Cinema: Designing Woman

Moviedom is filled with memorable fashion imagery–Vivien Leigh’s Gone With the Wind green velvet, Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina cocktail sheath, Jean Seberg’s T shirts in Breathless, almost anything Mike Myers wore in Austin Powers–but how often can articles of clothing be credited with having a performance-enhancing power akin to, say, a film’s director? It happened, it seems, during the shooting of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, an homage to the David Bowie ’70s and the world of men in makeup. According to Toni Collette, who played a rock-star wife, all the leopard print and lame she wore in the film coaxed the hidden extrovert right out of her. “The clothes made me want to show off,” she says, “which is just what the character had to do.”

The pen–and mind–behind that transformative wear is Sandy Powell, perhaps the movies’ most celebrated costume designer since the heyday of postwar grande dame Edith Head, a 35-time Oscar winner. Come the Academy Awards next month, Powell, a 38-year-old Londoner with 25 pictures and two previous Oscar nominations to her name, will be up again for a statuette–and the competition will include herself. Last week the designer received two Oscar nominations–one for her work on Velvet Goldmine and the other for the hit romance Shakespeare in Love.

It would be easy to sum up Powell as merely a lover of the period piece. After all, in addition to Velvet Goldmine and Shakespeare, her resume includes The Wings of the Dove and Orlando as well as Edward II, Rob Roy and Michael Collins. But what seems to attract Powell most are characters who lead showy, tumultuous, unhesitant lives, the sort through which she can indulge her taste for bold color and texture to the fullest. “I couldn’t do a project if it was all just fantastic costumes and a rubbish script,” she explains. “I couldn’t be bothered to give it my time.”

Powell briefly attended London’s venerable Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design before dropping out to work as an assistant designer in theater. Her movie career was launched in the mid ’80s when she met director Derek Jarman, with whom she collaborated on Caravaggio.

She has since developed a working method that involves little initial sketching. Powell first researches the era she’s dealing with by visiting museums and galleries and studying paintings and photographs. “Unless of course the film requires it, I’m not interested in an exact replica of the period. I look at the period, how it should be, how it could be, and then I do my own version,” she says. Next, she scours London for splendid fabrics. “I rarely start with a drawing,” says Powell. “I start with a fabric I like and base the design on how that fabric behaves.”

The decadent sequins and satin that make up Velvet Goldmine eclipse everything else in the film. Recalls director Haynes: “When she agreed [to work on Velvet Goldmine], I started leaping up and down because I knew how important the costumes were to this film. Sandy’s work is impeccably rich.” Powell’s best move in Goldmine, albeit the quietest, is ensuring that rock-star Brian Slade, the film’s lead character, never looks all that different offstage than he does when he’s performing. His lover and rival Curt Wild opts for black behind the scenes, but Slade believes in glam-rock’s life-as-spectacle ethos more passionately than anyone else, and this is reflected in his daywear–all fuchsia and wild prints.

“Sandy comes with strong responses to the material,” notes John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love, which speculates fancifully about the Bard’s inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. “She comes armed with instinct.” Among Madden’s favorite creations for the film were the costumes she made for the staged production of Romeo and Juliet. He loved the way in which the lavishness of the players’ dress contrasted with the shabby browns worn by the commoners in the audience. “At first we thought it looked bizarre,” says Madden, “but what was so brilliant was how she captured in costume how extraordinarily intoxicating that play must have been to the grubby creatures down in the pit watching.”

Shakespeare also showcased Powell’s obsession with detail. In the film, the dressing gown worn by Gwyneth Paltrow appears to be festooned with iridescent jewels–but they are actually dried beetle wings, intended to replicate Elizabethan materials. When Paltrow’s character pretends to be a boy, she wears a top with embroidery delicate enough to remind us that she is female. But Powell also put birdseed pouches in the crotch of Paltrow’s breeches so the actress would remember to walk like a boy.

If there is another theme to Powell’s work, it is an unfailing fascination with characters who live on gender’s edges. Apart from the sexual rebels she dressed in her two recent films and in Orlando (based on the Virginia Woolf novel about a heroine who switches sexes back and forth), Powell also designed costumes for Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. “I’m attracted to projects that involve taking risks of some kind,” Powell says, “and ones that might upset some people.”

Despite her obvious talent for the splashy, one could argue that Powell’s gift best manifests itself in smaller, brocade-free dramas such as Hilary and Jackie. Powell’s mod clothes never overwhelm the tale of the relationship between the impassioned cellist Jacqueline du Pre and her sister, but instead lend a keen visual intensity to the women’s profound differences. As Jackie becomes increasingly famous–and depressed–her knits seem to get more blindingly pink and blue; Hilary, meanwhile, recedes into neutrals. The look stays with you–Powell’s work, it seems, never fades to black.

–Reported by Helen Gibson/London and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles