Costume design for film is by turns a beguiling, frustrating and even banal form of creativity. It is the convergence of style and storytelling, yet it is often held in a different regard to score, editing, lighting, sound and directing. Perhaps this is on account of its tainted association with the fashion world, an industry often accused, with some validity, as being cutthroat and exclusionary. Historically, there has been a level of snark from those within or adjacent to this sector levelled at those who get it “wrong”. A rather profligate example of this could be a character like Joan Rivers (herself a former fashion consultant) taking aim at red carpet faux pas, to a blisteringly brutal extent. When said snark comes from those with a genuine desire to impart knowledge, this aspiration for perfection and accuracy can be attributed more to a frustration with the craft’s neglect and a wider lack of knowledge in said craft. Plus, with cinema historically being marketed as a male interest, the female-dominated world of fashion, and by extension costume design, has at times been dismissed as frivolous and superficial. Not something to be highly concerned with while analysing a film.
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After the success this year of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) (for this writer’s part a terrifying vehicle of dread consumerism and dusty ideas about empowerment), a cohort of female audience members evidently saw Barbie as a klaxon call for more laissez-faire attitudes towards feminine interests. It stands as an acknowledgement of the cultural or semiotic meaning such interests impart, no matter how frilly and fluffy they may appear to those on the outside looking in. Riding ahead of this curve has been a collection of female critics and commentators on YouTube who have dedicated their platform to evaluating what costume design, and to a greater extent fashion history, means to its audience and to filmmaking. Theirs is a position of educating and of dispelling myths which so frequently misrepresent the history of clothes making, and by extension, how fashion has been used by women over the centuries. These YouTubers are committed almost exclusively to heavy-handed Hollywood output in their critiques, which, while limiting, provides a new lens through which to view otherwise forgettable films, salvaged by their attention to costume.
Perhaps a good place to start, then, would be with Bernadette Banner. A passionate and unapologetic nerd for the art of good costume-making, she is herself a highly skilled seamstress whose skill set spans from the Early Medieval era to World War I, with a particular predilection for late Victorian womenswear. Her video on the five films which she considers went above and beyond in their attention to detail and accuracy includes Tulip Fever (2017), a film which by her own admission, and the wider critical and audience response, has been deemed notable only for being Harvey Weinstein’s final vanity project, if not for the costumes. She reveals how the costume designer, Michael O’Connor, worked with professional ruff-makers from the Royal Shakespeare Company for pinpoint accuracy. Having a presence like Bernadette in the costume analysis scene is certainly appreciative, but her attention to detail can border on the exhaustive. It begs the question to what extent accuracy plays a part in the overall quality of a film’s aesthetic choices. Certainly it’s enjoyable to mock a show like The Tudors (2007–2010) which committed the “blasphemous sin” of showing corsets on bare skin, but considering the calibre of such a show, the modus operandi of which was “Sexy Tudors Who Fuck”, is it such an issue that the costumes were nowhere near the level of historical research and technical expertise applied to something like Wolf Hall (2015)? When does anachronism work, and when is it simply a case of “you’re tacky and I hate you”?
For fashion and film YouTube critic Mina Le, historical inaccuracy can be imperative to an audience’s engagement with historical subject matter, and also for the coalescence of a film’s subject with its themes. She cites Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) in her video review as the prime meridian for where anachronistic liberty becomes an effective component of costume design. With Marie Antoinette, of course there is the glaringly obvious Converse All-Stars easter egg in the ‘I Want Candy’ montage, which has to the untrained eye been considered the most anachronistic aspect of the film, along with the contemporary soundtrack. Indeed it might surprise those listening to Le’s thoughts to hear her describe the overarching costume design as historically inaccurate, rather than just one misplaced pair of hi-tops.
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Certainly, the silhouettes are accurate and the tailoring and layout of the outfits look for the most part to be detailed in their recreation of 18th Century French fashion. Le’s reason for deeming it inaccurate is that there was a concerted effort by the costume designer, the legendary Milena Canonero, to frame Marie’s youthfulness in the film’s first third by using visual signifiers recognisable to a modern (and young) audience. Instead of lace, which could have appeared dowdy, Kirsten Dunst was dressed in organza and tulle, in sumptuous colours akin to the decadent, notorious cake in Antoinette’s famous misquote. Instead of heavy jewellery, which reportedly made Dunst look ‘matronly’ when tried on, they tied a simple girly ribbon around her neck. These decisions sacrificed ardent accuracy, but they ultimately aligned the costume design far more boldly with Coppola’s vision of a young Antoinette, and in doing so used modern signifiers of feminine youth to embellish the historical silhouette. For this reason Le, an expert, is happy to put accuracy aside and appreciate how style and storytelling can take precedence while still remaining cohesive with the period setting.
