Blankets & inhabitation of new living spaces
The ‘Essential Workers’ of Costume Design: People, Business, Objects.
When puppies get a new home vets advise to equip them with the bedding or blanket they’ve slept on. Carrying familiar scents it makes them feel safe and alleviates the stress of relocation. It helps canine babies, as well as human adults moving to unknown living spaces: an empty rented apartment, a short-term space fitted with bare essentials or sterile business hotels.
A long-owned cozy blanket offers the transiting body a link between spaces and makes inhabitation of a new environment more bearable. Through warmth and comfort it gives a feeling of immediate belonging and safety and will mitigate a heart attack caused by new spooky sounds. It is maybe the most personal and intimate of home textiles. In a different way than towels though, which are owned in many copies of similar design and used interchangeably in high turnover for hygiene reasons.
For one, blanket’s intimacy comes from direct contact with the body and bare skin. It serves as a sweater, scarf or poncho when thermostat is still a mystery, as a robe on the way to fridge at night but doesn’t get as much credit and attention as fashion. Secondly, accompanies the owner through highly emotional situations: longing, melancholy, happy cuddles, boredom or debilitating fever.
Easily foldable and portable is a loyal companion through house moves and travels and can be handled almost carelessly - won’t break in transit. Durable and washable will work for its owner as a tray, napkin or occasional silencer of embarrassing body sounds. A blanket gives the body a hint of continuity between old and new living spaces and a sense of microstability in ever changing surroundings.
During the pandemic it became clear how much we depend on the ‘essential workers’ – the people who daily take care of the basic, mundane parts of life that glue together our everydayness.
I’ve recently designed a steel installation for a personal project. When the welded construction arrived from a specialised gun-paint shop I saw in horror that the colour I had chosen and paid a hefty sum for came out wrong. Very, very wrong. No, the painters did not make a mistake - I did. The whole thing looked terrible and compromised months of work. The colour needed to be toned down or redone. Just days till the deadline and with the budget maxed out I was desperately browsing carton boxes for some impromptu solution, when an ordinary brown packing tape rolled out to the floor. Thin, semi-transparent with a muddy hue. Ugh, maybe? No, no - that will look like unprofessional. But out of ideas I tried to stick the delicate tape over the awful paint anyway. Well, not only it did it nicely tone it down, but greatly exposed texture of the steel. I was saved! Oh, thank you, Cheapest Brown Packing Tape – thank you for existing!
This dependency on a modest object made me think of essential elements in the professional field too: the invisible contributors to any show: film, theatre, event. People and things barely visible but saving the show so many times. From the perspective of supplying costumes I would like to subjectively appreciate three essential elements of the process as far as people, businesses and objects are concerned: Essential people - Wardrobe Supervisor, Essential business: second-hand stores, Essential object: safety-pins. I acknowledge though that there are actually numerous other people, businesses and objects that are truly indispensable to make even a small production come together.
Essential People: Wardrobe Supervisor
On film sets every crew member is there for a reason and is necessary. It is like a machine - that comprises of many, many elements – if the tiniest cog fails it breaks down. Wardrobe Supervisor and their personnel are often hidden in the jungle of racks of costumes and barely seen by most of the crew. I cannot say how many times I witnessed them save a costume or the entire scene with a quick, genius fix in an emergency and creatively solve all sorts of spectacular wardrobe malfunctions. I have seen a terrified colleague find a rented vintage white collar from the 1930’s washed with blacks by mistake and turned dark grey. She restored its crisp whiteness in an hour with some magic tricks as we all held our breaths. I have heard from a Wardrobe Supervisor that in just one night she made a wool coat one size larger to cover a replacement actress pregnancy. With knowledge about fabric, tailoring, knitting, mending, cleaning, ironing, attention to detail and priceless people skills to provide the comfort to the actors in the crowded dressing ‘room’ which is often just the interior of an old bus these are essential people. Mostly women, they save the face of the whole costume department so, so, so many times.
