design process was really fun for me.

I also enjoyed designing Sunny’s dress, which was made from green taffeta, an interior design fabric I found at a company in England that specializes in silk. I layered pink silk crepe over it. Her costumes were expensive to make because of their detail and use of highquality fabrics.

Sharen Davis “Ray”

Louisiana native Sharen Davis, nominated for “Ray,” is known for her urban/contemporary costume designs in films such as “Antwone Fisher” (2002), “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”(2000) and “Rush Hour” (1998). This is Davis’ first Academy Award nomination. Currently, she is working on location in South Central Los Angeles on a Doug Atchison film called “Akeelah and the Bee,” starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett.

How does it feel to be nominated for your first Academy Award?

I feel very fortunate. I’m very excited that both the Costume Designers Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have acknowledged my work for a bio picture that recreates music history.

You’re the second African-American costume designer to receive an Oscar nomination. (Costume designer Ruth Carter received a nomination for “Malcolm X” in 1992.) How has the costume design industry evolved since you entered the film industry in the early 1990s?

When I started my career in costume design there were hardly any African-American films. Now there are more African-American filmmakers, and there are studios that are willing to support them. I interview for a film, and if I like the project, then I do it. I don’t always get offers on the films I interview for, but hopefully this nomination will change that. I enjoy working on films that have a positive message. Right now I’m working on “Akeelah and the Bee,” a film about an African-American girl who lives in Los Angeles’ South Central and who makes it to the National Spelling Bee.

Ray is definitely a feel-good movie. How many costumes did you design?

I designed more than 100 costumes for the cast. Ray was a low-budget film, so most of the fabrics were purchased from vendors in downtown Los Angeles. We didn’t have a budget to go shopping in Europe or anything like that. I dug through fabric companies’ old-fabric bins. I chose upholstery fabric for the Raylettes’ dresses because it has more texture and depth and the colors are richer. Jamie Foxx’s blue, red and silver tuxedos were made of chanton silk, which also came from textile bins in Los Angeles. The vintage ties were all of the period for their sequence and were either rented from costume rentals or purchased from a vintage dealer, both in Los Angeles.

What type of research did you do for the film?

The film’s director, Taylor Hackford, spent 12 years preparing for the film, and amassed a large amount of research materials, and I had access to all of his materials. Ray Charles was still alive during the film’s production. [He passed away shortly after the film was edited.] He allowed us to view his vintage-clothing collection, which is stored at a private facility in Los Angeles, for our research.

I made all of Jamie’s costumes in multiples. Everything he wore was original; nothing was rented except the ties. I had to design the patterns from photographs I saw of Ray Charles throughout his career. It was really hard because I had to recreate the silhouettes correctly and make sure that each suit draped on Jamie the same way it did on Ray. My favorite suit on Jamie is a gray wool sports coat with black polka dots.

I loved creating costumes for the Raylettes. My favorite costumes were the knee-length, salmon-colored silk squareneck cocktail dresses with sheer mesh overlay and silver decorative balls.

What kind of design direction did you have for recreating the people in Ray Charles’ life?

There were so many characters moving in and out of the script, such as performers and business partners. I studied photos of all of these people at some stage of their lives. It was a challenge to create different silhouettes for these characters based on photographs. I got to create silhouettes that made them stand out—sort of a new look. The details are subtle, but they’re there.

Recreating Ray Charles’ childhood during the 1930s was very challenging, mainly because we had to distress all of the costumes in that scene to make them appear aged and of lower income. We wanted the audience to believe that the characters were straight out of this tiny community in Florida. That was a really interesting aspect of designing costumes for the film. When I look at photographs of people in Ray Charles’ life, like his mother and little brother or his manager or his mistress, I still find it interesting that I created an identity for those people on screen.

Bob Ringwood “Troy”

Veteran costume designer Bob Ringwood, nominated for “Troy,” honed his costume design skills on sci-fi/fantasy thrillers such as “The Time Machine” (2002), “Artificial Intelligence: AI” (2001), “Batman Forever” (1995), “Dune” (1984) and “Excalibur” (1981). Previously, he earned an Academy Award nomination for Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (1987). He is currently taking a brief hiatus to restore his 18th century estate in the English countryside.

The story of Troy comes from Homer’s “The Iliad,” an epic tale that combines history with mythology. Did the sheer scale of the production present any challenges for you?

The studio decided to cut the myths and all the gods and goddesses and just focus on the siege of Troy. The scale of the movie was huge, and on a large film like “Troy” you have to delegate duties. As I see it, the designer is like a conductor of an orchestra: You direct the players but you are not playing the instruments. I had to design about 9,000 costumes for the film, so the main challenge [given the short prep time of about five months] was to keep ahead of the camera.

