Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) has undergone one of the most dramatic transformations over the past three seasons of Game of Thrones. She begins a helpless pawn, but grows into the Mother of Dragons and a conquering hero. Like Sansa Stark, Daenerys’ character development is visually shown in her costumes, designed by Michele Clapton. At the beginning of Game of Thrones, Daenerys is under the tight control of her brother, Viserys. Viserys sees her as nothing more than a tool to get what he wants, arranging a marriage to a terrifying war lord just so he can build himself an army to fight for the Iron Throne. Daenerys is weak and…

Bit late to the party for this one, but what the hey. Did you know that Calvin Klein has re-released the white shift dress that Alicia Silverstone made famous in Clueless? Yes, you probably did. Thanks to Mona May’s costume design reinventing the look of an era, replacing baggy jeans and grunge with brightly coloured femininity and for (rich) boys, 1950s drape jackets and high-waisted trousers, Clueless (1995) remains a sartorial time capsule. That May went onto design for the 1996-97 television series demonstrates just how important her fashion contribution was at that time. Perhaps unsurprisingly Alicia Silverstone’s Cher is the most memorable character in terms of costume for a…

What a busy twelve months it’s been for costume design. Really though, this art, or craft, or business (Deborah Nadoolman Landis insists it is definitely a business) gets more talked about each year. 2013 was especially exciting however as it seemed every month something even more thrilling arrived to fawn over. In the last few weeks alone we have had The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Sleepy Hollow, and now American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street on the horizon. Dipping back further, it was Stoker that got us excited about subtext, The Great Gatsby that slammed the lid on that twenties revival once and for all, and Behind…

Part two of a new Dual Analysis costume film review. Beetle Juice (1988) is one of the landmark films in my life. There is “Before Beetle Juice” and there is “After Beetle Juice”. The film is important to me because it was the first film to reflect a subculture that I recognized firsthand: goth. I was a teenager in 1988, and the gothic movement had started (on the West Coast of California, in any case) in about 1984 – 1985. It wasn’t called goth, or gothic, at that point. In fact, I don’t even remember hearing the term ‘goth’ to describe this look until the mid-nineties, when the movement had…