Michelle Magda on her channel THE CHIC LEAGUE also argues in favour of historical inaccuracy as necessary to visual storytelling when applied correctly. She references Kirsten Dunst’s take on the matter in her video essay on the subject, who described it as “kind of like a history of feelings, rather than a history of facts.” Speaking from my own experience, as someone who’s taken pride in retaining intricate details of historical fact to an often pedantic level, it can feel needlessly recalcitrant to chase historical accuracy in a cinematic period setting. When there are talented costume designers putting effort and talent into creating the appropriate silhouette while also adding characterful flair for the primary cast, surely that is costume design in its purest form?
The problems start to emerge when Hollywood parrots myths about historical clothing, particularly corsets, in what they falsely believe to be an act of progressivism. Karolina Żebrowska, a YouTuber, director, writer and fashion historian brings her own brand of shitposting humour to these issues with her videos. She initially went viral for her 2015 response video to the bizarrely inaccurate trend of “100 Years of Beauty” videos being put out by Glamour and other beauty outlets, which often represented the 1920s with a model wearing what looked to be a Smiffy’s fancy dress costume. Alongside Hollywood glamour and style, she highlighted the real-life experiences of women in the early 20th century; the suffragette movement, working in domestic service, struggling through the Great Depression, nursing in World War II. She felt it necessary to do this out of a drive to educate and help people understand the reality of historical clothing, not just historical fashion, and to encourage people to look past glamour and style and understand the lived experience of women across history.
Żebrowska similarly makes a passionate case for the misrepresentation in Hollywood of corsetry and its effect on the female body (although this can also be credited to numerous other online female historians), particularly focusing on the film industry’s misrepresentation of the corset as an emblem of repression and restraint (as opposed to, essentially, a big old posture-aiding bra). This is by no means a fixed mainstream opinion even amongst fashion historians. It remains a hotly contested debate. Nevertheless Bernadette Banner, who actually grew up wearing a corset due to scoliosis, has also thrown her hat in in defence of corsets.
Where Żebrowska takes issue is with the trope in cinema of watching a woman being painfully cinched into a corset and how it affects that character’s narrative, in addition to the headline-grabbing statements made by actresses who wear them for roles talking about how painful and uncomfortable they are. The general consensus amongst fashion historians and modern corset experts is that if an actress is in pain while wearing one for a film, then that is a poorly constructed corset. She parodies this in a mock-interview about the subject, playing a starlet talking about the issue where the interviewer (also herself) counters her opinion with the historical fact that working class women would wear corsets and do daily chores in them. She also put out a video detailing how the backlash to corsets can be linked to a driven effort by Victorian men against the fashion industry, which at the time was one of the few female-led and dominated industries, with most corset studios run by madams. The main tactic used was a PR campaign based in ridicule, marking the roots of a male-led derision of fashion and women’s interest in it which would carry through all the way to the current era. It comes back again to the ways in which proper costume analysis by experts can help spread a better understanding of the lives of those who came before us.
While the world of costume experts seems to inevitably involve frustration at a lack of research and effort, there is still room for nuance. Yes, the costumes of Bridgerton (2020–) may use visibly synthetic material, and are absolutely winging it with the historical silhouettes, but as with The Tudors there is capacity to ‘low it, and choose one’s battles wisely. I see reason to be excited for upcoming projects. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) looks to have some innovative splendour in its costume design, and in Ridley Scott’s upcoming Napoleon (2023) his long-time collaborator Janty Yates seems to have pulled all the stops out. I hope that with those on YouTube dedicating their time to the analysis of costuming, and through this piece also, that costume analysis can become a bigger part of online criticism beyond the realms of fashion outlets. As a stylistic form so deeply tied to identity and status, experts who can offer didactic nuance on its history serve to broaden our understanding of ourselves, and so improve how it’s reimagined for screen.
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