We didn’t rent a single costume for the film. We set up a large workroom, and I gathered a small army of about 140 seamstresses, jewelry makers, tailors and costume assistants, including cutters and armorers from Italy and England. Plus [we had] a small group of highly skilled and generous assistants— including Paolo Scalabrini, Roland Sanchez, Frank Gardner, Helen Smith and Carrie Baylis—each being responsible for organizing a section of the film. Roz Ward and Jeeda Barford not only shopped, they designed and made most of the fabrics, woven and embroidered in India, Turkey, Iraq, Morocco and Uzbekistan. I reviewed all the designs with them, and we discussed the type of fabrics and decoration that would be suitable and which countries we could source those materials in. For “Troy,” I thought it would be better to weave and embroider the fabrics in those countries because they have craftsmen who specialize in traditional, hand-made fabrics. The look is more authentic, and the advantage is that those designs have been around for centuries. The patterns for the garments were sent to these countries, where the decoration was applied directly onto the fabric. The pieces were sent back and cut and assembled in our workshop.

To supply the armor for the legions of soldiers, we produced armor prototypes that used methods and materials that were authentic to the period. These were then cast in plastic using a recently developed, highly effective new method. High-pressure spray guns cover the prototype with miniscule droplets of plastic that pick up every detail of the original. This then becomes the mold, and hundreds of plastic copies are made. Each is then finished with metal plating and painted with dyes. The end result is a lightweight, perfect facsimile of the original that can be mass-produced.

What was your approach to the film’s costume design?

The design direction is pre-classical Greece. I designed period clothes circa 1250 B.C. and blended the designs with later classical Greek [looks] to make them seem more familiar to the audience. I also added a big pinch of Hollywood glamour.

I have always loved the ancient world and have read about it extensively over the years. So I had amassed quite a large collection of reference books on the subject and was comfortable with it. My approach was to refresh my knowledge and then put [the reference books] all away and design the project from my head. I also spent several days at The British Museum studying the ancient bas-relief sculptures from Iraq, which have thousands of tiny figures—I kept setting off the alarms in the museum by getting too close. Actually they’re quite accurate depictions of all levels of ancient society: religious, military and secular.

Prior to filming, I worked with sketch artist Mariano Diaz. We used layers of tracing paper, starting with a nude body. I drew clothes on the next layer. Mariano cleaned up the drawing, and we worked like this, back and forth on [about 8 layers], refining the design until the last layer, which was always finished into a highly polished drawing by Mariano. Then it was scanned into the computer, and worked up even further in Photoshop. From this finished design, the costumes were made.

Which costume designs from the film are your favorites?

The ladies’ court dresses were a joy to make, and these were expertly cut and sewn by Anne Maskrey to couture standards. Made with Indian silk, these dresses were handpleated and decorated in our workshop. The designs were based on ancient Greek dresses and influenced by the fabulous [Mariano] Fortuny [whose dresses were also based on ancient models]. Of course, I added quite a lot of old-style Hollywood glamour—you can’t beat Adrian, Travis Banton and Orry Kelly in the glamour department.

Alexandra Byrne “Finding Neverland”

“Finding Neverland” costume designer Alexandra Byrne is a relative newcomer by industry standards, having only produced costumes for six films, including “Elizabeth” (1998) and “Hamlet” (1996), both nominated for Academy Awards. Byrne, who also completed costume designs for director Joel Schumacher’s film adaptation of the Broadway musical “The Phantom of the Opera” last year, got her start designing sets and costumes for England’s Royal Shakespeare Co. before joining the film industry.

What was the design process like for “Finding Neverland”?

We made about 100 costumes. It’s quite a small film, but it has a range of costumes: cowboys, pirates, theatrical, fantasy and period costumes. The fabrics and trimmings were purchased from vintage-fabric markets and antique dealers in England. You have to hunt quite hard, but it’s there. We had 12 weeks to prep the costumes before production started.

I didn’t create costume sketches; I made big folio pages that were a collage of references for each character. The visuals do not need to be restricted to the period of the script; they show any aspect or feeling of the character. It’s a mood board that can be shared with the director, actors, producers and production designer. It becomes an ongoing process and discussion in which ideas are constantly growing. The images come from magazines, copies from books and photo albums. I use it to create silhouettes and patterns. It’s all a collaborative effort, but my job is to steer it in the right direction.

The great thing about my research for “Finding Neverland” is I have my own family albums with photographs from the late 1800s. They are not posed studio photographs but rather family snapshots of children playing and dressing up at home. Interestingly, I gathered my information from a variety of resources. I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London and sifted through their archives. The museum has a file with photographs of Sir James Barrie and the [Llewelyn Davies] boys. I also visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which has an expansive wardrobe collection that dates back to the 17th century. I also spent a lot of time browsing through my own book collections, mainly painters of that period but also looking wider for the unexpected inspiration. I visited London’s Theatre Museum and studied photographs from the original and early productions of “Peter Pan.” I also looked at a lot of visual references that didn’t have to do with the period and incorporated some of those influences into the costumes for the clowns, pirates, cowboys and Neverland, of course. I studied the work of Elsa Schiaparelli, the couture designer in the 1940s, for the feel of some of the fantasy scenes. She designed a collection inspired by the circus. At a London costume house I found a clown costume dating from the 1920s; some of the colors were amazingly bright greens and pinks. I used this boldness of color for inspiration on my own costume design in the fantasy sequence in which Barrie is dancing with the dog in the park and his imagination transforms the dog into a dancing bear in a circus.

