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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
From the dignified decadence of "Shakespeare in Love" to the gender-bending of "Velvet Goldmine" and "Orlando," Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell is remaking fashion history.
May 6, 1999 | If you've spent any amount of time looking at old clothes, in museums or in books, you've probably found yourself faced with a garment that you can't imagine being worn by any real person. It could be a pair of miniature kid gloves embroidered with elaborate pastoral love scenes, too exquisite to be misshapen by anything so brutishly human as a hand; a waistcoat so weighty with needlework it saps your joie de vivre just to imagine slipping it on; a corset with slender, smile-like bones spaced a quarter of an inch apart, its very meticulousness a reprimand to real-life flesh. Old clothes can be wonderful, but sometimes, their great beauty notwithstanding, they can be frustrating, too. The droopy lace trim on a cuff, the paint worn off a metal button, are the remnants of real lives. But without people inside them, old clothes often seem all too quiet, representing lives remembered only in whispers -- never anything so audacious as a shout, a burst of laughter or a fit of tears.
That's why the work of Sandy Powell, the costume designer who won an Academy Award for her work on "Shakespeare in Love," could be considered a kind of fanciful flourish on the study of serious fashion history. Powell's costumes are as accurate as movie clothes need to be. But she's gifted in subtler ways: She has a knack for giving her costumes emotional accuracy. In movies like 1997's "The Wings of the Dove," and last year's "Velvet Goldmine" and "Shakespeare in Love," she sends her costumes out to do a pretty complex job -- and succeeds on every count. The clothes tell a small story about the period in question. They move beautifully when necessary -- and constrict when necessary. And they always represent something of the character who's wearing them, without sending a crushingly obvious signal. Are the farthingales supporting the ladies' dresses in "Shakespeare in Love" precisely the right shape and size for the year 1593? Who knows? But seeing Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth rustling along in her heavy, pearl-festooned skirts gave me such an unshakable sense of the character -- she's like an angry gilt cloud, annoyed no end at being earthbound -- that I couldn't have cared less. Powell understands actors, movement and the significance of clothing in a historical sense, but her costumes go even further. In helping an actor bring life to a character, they give you a sense of what old clothes were like when they had life in them.
The outfits Powell conceives can be sumptuous looking. But no matter how beautiful or extravagant they are, they always look like clothes for real people. In that respect they deviate significantly from the tradition of the luxurious costume epic -- for example, '50s extravaganzas like "Desiree" or "Scaramouche," in which the dresses are terrific fun to look at but tend to resemble birthday cakes from an Italian bakery. Yet as intrigued as Powell is by the language of clothing, she never forgoes aesthetics. For "The Wings of the Dove," an adaptation of the Henry James novel, Powell convinced director Iain Softley to set the story in 1910 instead of 1902, arguing that the clothing of that period was more bohemian, more freeing. Then she went to town, putting the lead actresses, Helena Bonham Carter and Allison Elliot, in cocoon cloaks appliqued with floral designs poised precisely between Art Nouveau and Art Deco; broad-brimmed, rakishly tilted hats; and sheer, shimmery Fortuny-pleated gowns that transform the women into living caryatids. The beauty of the characters' clothes lies partly in their very casualness. The women's velvets, for example, always look just slightly rumpled; the chiffon veils they wear for touring Venice look as if they were tied on with only half a care. These don't look anything like clothes that had been entrusted to the wardrobe mistress's care until just before the cameras started rolling. They look as if a character had been wearing them that morning as she set out to do an errand, returned later to write a letter or two, dropped by a friend's house for tea. They're clothes that, their period look aside, are just like the ones we wear today -- in other words, they have a personal history built right in.
That's a conscious choice on Powell's part. "There's a beauty in dirt," she told the New York Times Magazine last year. "When I go to the movies, I think, Why is that dress so clean? The boat is going down and they look perfect. You want to have beauty in a film, but if something looks a bit worn, a bit soiled, it usually has more depth."
That's especially apparent in Powell's costumes for "Shakespeare in Love." As elaborate as the garments are -- many of them are trimmed with beads, embroidery and even metal filigree -- none of them have that garishly new, shiny look that signals "rich." Like old money, they speak a lot more quietly. The brocades and metallic laces look just a little corroded, which gives them both a degree of immediacy (these are tactile clothes -- they look like they'd be wonderful to touch) and a sense of history (they've been around the block a few times -- in the late 16th century, not even rich people had all that many garments).
There's always a sense of energy to Powell's work -- it never looks staid or stagy. And for a designer so young (she's in her late 30s), Powell already has a formidable risumi. She started out designing for the London stage in the early '80s, and did her first costumes for film in 1985, with Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio." Since then, she's worked numerous times with Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Michael Collins," "Interview with a Vampire," "The Butcher Boy"), and she received her first Oscar nomination in 1992 for Sally Potter's film of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando." Powell is frighteningly prolific. She received Oscar nominations for two 1998 movies ("Velvet Goldmine" as well as "Shakespeare in Love"), but she also designed costumes for last year's "Hilary and Jackie" (the story of cellist Jacqueline du Pri). Her next project is an adaptation of Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" set for release later this year, starring Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes.
