hippy | Clothes on Film

SPOILERS Despite all the hoo-ha over films such as Blue Jasmine and Stoker contemporary is still pretty much overlooked as a form of costume design. If it’s invisible, well, nobody notices it, and if it’s designer it becomes all about ‘the fashion’ (OMG TOTES WANT THOSE SHOES). We are currently in an age when costume design means period and sci-fi. It comes to the extent that if a costumer wants to tell a story through contemporary attire, he/she needs either a director with a key grasp of semiotics, or one that doesn’t care less about semiotics and offers a degree of autonomy. Watching About Time we presume that Richard Curtis…

Newly released on collectable Blu-ray, The Long Goodbye (1973, directed by Robert Altman) is the kind of film you feel ashamed for not watching more often. Starring Elliot Gould as Raymond Chandler’s pulp private dick Phillip Marlowe, this is a quirky, very seventies re-imagining of the Humphrey Bogart man-in-a-trenchcoat myth. The film is contemporary set, yet Gould’s Marlowe is a man out of place and time. Everything from his car to apartment to clothes is indicative of the P.I’s golden age; a world of cocktails, dames and pinstripe suits, not cat food, hippies and polyester. Hollywood’s effortless private detective was created in the post-Prohibition era of the 1930s-40s, and into…

As TracyDi Vicenzo in OHMSS, Diana Rigg wore a daring 1960s wedding ensemble.

His Cowichan-type Pendleton cardigan sums up The Dude best of all.