Jacqueline Oknaian has costumed Ugly Betty (2008-10), Sex and the City 2 (2010) and The Big C (2012-13), so it might be fair to say contemporary clothing is her forte. For The Intern she dressed Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro in that most tricky of cinematic costume: ‘office attire’. Fashion and practicality collide in what needs to be stylish but relatable clothing inside a believable setting. Here Ms Oknaian chats exclusively about her work on the film. Anne Hathaway has the perfect office wardrobe, where did you get your inspiration for her smart, but chic looks? I related to her character personally because I’m a mother and I’ve worked…

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…

For most cinemagoers Piper Perabo arrived on the big screen in her breakout role for Coyote Ugly (2000). Since then she has worked in television, on Broadway and continuously in movies. Costume wise Ms. Perabo has mixed period with contemporary though tends to work in the latter. For Looper she plays Suzie, a nightclub dancer struggling to bring up her young son in a decaying near future, and the lover of Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) before he attempts to mend his hedonistic ways. Speaking exclusively to Clothes on Film, Piper Perabo talks dressing the character of Suzie and working with costume designer Sharen Davis: “The stage wear was my favourite…

Poor Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). She is only a young teenager and yet like most characters in Game of Thrones she has been forced to grow up far too fast. This ongoing character development is echoed in her clothes by series costume designer Michele Clapton. We first meet Sansa in season 1 of Game of Thrones at her home in Winterfell. Her clothes are simple. The knotted decoration around the neckline of her dresses and the harsher fabrics echo the rough terrain of the North. She chooses shades of grey and blue, matching the murky colours of her environment. The dress she wears for the party held in honor of…

Daphne du Maurier‘s original novel My Cousin Rachel apparently does not specify the exact period in which it’s set, but implies some time toward the end of the 19th century on the Cornish coast. This new version of the story starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin actually positions itself in a specific time frame, as decided upon by director Roger Michell and costume designer Dinah Collin, namely the year 1840. We have an exclusive featurette about the costume design of My Cousin Rachel, which although brief goes into some detail about what to expect from the finished film: What is most fascinating is just why 1840 was chosen. It was…

She arrives at the support group just as the hugging begins. “This is cancer, right?” she asks, her pallid skin and sunken eyes suggesting she could well be a sufferer. Except this is a support group for testicular cancer and Marla doesn’t have any balls, not the kind that can be removed by surgery anyway. Mischievous Marla Singer: black fur coat, sunglasses, squashed black hat and breathing through a cigarette. On the surface Marla looks like a femme fatale, though in truth she is not manipulative enough to fit the mould. In Tyler Durden’s words she is “rock bottom”. Once mislaid, now gone for good. As an embodiment of affected…

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…

SPOILERS Ahead of a detailed interview with Star Wars: The Force Awakens costume designer Michael Kaplan (currently hard at work on Episode VIII), we take a brief look at his undeniable achievement in bringing the 1970s – early 80’s back to life right here in the present. How do you make the now look old when paradoxically it is supposed to be the new? Well, you go simple. We say simple, but we mean ‘back to basics’. This is not the prequels; The Force Awakens takes place thirty years after the Rebellion defeated the Empire. Now both sides are in state of rebuilding so there is little call for Padmae’s…

Filmmaker Nic Fforde discusses how he come to realise the importance of costume design in his projects. Stories in films are all familiar to us in some way, no matter how remote the setting. The hell that unfolds aboard the Nostromo in Alien, LA’s icy criminal underworld in Heat or Rope’s Ivy League dinner party – a good story well told will whisk you away to its own self–contained world. All the tools of filmmaking are there to help create these worlds. What part does costume play in all this? My day job is to make films for advertising. We work on low budgets with small documentary crews. Whatever our…

When glass-eyed Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) tells Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) that all the excess and splendour he drowns in is “from your perfect, irresistible imagination”, it’s hard not to see this entire film in this same light. Director, producer Baz Luhrmann and his wife, costume designer, production designer and co-producer Catherine Martin have concocted a vision of the early 1920s that did not exist yet somehow feels entirely natural. Their Great Gatsby is a twenties parallel universe; the twenties reloaded if you will. This is a flavour of the 1920s, those details that cinemagoers with just a passing knowledge of the era can recognise: cloche hats, bobbed hair, short…