denim | Clothes on Film

A brief video dip into the costume design of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT Having recently finished a six week, six episode run on the BBC, John le Carré adapted spy drama The Little Drummer Girl was divisive in terms of audience reaction. Some found the plot impossible to follow, others revelled in the cloak and dagger shenanigans of twenty-something Charmain ‘Charlie’ Ross (Florence Pugh), a low level actress drawn into a high stakes mission of infiltrating a Palestinian revolutionary group in 1979. The show’s costume design by Sheena Napier and Stephen Noble inspired equal division. While most enjoyed the eye-popping period ensembles and how they exemplified character, just as many were left confounded by their conspicuous presence. One thing that cannot…

MINOR SPOILERS For all the inevitable chrysalis transformation of singer Ally (Lady Gaga) during A Star is Born (2018, directed by Bradley Cooper), the most subtle, yet real sartorial reflection of character belongs to her mentor and lover Jack (Cooper). Costumed by Erin Benach (Drive, A Place Beyond the Pines), Jack is the epitome of the casual rock star. Stage wear, day wear, evening wear, drinking wear, sleeping wear – it’s all the same. His simple clothes mask a mind so damaged it can only be subdued with the bottle. Jack lives in t-shirts (plain, dark or neutral colours), untucked shirts (dark or a green graph-check), brown calf leather jacket,…

The Levi jacket worn by Ken Takakura as Ken Tanaka in Japan set thriller The Yakuza (1974, costume design by Dorothy Jeakins) is not Japanese denim. It was not made in Japan but is nonetheless representative of a time when denim as symbol of burgeoning Americana in the East would take off into the stratosphere, and has remained so ever since. Although Levi products were imported into Japan before the 1970s (Levi International was created in 1965), it was not until mid-decade that a Tokyo office was established. This was in response to growing popularity of all things American in Japan, especially denim and especially Levi. There was no single…

Or when your costumes look like a building. Odile Dicks-Mireaux’s designs for High Rise (2016) are far more than that. But for a film set in such a heavily stylised world, especially one created by sci-fi author J.G. Ballard, homogeny is everything. In fact homogeny is terrifying. Everything is reflected in the aesthetic. The building towers, Tom Hiddleston’s trouser legs tower, and Luke Evans towers over everyone.  Director Ben Wheatley has claimed that he did not want High Rise to look like a ‘greatest hits of the seventies‘, but really that’s exactly what he’s got, certainly in terms of costume design – and that’s okay. It might not be the…

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…

Part two of our essay looking at sartorial identity in Sons of Anarchy, featuring exclusive insight from series costume designer Kelli Jones. Catch up with part 1 HERE. The women of SAMCRO include porn stars and pole dancers, but the club matriarch is Gemma played by Katey Sagal, formerly known as Peg Bundy in Married with Children. Gemma is the Queen of this world so her look is regal rock chick, “to make her look badass without looking like a slut. This sexy mama bitch doesn’t need to TRY” costume designer Kelli Jones says. With her background in music (she has performed with the likes of Bette Midler, Gene Simmons…

Sons of Anarchy portrays the fictionalised world of an outlaw motorcycle club; although the plots are dramatic in the extreme, many of the details are firmly based in realism, including the costuming. Series creator Kurt Sutter has described it as pure soap opera, but this family drama has earned the tag of “Hamlet on Motorcycles”. It has been embraced by pop culture and by the biker community, and spurred an upsurge in sales of Harley Davidsons (and a $25k SOA branded bike). Motorcycle club culture took off after WW2, when returning veterans with experience of riding bikes on service, and often undiagnosed post-traumatic stress, took to the lifestyle looking for…

Levi’s® Spring Bottom pants are a most fascinating garment. Introduced in 1889 they are essentially jean trousers intended for Victorian (and later Edwardian) gentlemen. This is the first time Levi’s had focused their products on such an audience. Previously their stock in trade was miners and loggers, but this was a very early attempt by the company to branch out. Spring Bottom pants are a classic item of denim history, yet most folk have probably never heard of them. With this in mind we contacted costume designer Jenny Beavan recently and asked if she would consider putting them in the next Sherlock Holmes film. No-one was paying us to do…

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…

If you have played The Last of Us on Playstation 3 it has likely ruined video gaming for you. The world created is so vivid and believable that every game afterward just feels dated and empty. Throughout, The Last of Us is unwaveringly real, full of seemingly inconsequential details such as every weapon or object you carry being attached or able to fit into your character’s backpack. Contrast this with Grand Theft Auto V where a rocket launcher appears out of your trouser pocket and it’s clear that if game developers really want to create a living, breathing parallel to reality they need to treat it as reality – no…

Costume designer Ann Roth’s template for Working Girl (1988, directed by Mike Nichols) is especially astute with regards to the social and geographical make up of its characters. Protagonist Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is a homely girl raised and living in Staten Island, New York. Currently working as a secretary in Manhattan (not ‘executive assistant’, reflecting vernacular of the time), as is her best friend Cynthia (Joan Cusack). Tess, however, has gained a degree through night school and harbours ambitions to use it for more constructive tasks than answering the telephone and fetching toilet paper for bawdy stockbrokers. After being set up for a ‘date’ that turned out to be…