Wrangler | Clothes on Film

A brief video dip into the costume design of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

It was late November, 2016 when I visited the set of The Conjuring 2 (directed by James Wan). The reason I never wrote about it for Clothes on Film or anywhere else was because of my official role on the day: I was playing an extra (or background artist if you like) during the film’s Maida Vale pub scene. Specifically this is the moment when real life husband and wife paranormal investigator team, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) meet with noted experts in their field to discuss the validity of their current case, aka the Enfield poltergeist. I made the finished cut, by the skin of my…

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…