Fabricating Characters
April 2013
Hollywood Costume at ACMI
One need look no further than Audrey Hepburn’s elegant little shuffle-walk in the opening sequence of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) to understand the central role of costume design in sculpting the enduring characters of the silver screen. After a moment or two of impassive yet fixed gazing through the partially reflective glass of the Tiffany’s shop window, Hepburn’s character patters off into the distance, her gait constrained by the tapered line of her floor-length black dress. Then, moments later, her skirt hitched-up to her calves, we see Hepburn dash across a street and lightly ascend a set of steps to her front door; this skirt hitch is one of several “prospective suitor evasion manoeuvres” in the character’s arsenal. It is virtually impossible to imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s without this extraordinary article of cinematic costume. Designed by the French couturier Hubert De Givenchy, Hepburn’s evening dress is one of 100 pieces to be included in the upcoming exhibition at ACMI, Hollywood Costume.
The curator of the exhibition Deborah Nadoolman Landis – whose credentials extend not only to academia and writing, but also to high-echelon costume design (including Raiders of the Lost Ark and Michael Jackson’s Thriller) – would undoubtedly agree with this estimation of the cinematic synthesis between character, narrative, and costume. When I asked Nadoolman Landis whether contemporary clothing had a comparable value in modern cinema to that of period costume or fictional dress (and whether it required as much work on the part of the designer), her response was swift and direct. Contemporary clothing was by far the more vital and more challenging of the categories, since these are the costumes that must differentiate the actor-buying-milk from the character-buying-milk. Actors, according to Nadoolman Landis, “are empty vessels waiting to be filled – they become someone else hundreds of times in their careers.” The visual imagery of the character, as conceived by the costume designer, goes a long way to filling this void and establishing the actor’s identity in a film.
Preparation for the current exhibition took five years of the curator’s industry and zeal, a fact reflected in the array of seminal costumes included in the inventory, every item of which was individually selected by the curator herself. The exhibition comes to Melbourne after first being shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London in 2012. With legendary costumes from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Casino Royale (2006), Cleopatra (1963), Gladiator (2000), and most recently Lindy Hemming’s sophisticated Batman suit for The Dark Knight Rises (2012), it is hardly surprising that this exhibition proved to be the V&A’s second most successful installation on record. For visitors to Hollywood Costume, this is a rare opportunity to experience cinema in palpable three-dimensional space and to encounter in the flesh, so to speak, those characters that have affected and inspired us.
Hollywood Costume is an exhibition about hiding, enhancing, and revealing flesh for the purposes of visual narrative. It is not a display of fashion, but of cinema and characterisation. Included in the exhibition are two green dresses taken from key scenes in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Atonement (2007) respectively. Vivien Leigh and Keira Knightley were each transformed by the green dresses they wore in the films; as were their fictional characters, each of whom revealed their true colours and underlying spirit with the donning of these costumes. In the fabric of the oft-named green “curtain dress” from Gone with the Wind, Vivien Leigh’s character assumes a disguise for the purposes of deception, which in actuality discloses more of her intentions and personality than it hides. This instance of cinematic costume might then be juxtaposed with Batman’s finely constructed disguise, worn by the character to protect the identity of not only himself but also those around him. And, like the wonderful green dress from Atonement, it doesn’t half flutter in the wind nicely.
It would be nigh on impossible to find a member of society whose imagination was not, at some point in time, enlivened by one or several of the costumes that will be on display at ACMI from April until August this year. Part of our own lives as movie watchers are characterised by the roles created through these costumes. While it might be a bit surreal to see these items of dress without the animation lent to them by the actors – and indeed outside the realm of two dimensions in which we ordinarily (and repeatedly) encounter them – it is certainly an experience not to be missed. Who wouldn’t want to attend a celebrity shindig in which time, space and reality are all comfortably suspended for an hour or two?
Hollywood Costume shows at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Federation Square, from April 24 to August 18.
Curator Deborah Nadoolman Landis will deliver a keynote lecture, ‘Hollywood Costume: Inside the Wardrobe’ at ACMI on April 24. Tickets are Full $15, Concession $10 and ACMI Member $9.
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