18th century | Clothes on Film

There are already a lot of excellent interviews with Oscar winning Beauty and the Beast costume designer Jacqueline Durran online, so with our limited communication we wanted to ask a little more about Belle’s (Emma Watson) day-to-day ensemble and the creation of Gaston’s attire (Luke Evans), arguably the closest character to his 1991 animated counterpart. Ms. Durran, currently hard at work on a new project, was kind enough to provide a few brief responses: Clothes on Film: How did you go about creating costumes for a computer generated Beast? Jacqueline Durran: When I first started prep on the movie the Beast was going to be a prosthetic beast. Had this…

The first full-length trailer for Disney’s new live-action adaptation of Cinderella was this week and featured tantalising glimpses of what promises to be a visually gorgeous film. The costumes, designed by three time Academy Award winner Sandy Powell, appear to be absolutely stunning. With a clever mix of the eighteenth century, the 1830s, and a little 1950s couture thrown in for good measure (Powell has been quoted as saying she was aiming for the look of “a nineteenth-century period film made in the 1940s or ’50s”), Powell has created another jewel to add to her already over-bling crown. Here is a quick rundown of some of the looks we’ve been…

If you watch supernatural cop show Sleepy Hollow on Fox (Universal in the UK), you will definitely know who Kristin Burke is. Her sartorial contribution to the first season has ingrained the series with a handsome, consistent, yet oddly plausible look. We say ‘oddly’ because the show is, for want of a better term, completely batshit crazy; a mix of 18th century drama and modern day X-Files, involving headless horsemen, a tree monster, deadly black vein disease, and all manner of creepy mythology based beasties. It’s terrific fun. Kristin M. Burke is what we would politely call a veteran costume designer, over 50 films to her name, although not someone…

If you live near the Getty Center, there really is no excuse not to attend their Dressing the Part: Historical Costume on Film event.

Jack Sparrow has finally become the irritating wiseass who just won’t leave the party.

Win two pairs of tickets to an exclusive screening of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in London on 9th May. Harr!

The first trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Costumes are a typically splendid affair.