Heathers | Clothes on Film

Internal Affairs (1990) is an excellent stone cold thriller. The costumes are a subtle tease, revealing personal information that the characters never say out loud. Like many movies released in the late 1980s/1990s, Internal Affairs radiates uneasiness caused by shifting societal attitudes – anything that threatens a straight male chauvinist black-and-white world. Costume designer Rudy Dillon punches through this black-and-white world with ensembles that poke fun at the status quo and subsequently subvert them with eroticism, perhaps ironically using only a colour scheme of black and white. The straight white male chauvinist is Dennis Peck (Richard Gere), a police officer in Los Angeles who controls his colleagues by involving them…

Filmmaker and costume designer Sophie Black recounts her personal interpretation of Heathers, a film defined by vivid visual interpretation. It is just a coincidence that the first time I saw Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988) was within hours of the first time I saw David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), and I immediately made comparisons between the two films which I may have not noticed otherwise. More people are quick to compare Heathers to the work of Tim Burton, because of the associates he had on the film (producer Denise Di Novi and star Winona Ryder, to name but two) and the fact that the candy-coloured suburban setting mirrors that of Edward…