Christopher Cole | 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…

Director Brian De Palma has made movies heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock before, but Passion (2012) is the first one whose characters look like they stepped out of one of Hitchcock’s classic films. Karen Muller-Serreau’s bold and colourful costumes communicate the characters’ hidden desires and make watching Passion a sensory experience. This melodrama centres on two ad executives, Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) and her boss Christine (Rachel McAdams), who have a deadline to come up with an ad campaign for a new smartphone. In her sleep, Isabelle thinks of a great idea. The two other principal characters are Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) and Christine’s boyfriend Dirk (Paul Anderson) who get…