I made an interesting discovery that influenced my costume designs. I purchased a ladies’ bodice from a late 19th century evening gown at a vintage market. It wasn’t expensive because the fabric was worn and extremely fragile. In paintings from that era, fabrics tend to look quite heavy. I expected the fabric to be much heavier, but the silk was as light as tissue paper. It gave me a much clearer idea about weight and the movement of the fabric. The colors of the fabrics from that era were brighter than I had thought; inside the seams on this evening bodice, the colors were very strong where light had not had the chance to fade it.

Did you face many challenges because of the complex nature of costume design of that era?

There were some challenges with Johnny Depp’s wardrobe. I felt it needed to be of the right period, although the men’s clothing of that period was often stiff and too formal. I didn’t want to distract from the innocence of the story by complicating it with multiple costume changes for different story days. So I made one suit for his daywear, made with wool fabric, using the reverse side. Kate Winslet’s character was more bohemian, so I wanted her costumes to feel like clothes. They were made with linen and muslin—natural fabric—with handdone embroidery and appliqueacute;. In the film, Barrie’s wife had extravagant dresses like the green corset dress with embroidered black tulle and black beaded fringe detail. I tried not to make clicheacute;d choices from that period. I made sure everything was true to the period but more unusual and unexpected.

Sandy Powell “The Aviator”

Sandy Powell was nominated for “The Aviator,” her second collaboration with director Martin Scorsese. (She also earned an Oscar nomination for Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” in 2003.) Previously, she was nominated for her costume designs for the films “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), “The Wings of the Dove” (1997) and “Orlando” (1992). In 1999, she took home the Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love.” Currently, she is taking time off from films to work in musical theater.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m in Rome right now preparing costume design for a musical theater show called “Elizabeth” about Queen Elizabeth I. The director is an Englishman named Lindsay Kemp, who, among other things, is known for creating David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” look. He gave me my first job out of college, so I’m thrilled to work with him again—although it is an adjustment to not have a big budget for costumes after just working on such a big-budget film like “The Aviator.”

Your experience in costume design pretty much covers every film genre, including the films “Shakespeare in Love,” “Far From Heaven,” “Velvet Goldmine,” “Interview with the Vampire” and “The End of the Affair.”

Through my experience I’ve learned that after you do a film that’s successful, you get offers for films that are very similar. I try not to pigeonhole myself like that. This is the first film [for which] I’ve created “Hollywood glamour” costumes, and it was very challenging because it’s not quite contemporary and yet it is sort of recent history. I didn’t copy anything specific, really; I just designed costumes that I thought were glamorous of that era. I designed costumes for all of the principal actors and actresses as well as some of the key background people, about 300 costumes. We purchased our fabrics in New York and Los Angeles and made most of the costumes in Montreal. Some of the extras’ costumes came from costume rental houses in Los Angeles, New York and London. We used vintage fabrics and trims, including buttons, for the costumes’ details.

“The Aviator” is your second collaboration with director Martin Scorsese; the first was “Gangs of New York.”

Yes, and I think we make a really good team. I like working with him. He puts a lot of research into his films. For “Gangs of New York,” he had amassed a large volume of historical clips and photos, which made it helpful in my own research. For “The Aviator,” he provided different material. He screened movies for us that starred actors that were portrayed in “The Aviator.” We also watched Howard Hughes’ films, such as “The Outlaw” and “Hell’s Angels,” and newsreel footage.

What is your impression of Howard Hughes, and how did you make him evolve in the film?

He was a hard worker and a brilliant businessman. The film was episodic and had different stages that begin during the Roaring ’20s and end in 1947. In the early years, Hughes was very polished looking. Later he begins to look scruffy and a little disheveled. After the plane crash, he lost a lot of weight, and I had to convey that. I made Leonardo’s costumes a few sizes too big and used a flimsier fabric made of lightweight wool to give the impression he had lost a lot of weight.

Which costumes are your favorites in the film?

I really enjoyed making Cate Blanchett’s costumes. She played Katharine Hepburn, who was very casual in a smart way in private but who could also look very glamorous when she dressed up. Hepburn wasn’t conventional at all; she usually wore slacks instead of a dress. For Blanchett, I designed wool trousers and rayon and cotton shirts as well as a few dresses. One of my favorite dresses she wore in the film was a mustard/green jersey dress with a studded waist, dolman sleeves and shoulder pads. It has a complicated structure, but it has a simple yet beautiful appearance.

The dress Gwen Stefani wore as Jean Harlow is the only dress in the film I copied from a photograph of the late actress. It’s a V-neck satin-backed silver lameacute; dress that I paired with a silk velvet jacket and fur collar.

Do you think Hollywood fashion is as glamorous now as it was in the 1930s?

No, but I think it tries. I don’t think designers have the same sense of style they had back then. There are far more choices now for fabrics and trims, and far more ways that people can make mistakes.