www.thethings.com: High fashion in film isn't anything new, but the budgets for Hollywood's best-dressed on screen seem to just keep growing. It's true that not every movie costs hundreds of thousands on clothing alone, but the actors have to wear something.
4 comments:
The Devil Wears Prada makes a necessary point when it comes to purchasing a wardrobe, a very similar one I have heard in class before, being that “a gold-sprayed piece of cardboard will always look like a gold-sprayed piece of cardboard”. That to say that materiality matters. There is only so much you can do with items that aren’t the actual things designers call for. Sometimes, like in this movie’s case, making the budget for it is necessary because the look can only be accomplished by a specific thing. Again referencing the movie, something that isn’t brand-named would stick up like a sore thumb because of nature and the setting, ruining the immersive element of the film. Similarly, you can’t make an orb out of plastic (I’m sure you could but this is the example I have), base the entire plot around the value of it, and have it not look like it worth more than a few dollars.
The idea of a wardrobe costing about one million dollars is absolutely insane to me. I honestly can not even fathom what it must feel like to wear a jacket that is worth $400,000. But clearly, the expenditures in the wardrobe department were worth it as it made the film what it is today. I was recently watching a documentary on the creation of the TV show Schitt’s Creek, and they talked extensively about how they purchased luxury items on a tight budget. At first I thought it was foolish to spend so much of your small budget on designer items, but as they talked about it more, it started to make more sense; people who are knowledgeable about clothing and fashion can tell when something is authentic from a real designer, and it enhances the overall perception of the reality of the show. While it still seems like an extreme expense to me, sometimes you just can not recreate what the real item would look like.
The Devil Wears Prada is one of my favorite films ever, and I've never read about the costume design, so this article was really fascinating to me. Like Bridget above said, I literally cannot in my entire life fathom wearing a coat that cost $400,000 dollars. Sometimes I have a 100 dollar jacket on and I'm like, Sierra you are dressed way too boujie right now. I imagine I would feel really stupid wearing a coat that cost that much. Having a $1 million dollar budget would be literally insane. The only budget I've ever worked with was well under 1 thousand. It does make sense though, in a film that is making a commentary about modern fashion industries, it is pretty important to have actual fashion items and not cheap fakes. I can't imagine having the same amount of impact as the fashion designers who create anything they wont and it sells as if it were liquid gold, or to be a woman who can get them to let you use it for a movie rent free. How fascinating!
The Devil Wears Prada is one of the few movies I still have on DVD, even though I no longer own a DVD player. It is no surprise to me that they had a very high wardrobe budget considering both the title of the film itself, and the basis of it being high fashion. Seeing the budget number set at $100k is already high. What I did not expect was the number amassing over one million dollars. Just imagining clothes costing that much stresses me out for reasons I cannot even begin to explain. I would be genuinely nervous to wear a coat that costs $400,000 because of even the smallest chance of spilling something on it and having to pay that money back. Even the costumes that Anne Hathaway wore in the start of the movie when she was supposedly on the come-up, were still probably thousands of dollars.
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