As the 1960s dawned, Audrey Hepburn entered her thirtieth year. Following the success of such films as Funny Face (1957) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) she was a huge star, and thanks to her enduring relationship with couturier Hubert de Givenchy (she was his muse) a style icon to boot. Yet as the decade grooved to immortality with ‘youthquake’ spreading across the globe like wild fire, Audrey suddenly found herself part of the old guard. Teenagers were wearing shorter and shorter minis in myriad colours, and while Audrey always remained chic in her LBD or Givenchy sack, she was not really appealing to a young audience anymore. She wasn’t hip.…

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston Directed By: Nicolas Winding Refn On the surface, Drive is effortlessly stylish, old-school filmmaking that luxuriates in its retro fashion. Yet, as Simon Kinnear reveals, underneath the hood, lurks a troubling character study. It has become something of a cliché to acknowledge the debt owed by the Movie Brats of the 1970s to the European auteurs of the 1950s and 1960s. Woody Allen idolised Ingmar Bergman, Paul Schrader wrote a book about Bresson and Dreyer, both Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola ripped-off Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and Scorsese littered his films with allusions to Godard and Visconti. Yet arguably the most blatant steal…

Featuring couture as cool and disaffecting its protagonist, Belle de Jour (1967, directed by Luis Buñuel) has much to say through its ambiguous antiplot narrative and can be read effectively through costume. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, a bourgeois housewife unable to commit sexually to her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). Instead she fulfils her sadomasochistic fantasies by becoming prostitute ‘Belle de jour’ at an intimately run brothel. Every afternoon between two and five Séverine services clients of various persuasions as her eyes are gradually opened to the possibility of sexual satisfaction. Yet the deeper she digs the more her bourgeois existence is threatened. Eventually Séverine quits the brothel and returns to…

Basic Instinct is a movie that even its director Paul Verhoeven has described as “nonsense”, yet one cannot argue with the impact of the white dress Sharon Stone wears for the interrogation scene. Plus there is far more going on here than an absence of underwear. When this erotic thriller was released in 1992 it was notorious long before projectors whirred to life. Picketed on set by gay and lesbian groups in San Francisco for what they considered to be a stereotypical and offensive view of homosexuality, the film was lucky to have gotten made at all. Of course this was before the furore over that close up, not to…

With its explosive mix of comedy, drama and racial politics, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) remains one of the most controversial and powerful films of the 80’s. Much of its enduring popularity can be attributed to an iconic aesthetic achieved through a combination of the writer-director-star’s expansive yet intimate vision, Ernest Dickerson’s glowing cinematography and – journalist Ashley Clark argues – Ruth E. Carter’s vibrant, expressive costume work. Carter’s contribution is vital in three key areas: establishing a sense of place and adding depth to the characters, supporting the film’s themes, and contributing to a bold onscreen representation of blackness which, as suggested by Ed Guerrero, “challenges and…

Clothes on Film talks exclusively to Anna Sheppard about her work on Captain America: The First Avenger, covering sartorial recreation of 1940s wartime, development of a superhero costume and the difficulties of working from someone else’s original designs. Anna B. Sheppard is one of the best known and respected costume designers in the business. Based in London but working internationally, she has created costumes for directors Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino, plus been Academy Award nominated twice, for Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002). Captain America is something of a departure for Sheppard as she is effectively working from a 70 year old design template. The…