IndieWire: Writer-director Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is the sort of maximalist movie where every frame teems with excess, so it’s only fitting that its costumes be outrageous in both their number and designs. Between the cast of over a hundred speaking roles and the abundance of extras, costume designer Mary Zophres estimates that she and her department created around 7,000 costumes, which is even more impressive when one considers the meticulous detail that went into every piece of clothing.
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Babylon itself was a very interesting movie and throughout watching it at some points I would just be looking at the screen and thinking about how much time and work went into designing what was on screen at that point. Because there were so many different locations and different characters and just so many people on screen. And with this being a period piece I was very interested in knowing exactly how much went into creating the costumes specifically for so many people throughout the whole movie. This article is really cool and it gives you some insight into just how much work went into making the costumes for a single character who is not even one of the main characters. And as it turns out it is quite a bit of work for just one character which I think is really rather cool. It is super cool to kind of know how much thought went into all of the costumes in Babylon.
Despite not having seen ‘Babylon’, I’ve seen multiple images on the Internet of the movie and its extravagant set and costume immediately left a deep impression in my mind. Upon reading this article, I am shocked by the fact that she had to deal with (and was able to deal with) nearly 7,000 costumes for this movie, all made from scratch too! I am intrigued by the amount of organisation such a large-scale project must have taken on the part of the costume department and what that chain of command would have looked like. Even at smaller-scale productions at this school, communication often becomes messy or fails at its worst, so I admire the team for handling it all. Further, I am impressed by the level of detail Mary Zophres is able to maintain, again, given the scale of such a project. One question I was left with, however, upon finishing this article was the comment left by Smart. Smart stated that she wasn’t able to talk to the costume designer in such detail for such a long time, which I was surprised by because I thought it was an industry standard.
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