Costume designer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Michael Kaplan, talks us through his choices and intentions for clothing in the film. Prepare to be disappointed if you want Tom Cruise’s blue silk suit worn in Dubai; it was custom made by Mr. Kaplan himself. At least Cruise’s Persol sunglasses are available to buy, however. Michael Kaplan is a powerhouse force in costume design. He is guaranteed to have worked on at least one Hollywood movie you fondly remember from the last twenty years or so. If in doubt consider he designed Samuel L. Jackson’s pimp ensembles for The Long Kiss Good Night (1996) and Randy Quaid’s bad taste brilliance…

In Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, costume supervisor Edith Head), based on the novella by Truman Capote, we get to know Holly Golightly, a mysterious woman-child with a troubled past who refuses to belong to anyone or anywhere. The film reveals much about Holly’s character through its allusions via costume, attests Lisa Magnuson. Holly is presented as young, frightened and damaged; someone who, like a cat, lashes out when others get too close. Holly’s iconic Givenchy dress seen in the opening scene with its thick, cumbersome necklace and yoked back, arguably the most famous costume in film history, represents Holly’s current status as a call girl. The dress consumes…

Filmmaker Nic Fforde discusses how he come to realise the importance of costume design in his projects. Stories in films are all familiar to us in some way, no matter how remote the setting. The hell that unfolds aboard the Nostromo in Alien, LA’s icy criminal underworld in Heat or Rope’s Ivy League dinner party – a good story well told will whisk you away to its own self–contained world. All the tools of filmmaking are there to help create these worlds. What part does costume play in all this? My day job is to make films for advertising. We work on low budgets with small documentary crews. Whatever our…

Joanna Johnston is a multi-award nominated costume designer with an excitingly eclectic filmography. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989) and The Sixth Sense (1999) to About a Boy (2002) and Valkyrie (2008). Including most famously Saving Private Ryan (1998), she is now carving a niche in military dress and uniform. Although, considering the subtlety of all Ms. Johnston’s costume design – the cleverly unchanging ensemble worn by Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense for example – this is only a small part of her work. Clothes on Film called up Joanna Johnston for a chat about her most recently released project, War Horse…

Costume designer Gary Jones took on the difficult task of bringing The Wizard of Oz back to life for a new millennium and a new audience that had grand expectations. Yet in the end his overall look for Oz the Great and Powerful was more grounded in reality than most of us expected. This is about as far away from pantomime fantasy as you can get. Some of the outfits are, dare we say, wearable, even if you don’t have a costume party to go to. We inspected four of them close up back in February (read our analysis HERE) so can attest at their relative simplicity. However don’t underestimate…

There is a problem with the costumes in The Wolf of Wall Street, and it has nothing to do with the film itself but the coverage they have received. Namely, that this coverage is incorrect. Articles such as this one for Vogue France, or this for The Hollywood Reporter, or a ‘suit guide’ by Esquire, concentrate almost solely on Giorgio Armani’s contribution to the project with barely a mention of costume designer Sandy Powell. And this is the Sandy Powell by the way: 10 Oscar nominations and so well respected she has an OBE for services to the industry. It was Powell who costumed The Wolf of Wall Street, not…

Starring: Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield Directed By: Martin Scorsese Acclaimed director Martin Scorsese concocts a cracking children’s fantasy in homage to silent movie magician Georges Méliès; his beloved Hugo barely drops a cog in its methodically realised mechanical world. Scorsese has unmistakably made a children’s movie. Some may argue not as it is crammed full of references to early moving pictures that only adults could probably recognise. Yet Scorsese’s purpose, like that of his hero Méliès, is to entertain and inform. For all the po-faced wittering by cinema scholars that Hugo is meant for them, one has to wonder if deep down Scorsese really cares if any…

SPOILERS Ahead of a detailed interview with Star Wars: The Force Awakens costume designer Michael Kaplan (currently hard at work on Episode VIII), we take a brief look at his undeniable achievement in bringing the 1970s – early 80’s back to life right here in the present. How do you make the now look old when paradoxically it is supposed to be the new? Well, you go simple. We say simple, but we mean ‘back to basics’. This is not the prequels; The Force Awakens takes place thirty years after the Rebellion defeated the Empire. Now both sides are in state of rebuilding so there is little call for Padmae’s…

No actress personifies the vivid style and nutty playfulness of the flower power years more than Goldie Hawn. From the disheveled crop of sunny blonde locks and psychedelic mini dresses to the teeny bikinis and hand-painted slogan tattoos, Goldie’s most notable looks left an indelible stamp on 1960s pop culture. For three years her giggly, dizzy blonde routine and flawless comic timing charmed American television viewers and made her the most popular member of the ‘Laugh-In’ roster and her work on the legendary TV show led to her first starring role in a major motion picture, 1969’s Cactus Flower. In Cactus Flower, Goldie is cast as a Greenwich Village-dwelling hipster,…

That is the long and the short of it: according to the wise words of this month’s Vogue India, Clothes on Film are one of the leading voices in digital fashion coverage. The exact words of their writer Dal Chodha were ‘game changer’, so we’ll happily run with that. You can read the full Vogue article in THIS PDF. We’re on page 156, the piece begins at p 148. Honestly we are not entirely sure what being bestowed such an honour means, but with names such as Victoria Beckham and Burberry included in the list we must be doing (and saying) something right. It does make Clothes on Film seem…