The costume designer liaises with the actor, director,
cinematographer, art director, hair and make-up stylists,
and even the writer and stunt coordinator. On the set
daily and/or nightly, until shooting wraps, for fittings,
alterations, accidents, or additions, the costume designer
is involved from a film’s earliest pre-production and must
do exhaustive research, even for a modern movie, regarding location, climate, class, age, taste, and fads. But, the
designer must be always inventive. Historical clothing
must be both accurate and believable for today’s eyes.
Truth, at times, must be sacrificed to ensure that an actor
will look correct and the designer must determine how to
make departures from strict historical accuracy appropriate both to the period and to the actor’s physique. For
example, the narrow shoulder lines of a nineteenth-century cowboy jacket could make a twenty-first-century
actor look pinched, and so must be adjusted. This is a
difficult and intuitive process because the designer must
know the history well enough to tweak it, if necessary,
without losing an accurate feel for the time. After
research, a designer will usually make sketches, some
quite artistic, and attach swatches of cloth to the paper.
This becomes the prototype of the final costume.
The ingenuity of costume designers is legendary. For
the Italian neorealist film Bellissima (1951), Piero Tosi
asked people in the street to give him the clothes they
were wearing, which, once told it was for ‘‘cinema’’ and
‘‘Anna Magnani,’’ they eagerly did. For the Mafia film
Casino (1995), Rita Ryack looked through the closets
of Brooklyn gangsters in their homes. For the littledocumented slave incident dramatized in Amistad
(1997), Ruth Carter examined period American and
European paintings and African cloth. For Lagaan
(2001), a nineteenth-century Indian story, Bhanu
Athaiya studied the climate and landscape of Bhuj, the
film’s locale. To bring evocative movements to the flying
or fighting characters in Ying xiong (Hero, Zhang Yimou,
2002), Emi Wada followed ancient Chinese dance
costumes’ cutting patterns. And to dress a cast of 10,000
in clothes from 1903 to 1969 for The Last Emperor (1987,
Academy Award), James Acheson studied the history
of twentieth-century China for six months.
The costume designer’s primary relationship is with
the actor, who often feels in character once in costume
but also expects the designer to exalt good features and
diminish bad ones. To do this, the designer will ingeniously pad, tailor, dye, and cut minutia such as sleeves,
waists, buttons, collars, and hems. During Hollywood’s
studio era, costume designers often built an enduring
collaboration with the actors they dressed and were associated with a ‘‘look’’: Adrian with Greta Garbo and Joan
Crawford, Travis Banton (1894–1958) with Marlene
Dietrich and Mae West, Jean Louis (1907–1997) with
Rita Hayworth, Orry-Kelly (1897–1964) with Bette
Davis, William Travilla (1920–1990) with Marilyn
Monroe, Howard Greer (1896–1974) with Jane Russell,
Irene Sharaff (1910–1993) with Elizabeth Taylor. Widely
copied film outfits became, in some cases, a signature such
as Rita Hayworth’s infamous strapless Gilda gown (1946,
Jean Louis), Elizabeth Taylor’s slip in Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1958, Helen Rose), the tight cap-sleeved undershirt
Lucinda Ballard (1906–1993) provided for Marlon Brando
in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Marilyn Monroe’s
pleated halter-top dress in The Seven Year Itch (1955,
William Travilla). The designer dresses actors of every
type and shape in films of every genre and must work out contradictions such as Walter Plunkett’s (1902–1982)
task in making a twenty-two year old, pregnant Joan
Bennett look ten in Little Women (1933), Irene Sharaff’s
in dressing sex siren Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1966) as a desirable frump, or Lizzie
Gardiner’s in turning cool bad boy Terence Stamp in
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) into
a dowdy transsexual. The American Edith Head (1897–
1981) and the Italian Piero Tosi, two of cinema’s bestknown, most prolific and most admired designers, well
exemplify these abilities.
For over sixty years, Edith Head dressed actors from
Montgomery Clift and Elvis Presley to Sophia Loren and
Doris Day. She started working at Paramount in 1923
under Howard Greer, took over from Travis Banton in
1938, and ran the department until 1967 when she went
to Universal for ten years. Nominated thirty-three times
and winner of eight Oscars, Head costumed films as
various as Wings (William Wellman, 1927) and Sweet
Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969). Her costumes consistently
sparked lasting fashion trends including the T-shirt and
jeans look she established for Paul Newman in Hud
(1963).
