MINOR SPOILERS Okja (2017) is the second film that costume designer Catherine George has worked on with director Bong Joon-ho. Their first together, Snowpiercer (2013), despite being lauded by critics (and featuring Chris Evans), only received a limited theatrcial run in the U.S. and no release at all in the UK. Unlike Okja, Snowpiercer is an out and out sci-fi fantasy set when most of the world’s population have been wiped out and those who remain live on perpetually moving train. Okja is still a fantasy, it revolves around a little girl Mija (An Seo Hyun) trying to save her giant ‘super pig’ from being harvested as GM bacon, but…

As the exquisite Toy Story 3 finally arrives in the UK, Clothes on Film caught up with its director Lee Unkrich for an exclusive interview. We discussed the role of costume in animation, Ken’s camptastic wardrobe and how Stanley Kubrick shaped Lee’s career as a filmmaker. Costume and animation may not seem like typical bedfellows, simply because the medium is not tangible as such. It does not exist in the physical world only on screen, yet animated films; particularly those by Disney/Pixar, particularly Toy Story, often employ costume as a character/storytelling device. Woody stripped of his identity as a cowboy by losing his hat, or Al of Al’s Toy Barn’s…

A trailer for Hammer Productions’ The Woman in Black starring Daniel Radcliffe has arrived like a sudden mist on an October morning, bringing with it that wonderful sense of dread only a Victorian setting can provide. Playing young solicitor Arthur Kipps, Radcliffe’s recently bereaved single father travels from London to a cursed village in the East Coast, its marshes haunted by sightings of a ‘woman in black’. The film, like the novel by Susan Hill and stage play of the same name, is set during an undetermined period in the 1800s. By the looks of Keith Madden’s classic, traditionally English themed costumes, probably towards the end of the century. What…

Director Joe Wright’s follow up to The Soloist (2009) is an eclectic action thriller featuring Saoirse Ronan as a sixteen year old trained killer searching for answers about her past. Costume design by German born Lucie Bates is among some of the most fascinating of the year so far. Constructed as a live action fairytale, her ensembles actually form part of the narrative. Characters are identified, even enhanced, by what they wear. Saoirse Ronan as Hanna. Her costumes are deliberately loose and not intended as gender specific. Talking exclusively to Clothes on Film, Lucie Bates chats about her work on Hanna, inducing parody, subtext and working with Giorgio Armani: Clothes…

A fortnight ago to the day, Clothes on Film creator and editor Christopher Laverty joined fashion historian Amber Jane Butchart to give one of two talks and a Q&A chat at The British Library in London. The subjects under discussion were, respectively, the unexpectedly colourful clothing of Prohibition era gangsters as portrayed in the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire, and the influence of movies and movie star style on fashion during The Jazz Age. After Christopher and Amber finished their talks to a delighted audience (they clapped), everyone reconvened to the elegant backdrop of the main library grounds to swig cocktails and dance the night away to Alex Mendham &…

Big names all round for this moody, glossy looking thriller: Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, directed by Ridley Scott and, best of all, costumes by Scott’s longtime collaborator Janty Yates. Ms. Yates is best known for her Academy Award winning designs on Gladiator, and more recently Prometheus. But she does far than period and sci-fi. For The Counsellor it’s sharp, sometimes deliberately loud contemporary costume that occasionally recalls her work on Hannibal and Miami-Vice. She used designer names for the principals, including Armani (Fassbender and Cruz), Versace (Bardem) and Thomas Wilde (Diaz). It’s all up there on screen. The film is based on the first…

Savile Row tailors Kilgour provided much of Cary Grant’s wardrobe for North by Northwest (1959). In all probability director Alfred Hitchcock left Grant to his own devices in selecting ensembles, just as he’d done on To Catch a Thief four years earlier. If this was in fact the case, Hitchcock was not so trusting with Eva Marie Saint’s wardrobe. Disliking initial design sketches for her look, he escorted Marie Saint to New York’s swanky Bergdorf Goodman department store, personally choosing her outfits right off the racks. She later jokingly referred to Hitch as her “one and only sugar daddy”. As for Cary Grant, by this stage in his career it…

The leggy lure of Bombshell. 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…

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…

Here is a real treat for Doctor Who fans, plus anyone craving a revival of the bow tie. Costume designer for the new series, Ray Holman, chats exclusively to Clothes on Film about dressing Matt Smith in the part. He has even given us a character sketch. Clothes on Film, Chris: Can you talk us through the new Doctor’s look? Ray Holman: The Doctor wears tan top lace-up ankle boots, skinny houndstooth trousers with the bottoms rolled up to sit at the top of the boots, and braces. A cranberry coloured squiggly pattern slim-cut shirt with striped cuffs and a soft collar, a small bow tie, a tweed jacket which…