When making a feature film, there are many important elements to pay special attention to. One of them is the costume, since it is key to give a frame to the story and to take the audience to the time in which the story is set. This work is carried out jointly by the director of the film, the director of photography and the costume designer, who work as a team to create characters, specific periods and to narrate situations.
An important detail is that it is necessary that the characters look realistic and that their clothes communicate their personality and style. It is also very important to determine the color palette that will be used depending on the setting of the film and even of each scene. To carry out this task, a deep investigation must be done many months before starting to shoot in order to take ideas that will inspire the costume design. Depending on the period in which the film is set, they can resort to magazines, books, photographs of the people to be portrayed (when the story is based on real events) or, if the film is set in a more contemporary period, they can visit the locations where the film will be shot to be inspired by current fashion.
Keira Knightley's clothes in Colette are the example of months of preparation. The costume designer of the film said in an interview that she began studying a year before the photos of the real French novelist Sidonie Gabrielle Colette as well as other photographs from that period - the beginning of the 20th century - and was even inspired by paintings by Jean-Georges Béraud, Fernand Toussaint and Édouard Vuillard.
Another emblematic example is Jackie, the film directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Natalie Portman, which earned a nomination for the Oscar and BAFTA awards in the category of Best Costume Design (in charge of Madeline Fontaine). In this biographical drama about the life of the first lady Jackie Kennedy, the director entrusted Fontaine with the difficult task of recreating some pieces that were very important in the story: the red wool Dior, the pink Channel suit matching a subtle hat and a pearl necklace – the clothes she was wearing the day of her husband's assassination- "This project was special because of all the collective memory that exists around her (...) it was a great challenge" she says.
And if we leave behind the period clothes or real characters and go to the futuristic side, we can talk about Valerian and the city of a thousand planets starring Cara Delevingne and Dane Dehaan, with the participation of other talents like Rihanna, Clive Owen and Ethan Hawke. In this case, costume designer Oliver Bériot said that his starting point for inspiration was comic books, which have a strong inspiration in the seventies. "We had a workshop of eighty people and we built costumes during nine months for the majority of the characters. There’s a few items we shopped for but we did a major part of the work," he says. They used multiple fabrics and textures from spandex and latex to elastomers or rubber to accompany all these science fiction scenarios.
Quite a piece of art!
