This is part 2 (part 1 HERE) of an expanded article Clothes on Film editor Christopher Laverty wrote for men’s style resource MR PORTER analysing Michael Caine’s suits in The Italian Job. This post covers all the costumes he wore during the film. We rejoin Charlie and his ragtag crew at the big meeting when the gang are all introduced to each other. It had to be a Doug Hayward moment and thankfully does not disappoint. In actual fact it is probably Michael Caine’s best fitting suit in the whole movie: Dark blue worsted wool suit; double breasted jacket, wide peaked lapels, 6 on 2 fastening, slanted hip pockets, ticket…

All the Clothes on Film posts in a big long list – scroll down there’s loads – or you can search via keyword in the box below. Older posts may have been attacked by the typo monster. From Tailors with Love Podcast: Discussing the Tom Ford Look The Rhythm Section Trailer: An Assassin’s Lookbook Troop Zero: It’s Birdie Time Bombshell: Below the Belt Guns Akimbo Trailer Hits: Daniel Radcliffe is Deadly Cousin Eddie The Fashionable Style of Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone The Gumshoe Chic of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart (1987) The Costuming of Joaquin Phoenix in Joker The Maltese Falcon: The Shirts That Dreams Are Made Of…

Sons of Anarchy portrays the fictionalised world of an outlaw motorcycle club; although the plots are dramatic in the extreme, many of the details are firmly based in realism, including the costuming. Series creator Kurt Sutter has described it as pure soap opera, but this family drama has earned the tag of “Hamlet on Motorcycles”. It has been embraced by pop culture and by the biker community, and spurred an upsurge in sales of Harley Davidsons (and a $25k SOA branded bike). Motorcycle club culture took off after WW2, when returning veterans with experience of riding bikes on service, and often undiagnosed post-traumatic stress, took to the lifestyle looking for……

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page Directed By: Christopher Nolan Not everyone is going to like Inception. Not everyone likes, say, Fight Club, or Inglourious Basterds. Mainly because they went in expecting one thing and came out with something entirely different. And this is Inception in a nutshell. Slick, engaging, tense, yet maybe nothing at all like you expected. The screenplay by director Christopher Nolan, apparently decades in the making and originally a horror story, is constructed as his own personal maze in which to lose viewers. The meat of the film, the heist or ‘Inception’, incorporates several plots working concurrently towards a single narrative. Shooting at exotic locales…

Twenty-five years ago, costume designer Margot Wilson was a student living in Paris when she picked up a roll of red, moire silk fabric during a shopping trip to Milan. She didn’t know why, or what for; she wasn’t even a costume designer then, just a talented young fashion grad from East Sydney Tech on a six-month scholarship to France. When it was time to go home, she took the beautiful roll of fabric back down under with her. Fast forward three decades and a couple of dozen films later (including Lantana, Bran Nue Dae and Lawless), and Wilson has finally found a screen role for her magnificent weave –…

As the UK is missing out on the Iron Man 2 world premiere thanks to that giant ash cloud, we shall endeavour to cheer ourselves up with a few images from the film everyone has probably seen already. Iron Man 2 is one of costume designer Mary Zophres’ biggest productions to date. Although, the rumour goes, she did have a staff of twenty five assistants on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), so is obviously used to pressure. Working from a template established by original Iron Man’s costume designers Rebecca Bentjen and Laura Jean Shannon, she has created an already memorable looking set of principals. Disregarding…

Part two of our essay looking at sartorial identity in Sons of Anarchy, featuring exclusive insight from series costume designer Kelli Jones. Catch up with part 1 HERE. The women of SAMCRO include porn stars and pole dancers, but the club matriarch is Gemma played by Katey Sagal, formerly known as Peg Bundy in Married with Children. Gemma is the Queen of this world so her look is regal rock chick, “to make her look badass without looking like a slut. This sexy mama bitch doesn’t need to TRY” costume designer Kelli Jones says. With her background in music (she has performed with the likes of Bette Midler, Gene Simmons…

He is the whitest of the white trash, the kind of man who dumps raw sewage in a storm drain and kidnaps your boss as a Christmas present. And the only man to ever combine a leather belt with a bathrobe. Randy Quaid has played lovable moocher ‘Cousin Eddie’ in four separate National Lampoon films, but his most famous performance still resides at yuletide. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989, directed by Jeremiah C. Chechik) has weathered years of apathy to become something of a seasonal favourite. Watching Chevy Chase’s bipolar family man Clark Griswold lose his rag every December is now a festive tradition . Yet Clark is not really…

What young girl doesn’t want to be in the ‘Pink Ladies’ after seeing Grease (1978)? They are synonymous by their satin-lined powder pink baseball-style jacket, ‘Pink Ladies’ embroidered in black scrawl on the reverse, their name on the front, worn mostly with the collar up for that rebellious touch. Celebrating impurity, they are one of the most popular and imitated girl gangs on screen. Being ‘pink’ is a sarcastic and perhaps sexual allusion. Specialist websites suggest for a Pink Lady we need their jacket and a poodle skirt, but what do the girls really wear and why? Rizzo, the Pink Ladies’ leader, is studied HERE, with this article focusing on…

The green suit worn by Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels in The Birds (1963) has become increasingly symbolic in recent years as we delve ever deeper into the semiotics of film. In this case it is hardly surprising as Hedren only wears three costumes in total; the suit is so visible we cannot fail to draw meaning from its presence. But what was director Alfred Hitchcock trying to say with it, and more importantly, why? If you visited the V&A’s Hollywood Costume exhibition (now closed in London but moved to Australia and the U.S.), seeing The Birds’ suit would likely have stuck in your mind. It was given prominent placing…