Paranormal Activity 2 does look interesting; not least costume wise. In a very ordinary way. Harry subverts his identity to get lost in the crowd during this blistering new trailer for New Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. The costumes are somewhat…ahem….‘colourful’. A few images from The American starring George Clooney. Contemporary costume design by Suttirat Anne Larlarb. If you like Potter, you are going to like this. Cannot say fairer than that. Want to know exactly what a costume designer does? Let Ellen Mirojnick explain it to you.

We may have to eat our words, but as it stands 12 Years a Slave is unlikely to win the Best Costume Design Oscar. It does tick some of the necessary boxes: it’s period (mid 19th century), features both crinolines and cravats, and is part of the popular ballot. Yet being as the protagonist spends most of his time in just an increasingly distressed tunic shirt, the Academy may just feel costume designer Patricia Norris has really not worked hard enough. Flippancy toward the Academy aside, 12 Years a Slave remains a wonderfully rich costume experience. Every fibre leaps off the screen with detail and feeling. The cool weave of……

A slight but worth watching video about the costume and production design for frothy Walt Disney biography Saving Mr. Banks. If you have not seen the film it won’t spoil anything, and will probably get you wanting to dress in sixties suits and dresses again, like Mad Men did in the early days. Newly released on collectable Blu-ray, The Long Goodbye (1973, directed by Robert Altman) is the kind of film you feel ashamed for not watching more often. Starring Elliot Gould as Raymond Chandler’s pulp private dick Phillip Marlowe, this is a quirky, very seventies re-imagining of the Humphrey Bogart man-in-a-trenchcoat myth. The film is contemporary set, yet Gould’s…

The Counsellor trailer hits with high-shine sartorial gloss. Lord Christopher Laverty 6 Comments 24 Sep ’10 29 Oct ’10 8 Dec ’10

Playing computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace embodies the character in such a way that picturing anyone else in the role is nearly impossible. The displaced sex appeal of uniforms in Mildred Pierce. Groundbreaking film La Dolce Vita offers a conflicting portrayal of masculinity. Potiche confirms that Catherine Deneuve will always be Belle de Jour, only now with added sense of humour. In Malèna, Monica Bellucci plays an impossible vision of beauty; a woman so striking she is immediately sexualised by all who lay eyes on her. A prevalent theme in the first episode of Mildred Pierce starring is how domestic costume can be read as a signal for sexual…

Shocking, but not really considering all the legal wrangling going on recently, Bond 23 has been shelved “indefinitely”.

Or when your costumes look like a building. Odile Dicks-Mireaux’s designs for High Rise (2016) are far more than that. But for a film set in such a heavily stylised world, especially one created by sci-fi author J.G. Ballard, homogeny is everything. In fact homogeny is terrifying. Everything is reflected in the aesthetic. The building towers, Tom Hiddleston’s trouser legs tower, and Luke Evans towers over everyone.  Director Ben Wheatley has claimed that he did not want High Rise to look like a ‘greatest hits of the seventies‘, but really that’s exactly what he’s got, certainly in terms of costume design – and that’s okay. It might not be the……

With exclusive insight from costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas, we analyse Sandra Bullock’s low volume, big impact wardrobe in The Proposal. Crazy, Stupid Love is every inch the ‘fashion film’, both in terms of narrative and costume designer Dayna Pink’s elegant menswear styling. Warner Bros. have released two images from The Great Gatsby. Not much to see, but it is difficult not to be drawn in by the promise of costume luxury. Lucie Bates exclusively discusses her work on Hanna, inducing parodies, subtext and working with Giorgio Armani. Judianna Makovsky demonstrates that contemporary fashion with a plot is far more fun than a flick through Vogue. Esquire have featured a…

In the very opening scene of Rocky (1976, costume designer Robert Cambel), we see the title character in the ring, bare chested, hands encased in boxing gloves, the picture of sporting violence and masculinity. But this is no more than a surface assumption. Not two minutes later, we see Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) shrug on his faded brown towelling dressing gown, with “The Italian Stallion” embroidered on the back, and things start to shift. This is not a macho film concerned with the fight alone, but an exploration of masculinity in all its guises – the assumptions, the pretence and the reality. Clothes play an important part in this, both…

Two trends in women’s fashion for 2011 are prints and turbans, empathised in the film Coming to America. Little Junior Brown represents the ugly face of nineties designer villainy. A classic example of mid-eighties opulence – Sigourney Weaver’s oversized cape coat.