Perhaps the most mind-churning mainstream film of recent years, Inception is testament to the power of great costume design. Not only does it look sumptuous, thanks to all those 3 pc suits and silk ties, but because of costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and director Christopher Nolan’s commitment to clothing serving an implicit function, Inception is at least partially decipherable by what the characters wear. The screen is filled with costume clues to interpret. Jeffrey Kurland has been costume designer on thirty seven feature films, including Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Collateral (2004), though Inception is his first collaboration with Chris Nolan. Here he explains exclusively to Clothes on Film his sartorial…

“We are stardust, we are golden”, sang Joni Mitchell of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held August 15-18th 1969, at a dairy farm in the Catskills near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York. The irony was, she wasn’t even there. A further irony follows in that whilst a myriad of psychedelic colours are synonymous with the Woodstock nation, one of the most revered choices of dress, clearly shown in the documentary Woodstock (1970) is a simple white leather fringed lace-up tunic-style vest and bell bottom trousers. It is worn by one of the first female rock stars, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane,…

MINOR SPOILERS Like any film with an extended period of time between the original and sequel(s), T2: Trainspotting (2017) is required to form an immediate connection with its audience. Twenty years have passed, yet we must feel accustomed to this world. For every element of change, something else must remain the same. We take comfort in what we know; it allows us to enjoy the new without fear of the unknown. If T2 had been released a couple of years after Trainspotting (1996), it could potentially have been set in Benidorm. Transplanting our anti-heroes from Scotland to Spain is fine when they are fresh in our conscious mind, but twenty…

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…

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…

The Coen brothers’ story of a drug deal gone wrong and the chaotic game of cat and mouse that follows is an exploration of masculinity in all its guises. Through divergence of clothing, costume designer Mary Zophres shows many variations of character and motivation and pinpoints the story within a time and place – rural West Texas, 1980. The first shots of No Country for Old Men (2007) welcome us into the Texan landscape, the sky awash with muted blues and oranges before the scorching sun rises to reveal a landscape of pale brown sand. Not only does this evoke the wilderness and subsequent loneliness of the setting, but it…

Locke (2013, costume design by Nigel Egerton) is a film unique in its restrictions – it takes place in real time, has only one character and only one setting. Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is driving somewhere important, and over the course of the film’s 85 minute running time, his life gradually begins to crumble around him as he desperately tries to salvage it. The controlled environment – the inside of his car – and the fact that the only character we actually see is Ivan himself means that interest in him is the only way of maintaining an audience’s attention with such limited visual stimulation. Ivan is the only character…

Directed by Jon Favreau Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow Summer blockbuster season has officially kicked off with one of the most anticipated releases of the year – Iron Man 2. The first Iron Man was a surprise hit of 2008, it resurrected Robert Downey Jr.’s career and even made AC/DC cool again. Taking a different tact to The Dark Knight, it kept the tone light and went down a storm with critics and fans alike. Two years later, we have the sequel. The story picks up six months after events of the first film; Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is trying adjust after revealing his secret identity…

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz Director: Quentin Tarantino World War II set Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s first ‘period film’ as such. It is an occasionally taxing two and half hours, not for the easily distracted. Though judging by Tarantino’s appreciation of how costume (military or otherwise) defined this brutal time, maybe he should revisit history’s atrocities more often. Via costume designer Anna B. Sheppard, Tarantino has deftly employed uniform to suggest a threatening presence in his antagonists. For the film’s first act, or chapter, SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) visits the home of a French farmer and his three daughters he suspects of harbouring Jews. Landa…

SPOILERS If you’ve heard anything about Phantom Thread (2017, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), you are bound to uncover a multitude of thoughts on the astounding Academy Award winning costume work of Mark Bridges or the retirement role of Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, 1950s fashion house couturier. But one of the key components to Reynolds is missing from the discussion: Autism. Reynolds’ (Daniel Day-Lewis) daily dressing routine. Phantom Thread opens with Reynolds (Day-Lewis) getting dressed to formalities of the era. Polished shoes, ironed trousers, a fresh button-down shirt, with the addition of long magenta socks to introduce the notion of creativity, or perhaps particularities to the character. The scene…