www.hollywoodreporter.com: Martin is no stranger to Oscar voters, having won two statuettes in 2002 for her Moulin Rouge! costumes and set decor. In The Great Gatsby, her fourth film wit husband-director Baz Lurhmann, she mainlines fresh blood into F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary autopsy of the empty emotional lives of Long Island's wealthy elite during the gin-soaked Prohibition era. Thanks to Martin, who again did double set and costume design duty, the film's parties in Gatsby's East Egg mansion are ocular orgies set to the music of Jay Z, Beyonce and Andre 3000. But Martin's aesthetic also remains unerringly true to Fitzgerald's period, including body-conscious gowns, assymetrical hemlines and iridescent satins.
6 comments:
In this article, it was really interesting to see the different kinds of challenges and opportunities that came for each designer while working on costuming these films, which are all set in different time periods from our own. I thought it was very that cool that Katherine Martin, designer for Great Gatsby, lined Tom Buchanan's suits with skull-and-bones silk. In film, there is more opportunity for small details in costumes to be viewed by audiences than in theatre, but this detail is one that they wouldn't even see. Martin did this just as another aid for Joel Edgerton to get into character. I found this really interesting because it reminds me that costuming and design in general is not just about what the audience experiences.
It was also interesting that all of the designers were costuming movies that take place in the past, except for the designer of Catching Fire. Trish Summerville's experiences with futuristic unitard sweat-suits were obviously very different from Daniel Orlandi's with re-creating 1961 Disneyland.
When you go and watch a movie you don't generally think about what the people are wearing or better yet who took the time to design them. Looking back at these movies through the eyes of the designer makes it all seem so much outstanding. Each movie no matter how simple faced its own problems when figuring out what to put people in for the show. Not having seen all these movies, I can most closely relate to The Hunger Games each costume so closely relates to the individual person and adds so much more to the character. In addition there is this aspect of the show where everyone has to wear the same thing and it has to be right for all of them. After reading this article I have a new appreciation for what goes into costuming a character.
I found this article to be very inspiring on many different levels!
The costumes presented in this article were so simply intricate and on one hand they work so well with the movie it seems as if they would be easily drawn into the world they exist in. However, they are also so carefully used to say intuitive things to the audience about the character that they are hard to miss! Furthermore, it was amazing to see these artists with their work and hear how they felt they helped the movie through the characters they helped create.
2) Costume design for film is fascinating. Varying and close up camera angles allow for subtle details in design which can add to the character in a really significant way. I love the hidden details the article said Martin adds, such as choosing a specific lining for a coat. Although it makes no visual effect on the audience, it gives the actor greater insight to their character so they can better portray the person. The other designer who stood out to me was Trish Summerville and her costumes for Catching Fire. It must have been a great challenge for her to create not only the lavish, rich world of the future, but also what the poor of the future would wear. I think she did an excellent job portraying the time period while embodying characters and their struggles.
Having seen most of these films, I can completely attest to the humongous impact that these costumes had on the character and the plot of the story. We know that Katniss Everdeen (of Catching Fire) is called the Girl on Fire after she wore a literally smoking hot dress in the first book/movie. Furthermore, I like how this article delves into the individual nuances nd thought processes that each designer goes through. Although costume design for film and theatre contain many of the same basic elements, there's a certain finesse that comes with film. That's not to say that theatrical designers don't carry that sort of detailing, but rather that the camera is a much more critical eye than our own, sitting fifteen rows back at an angle. The precision in which the Gatsby design was done blew me away. Everything, down to the skull-and-bones which completely defines Tom Buchanan as a menacing character, was spot on. The colors flowed effortlessly and the vibrancy made my head hurt at times. Yet, there was something so impeccably beautiful about the whole existence that i have to say that it had the best costumes of this article.
I often forget about costume design when watching a good movie because a good movie has a cohesive feeling experience and its easy to forget that every part of the film was designed by someone. I recently watched American Hustle and I didn't even think about the costumes and how they had to be made because the original outfits from the 70's are falling part.
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