Monday, November 01, 2021
Last Night in Soho costume designer breaks down the thriller's scary-good vintage glam
EW.com: The question isn't what happened Last Night in Soho. The question is: What was everyone wearing?
In Edgar Wright's psychological horror film (out Friday), style takes the spotlight. Thomasin McKenzie stars as Ellie, a naïve young woman with a talent for clothing construction and a mysterious psychic ability who moves to London to study fashion design. In her rented flat in Soho, when she goes to sleep at night, she finds herself involuntarily transported in her dreams to the neighborhood as it was in the 1960s.
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4 comments:
I’m really excited to see Last Night in Soho, and the 1960s are always a really fun decade for costumes as it was such a big turning point for fashion. One thing I wish the article talked about more is the newspaper dress, they talk about having to have the textile printed specifically to include Cornish newspapers with more PG stories but I would like to know what the material was, or how they treated it to look papery and stiff to give the illusion that the character actually made it from newspaper. The costume designer had a difficult task of reinterpreting the 1960s through the eye of the main character who lives in a contemporary world, so I’m interested to see how we as the audience can draw connections between her designs and how she envisions the past. It was also interesting to hear the research process behind the Jack character, and that they looked at DJs of the period.
I really need to see Last Night in Soho! The costumes look so incredible and I thought that the storyline was genius. I was actually very close to studying costume design in London instead of Carnegie Mellon, and am planning on spending my junior year abroad in London so the entire plot and storyline seems incredibly interesting to me. Funnily enough Odile Dicks-Mireaux the costume designer for film went to design school at UAL, which is where I will be going to study costume design in London. I really love the costumes within this film, from what I can tell the color pallet and garment choices made where very specifically and incredibly done. I also think the garment choices do a good job of capturing the fashion of the 1960’s in both the cut and shape. I think its great when films use vintage clothing because you truly cant create something that will capture a time period better than something that was quite literally made at the time. I learned a lot about reusing vintage clothing in current films when I worked for Helen Uffner who had a massive collection of garments that she rented out to various film productions from all over. I also loved the added plot line of the Newspaper dress because I’ve known a couple fashion students that did exactly that to enter fashion school.
It was very interesting to learn about the process of finding influences for the costuming of the 1960’s sequences in Last Night in Soho. One might expect research to be done into magazines, catalogues, and photos of well-dressed individuals from the time period, but the director and costume designer instead turned their attention to movies of the era. I don’t know whether this is standard practice or not, but that seems like a good approach to me if what you want to achieve is not a hyper-accurate rendition of a period’s fashion, but instead a representation of the popular perception (often created or realized in film) of the period. The costumes for the film certainly look fantastic so far, and scream “sixties”. I’d be interested to watch some of the movies they talked about to see just in what ways they were inspired. Maybe they will inspire some of my own work!
After reading the article I’m intrigued to see Last Night in Soho. I think the jumping between past and present is interesting but also difficult. As an audience, I would be relying heavily on the costume and the set to give me visual evidence that shows the character has been transported. So, I suspect Odile Dicks-Mireaux , the costume designer for the movie, is incorporating costumes that have strong historical contextual elements. Like the article mentions, drawing inspirations from other pieces can be very helpful. The white plastic Macs will be one of those visual evidence as it is so iconic and eye-catching. I am curious though, to see how the costumes will show that Ellie (the main character) has drawn inspiration from her experience in the 60s. This crash between modern and vintage can take a very interesting spin.
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