Piero Tosi describes the ‘‘essence of costume design’’
as ‘‘the willingness and humility to accept each project as
a new venture’’ (Landis, p. 149). Known for his thoroughness and acute aesthetic sense, Tosi’s ability to bring
realism to the narrative, no matter what the epoch, is
almost unparalleled, even for working class, post–World
War II Italian life (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), nineteenth-century German royalty (Ludwig, 1972), or
Sicilian aristocrats (Il Gattopardo [The Leopard, 1963,
Academy Award nomination]). For the mythic Medea
(Pier Palo Pasolini, 1969), Tosi took inspiration from
North African, Micronesian, Greek, and Bedouin fabrics
and headdresses. Terence Stamp praised Tosi’s designs
for him in the surreal ‘‘Toby Dammit’’ sequence in
Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead, Federico
Fellini, 1968) as vital in helping him play the part.
Tosi’s versatility has extended to creating hair, makeup
or sets for some films, including the dreamlike makeup
for Fellini’s ancient Rome extravaganza, Satyricon (Fellini
Satyricon, 1969).
The costume designer must work closely with the
cinematographer’s needs. To handle a dark nocturnal
fight scene in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His
Brothers, 1960), Tosi used a white line in Alain Delon’s
sweater to highlight his head. In Shanghai Express (1932),
the milliner John Frederics (d. 1964) similarly buoyed
Marlene Dietrich’s face in a night shot by using egret
feathers formed into a V. Film stock itself also posed
obstacles. Until color was introduced into features in the
late 1930s, it was conveyed by shading and designers
had to use whatever fabrics best suggested it. A famous
example is Bette Davis’s dress in Jezebel (1938), which
had to be perceived as red. After many experiments with
blacks, blues, and reds, Warner Bros. designer Orry-Kelly
used a reddish brown, high-sheen satin, which, in monochrome, gave an illusion of scarlet. More complex
problems occurred with color film. Designers had to
work with the color spectrum as it appeared on celluloid,
not as it really was. A gorgeous blue might translate to
poor gray on film, requiring the designer to screen-test
every garment. Other technical advancements necessitated adaptations: the talkies exaggerated the sound of
noisy fabrics like taffeta or beaded materials, and
Cinemascope’s vast detail showed machine stitching,
forcing some clothes to be hand-sewn. These difficulties
were so notable that the Academy Award for costume,
begun in 1948, was originally divided into two awards,
one for black and white and one for color. Starting in
1967 the category incorporated both. New color problems have arisen for the costume designer with the green
screen backdrop necessary for digital projection.
Production design or art direction and costume
often contain such an essential aesthetic link that many
designers, such as Piero Gherardi (1909–1971), Mitchell
Leisen (1898–1972), Natacha Rambova (1897–1966),
Carlo Simi, Piero Tosi, Patrizia von Brandenstein, and
Tony Walton (b. 1934) have done both. Rambova’s sets
and costumes were especially attuned and her interpretations of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing for Salome (1923)
are some of cinema’s most extraordinary examples of this
homogeneity.
Directors can assign great importance to costume.
The designer Anthony Powell (b. 1935) revealed that
George Cukor, with whom he worked on Travels with
My Aunt (1972), often would re-block or re-light a scene
to accommodate an unexpectedly striking outfit. Many
designers work continually, or for a cycle of films, with
one director, creating well-known partnerships, some
through choice, others through the serendipity of a studio-formed relationship. Some key ones have been
between Natacha Rambova and Alla Nazimova, Travis
Banton and Josef von Sternberg (through Paramount),
Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock (through Paramount),
Bill Thomas (1921–2000) and Douglas Sirk (through
Universal), Piero Tosi and Luchino Visconti, Piero
Gherardi and Federico Fellini, Shirley Russell and Ken
Russell, Carlo Simi and Sergio Leone, Emi Wada and
Peter Greenaway, Jeffery Kurland and Woody Allen,
Ruth Carter and Spike Lee. These collaborations often
orchestrate a total look that can promote an auteurist
agenda. In Jungle Fever (1991), for example, Lee and
Carter made unusual use of such a collaboration when
he and Carter conceived an overall color scheme through
the costumes’ vivid colors and a persistent bath of golden light, trying to effect a harmonious tonality as a counterbalance to the story’s racist-inspired anger.
Another collaborator is the costume house. Western
Costume Company in Los Angeles (founded in 1912,
originally for cowboy films) and Sartoria Tirelli in Rome
(established in 1964) are two of the most notable. These
businesses typically have huge stocks of period costume as
well as research libraries and facilities for making accessories or clothes.