Essential Business: Second-Hand Stores
I can hardly imagine making a contemporary film without stepping into a second-hand store: either for inspiration, for vintage trophies or due to lack of budget. Some are not very glamorous, often stinky, but a real mine for costumes. I am thankful that it’s someone’s everyday task and business to dig through tones of stock, segregate, display, rotate so that you can carry out an Ikea bag of stuff for the price of a sweater in a regular store. I would travel to stores in other cities because they carry stock from some specific country, or specific decade – such specialisation could not have been more helpful. I especially appreciate second-hand stores in small towns, when you are away on location and it is often the only place that sells clothes that can save you in an emergency. Also, prices there are lower than in fancy vintage city stores and you dig out silk and cashmere gems for a price of socks.
Essential Object: Safety Pin
One of the rules of working with actors is that you don’t sew or pin costumes on them. But so many times you do. A ripped jacket will not make the Director Of Photography risk losing exposure and wait for the actor to go back to the dressing room take the costume off, have it repaired and walk back to the set. When a shoulder strap of a dress brakes during a scene exposing way too much cleavage for daytime TV you would just hear someone yelling: “Just pin it, just pin it already - we are rolling!” If a golden necklace clasp malfunctions during a take, the tiniest golden safety-pin will do the job till the break - no one will even notice. And then maybe the nice guys from prop department will help. An artillery of safety-pins in all sizes and colours are hiding in Wardrobe Standbys’ waistbags and are a secret weapon on stand-by: humble, modest, patient little life-savers. So if the designer makes the costume, it’s the safety pin that saves it. So many, many, many times.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Loss of visual identity - Film Character Redesign
The opening scene from ‘Abre los Ojos’ from 1997 with Eduardo Noriega required quite some logistics to close the Gran Via in Madrid for the nightmarish, surreal effect. If it was shot now, life of the location manager would be so much easier – the surreal is now real.
The surroundings changed so abruptly. It’s like the reality was a film and the script changed overnight. Scratch that. There is no script anymore. Unscripted. Full improv. Just the genre emerges. Maybe not ‘Mad Max’ yet, but surely closer to the post-apocalyptic shelf.
So as a costume designer under lock-down I wonder: how to redesign a film character for a new, up-side-down, story? If the story changes, the character changes: stories make characters and vice versa. Due to the lack of characters at hand to work on right now, I take a look at myself as a character in this new ‘film’ about seclusion.
If I think of myself as a film character I kind of identify with the formal vibe of ‘Succession’ and definitely wish I was frequenting the series’ glamorous locations, where good suits belong. And as a designer I am happy with the results of a years-long search for my visual identity (with awful, embarrassing detours). But in the socially distanced reality I got slightly nervous. Adieu my double-breasted red suit, made-to-measure derby shoes, a vintage trophy clutch. There are no occasions for these, and maybe there won’t be for a long, long time.
So now what? Loungewear (brrrr)? Sweatpants? That’s not who my character is. I am definitely a buttoned-up, tailored type. So, if things that visually ‘define’ me are irrelevant and inadequate… Oh no, what now? How to be ‘me’?
So back to square one. Redesign.
Redesign means the character has to materialise adequately to the new story (unless it’s a character whose main quality is inability to adapt). In the need to reinvent a character for a new genre, time or location I guess what can be done is that the character can be stripped down to its substantial qualities: to the essence. I wonder if it is the same thing as style, but no. It’s something deeper. Not just circumstantial incarnations of the character’s core. Something very innate, that can trespass a decade, a century or location. Like we could see in James Bond for decades or so beautifully shown in ‘Orlando’ with Tilda Swinton, or ‘Age of Adaline’ with Blake Lively. Once the essence is found, it can be materialised in any situation. It can be manifested regardless of time or place - either in a late 19th-century ball gown selection or a stay-at-home-during-coronavirus-pandemic choice of undergarment.
