Joanna Johnston is a multi-award nominated costume designer with an excitingly eclectic filmography. From Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989) and The Sixth Sense (1999) to About a Boy (2002) and Valkyrie (2008). Including most famously Saving Private Ryan (1998), she is now carving a niche in military dress and uniform. Although, considering the subtlety of all Ms. Johnston’s costume design – the cleverly unchanging ensemble worn by Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense for example – this is only a small part of her work. Clothes on Film called up Joanna Johnston for a chat about her most recently released project, War Horse…

Judianna Makovsky demonstrates that contemporary fashion with a plot is far more fun than a flick through Vogue. Lord Christopher Laverty 4 Comments 10 Jun ’11 31 Jan ’14 17 Jan ’20 La Femme Nikita re-defines the little black dress on film. Lord Christopher Laverty 2 Comments 31 Aug ’10 2 Apr ’12 6 Feb ’17

An uncomfortable watch, Rabbit Hole is nonetheless essential viewing. Lord Christopher Laverty 1 Comment 16 Feb ’10 3 Feb ’12 19 Feb ’10

This week’s interesting costume design stories and links. Could Django Unchained be the first Quentin Tarantino movie to win a Costume Design Oscar? With exclusive insight from costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas, we analyse Sandra Bullock’s low volume, big impact wardrobe in The Proposal. To get you in the mood to derby, here are a few photos from Whip It illustrating its wild ‘thrown together’ style. In as much as this is Drew Barrymore’s movie, it is also Catherine Marie Thomas’ runway to showcase a wide range of creativity.

That is the long and the short of it: according to the wise words of this month’s Vogue India, Clothes on Film are one of the leading voices in digital fashion coverage. The exact words of their writer Dal Chodha were ‘game changer’, so we’ll happily run with that. You can read the full Vogue article in THIS PDF. We’re on page 156, the piece begins at p 148. Honestly we are not entirely sure what being bestowed such an honour means, but with names such as Victoria Beckham and Burberry included in the list we must be doing (and saying) something right. It does make Clothes on Film seem…

Two trends in women’s fashion for 2011 are prints and turbans, empathised in the film Coming to America. The costumes are somewhat…ahem….‘colourful’. The best film Pixar have ever made. Esquire have featured a fashion shoot with Ken from Toy Story 3. That’s right; a doll dresses better than you. Win tickets! If you can get to London on Sunday 20th June, you could be watching Toy Story 3 at a very early screening. Here are some images of the Toy Story gang, principally the one most obsessed by fashion: Ken.

Judging solely on this footage, Carey Mulligan’s Jenny goes down the Audrey Hepburn route more than typical teen fashions of the sixties.

With so many movie streaming options now available, we thought we’d draw your attention to one of the best: Curzon on Demand. The trailer for The Three Musketeers affords the briefest peek at those 17th century costumes. As worn by Grace Kelly, this floaty, conspicuous dress is an appreciable nod to Dior’s ‘New Look’ of the late 1940s. Milla Jovovich has released three pics of herself on Twitter wearing costumes from The Three Musketeers.

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……

To tie-in with the release of Disney’s new live-action version of Beauty and Beast, the project’s Oscar winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran teamed up with students from Central Saint Martin’s college in London to reinterpret ensembles from the film. These are outfits designed in homage to Beauty and the Beast, taking specific elements here and there, a song, colour or concept and creating something entirely new. Whether these are fashion or art pieces is ultimately unclear – what stands out though is their reach beyond that of merely marketing a big movie. Just as an idea it would be fantastic to see more films promoting their costumes in this way.…