Costume Talk: Les Miserables and Anna Karenina
I just had the privilege to see Les Miserables just yesterday, and all I can say is WOW. There's no other way to really put. Just WOW. Just like that. The storyline, the singing, the ACTING, oh the acting (my theater major comes into play there, sorry guys!) Anyways, as a fashion lover, I also noticed immediately the phenomenal job done on the costumes which led me back to when I saw Anna Karenina a few months ago with my roommate and some friends. I also noticed the spectacular costumes in that movie as well. So then I thought: who is going to take the Oscar home this year? Obviously these two will be nominated. So, I looked deeper in the backstory behind these two films for their inspirations, etc.
Anna Karenina's costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, was told that the film was to hold the mixture of the period of 1850's-1870's but also to hold the style of a 50's couture look. The director, Joe Wright, states, ""I want to concentrate on silhouette, on certain details, and the way into that idea is to look at '50s couture. Look at the kind of bold shapes and asymmetric styles, and then use that to bring Anna to life." The most important part of the film for the costumes were that of the ball in which the Count and Anna first meet. For one, Anna is dressed in an all black gown, creating a dark and mysterious character that she so longs to be. Then, the Count, dressed in an all white uniform contrasts with Anna, creating a yin-yang feel and their constant pull towards each other. The other part of the ball that I did not know about is that every woman in the background is wearing the same dress. There were 25 women in the background which they filmed and they had 25 different shades of pastel to create different looks for the women, although they are all wearing the same dress. Cool, huh? Another cool fact is that Jacqueline has no previous training in her profession. She, in fact, had dropped out of college, and had nowhere to go, so she was offered to design costumes and look where she is now!
Now, onto Les Miserables. The amazing thing to me about this film was grossness (yes, the grossness) of the people. They were dirty, grimy, ucky, and icky. And that is fantastic (in a movie sense). They were able to capture the filth of the streets of Paris perfectly, the image of no middle class. There was only the poor and the rich, and that was that. The costume designer, Paco Delgado, wanted to add a lot of fantasy but reality to this film since it is still a musical deep down at the core. One thing to note about Les Miserables is the dress that Fantine wears as a prostitute because it is the same color as what the convicts wore at the beginning of the movie: red. Red is a symbolic color no matter what context it is in, it just is. And therefore brings out the lights of each character and their past struggles with the world of a revolutionary France. The two most playful characters, the innkeeper and his wife, both get a Tim Burtonesque feel. Which is only because Helena Bonham Carter stars as the innkeeper's wife (which I have some beef to chew on that since they type-casted her....*cough cough*). They are whimsical and quite colorful, which, if you pay attention, it is about Christmastime when they first introduce the innkeeper and his wife in which they both are wearing green and red (Christmas colors) portraying their playfulness and youth.
So which do you think will take home the Oscar, puppets?
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