I am not sure what my own character’s essence is yet. So, I have made this a quarantine assignment: an investigation to my visual essence and redesign of myself for the new, not clear yet, reality.
So, how to investigate your visual essence?
1. Open the wardrobe and look at the clothes from ‘before’. Pick up a few items that define you visually, that scream ‘me’, even the very humble or worn-down. (For inspiration to include bored household members in this activity see the ‘Toss or Take’ scene from Sex and the City).
2. Put each piece of clothing each on, parade for a while, wear for the whole day, or a couple of days (changing clothes daily seems so prepandemic). How do they make you feel? What vibe do they give? Write it down. How do they make you stand? Walk? Relate to other people? What do you want to say if you put them on? (Any jacket gives you the ‘you-talkin’-to-me?’ mirror moment?)
3. No clue? Ever dreamed of being like Robert DeNiro in that scene? Any film characters, history figures, celebrities you kind of aspire to visually? Or wish you were them? Love to dress as some particular character for Halloween? (If Nicole in ‘Marriage Story’ dressed as David Bowie in ‘Let’s Dance’ each year that would be a definite clue).
4. Is there anything that these clothes have in common? Do words that describe them have a common denominator? Armour? Playfulness? Anarchy? Comfort? Dreaminess? Stability? No answer is good or bad really. The result needn’t be particularly pleasant or likeable.
5. Explore. Re-wear these items. Take all the time you need. Maybe after two days or two months you’ll sense a quality that totally makes you ‘you’. This will be the very essence of your character manifested in the clothes – the part of the material world closest to the body.
So far, I have grimaced in favourite suits in front of the mirror and wore my go-to overalls for a week straight. If I had lived in the medieval ages, I guess I would have chosen to be a knight or like Mila Jovovich in ‘Joan of Arc’. As for real film characters, I would kill for a Tom Cruise’s Top Gun look, all geared up in the iconic jumpsuit. I’ve also pinned a photo of Greta Garbo in a 40’s long sleeve evening gown and an 80’s Princess Diana cocktail outfit. And the common thing was the enlarged shoulders and the shoulder pads. Also, epaulette is my favourite detail in a duster coat. Ok that’s an easy association: they are all sings of authority. Other words that I have written down: verticality, column, monolith, structure, symmetry. But I am struggling to find that one word. Is it something about power? Hmm. I need to wear some of my suits indoors again just to feel what exactly they do to me. In a conscious effort to understand.
I hope I will find it. When I do the point is how to translate this essence to lockdown outfit choices. Or can it spontaneously manifest itself adequately over time once I am conscious what my essence is, if I think of myself as a film character?
I keep picturing the quarantine end as the last scene of “Surrogates” with Bruce Willis. When the surrogates - robotic, flawless representations of humans in public and social life - are deactivated globally, their very imperfect human operators emerge from homes. In stained, stretched sweatpants, thinned robes and with grey hair roots, they come out to face the new reality. And I am curious what will my redesigned character look like when it’s time to re-emerge from the depths of home interiors after the lock-down has ended.
No one’s looking & identity crisis
Culture happens when someone is looking at someone else. Then meanings are figured out and reflected back validating the observed and the observer. That is one of the reasons Tom Hanks (hopefully recovered by now) created Wilson.
Isolation means no one is looking. There is nowhere to go, no one to see and no one to be seen by. Of course this has many, many more serious health and social consequences. But it also can make a dent in identity.
In the absence of public exposure there is no one to witness the normally performed roles signalled by clothing - our costumes in everyday life. No one to validate the selves by either a compliment or a snub, or any reaction for that matter.
Many identities are now void or on hold. Professional identities first of all. A host of an NBC late night show, an Emirates stewardess, a Paris Fashion Week supermodel, any actor. They are not in the establishments that make them who they are professionally. They stay at home. They are not in uniforms, costumes, clothes that make them who they are professionally.
I guess it must cause at least a small identity crisis.