Oscars 2016: Costume Designers Bring Sketches to Life

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Costume Designers Share Their Sketches

The Danish Girl, Cinderella, The Revenant, Carol, and Mad Max: Fury Road are up for Best Costume Design at this year's Academy Awards. Ahead, the films' costume designers discuss the conception and execution of their dazzling, elegant, and gritty visions for the screen.

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Sandy Powell for Cinderella

In director Kenneth Branagh’s update on the classic fairy tale, Cinderella (Lily James) wears a voluminous, blue dress as she enters the ball to meet the Prince. In order to make her stand out, costume designer Sandy Powell kept things simple. “She has to walk into the ballroom and immediately look different from everybody else,” Powell tells EW. “She has the biggest dress in the room, but it’s also the simplest and it was deliberate.”

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Sandy Powell for Cinderella

It’s good to be bad, especially when you look like Cate Blanchett’s wicked stepmother. “As it quite often happens with the baddies, they do wear the best clothes,” Powell says of the character. “There’s something really intimidating about somebody who is perfectly dressed.” To convey that notion, Powell made sure to maintain a sense of glamour in the stepmother’s structured pieces.

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Sandy Powell for Cinderella

Powell also put Blanchett in darker shades, rather than having the villainous character dressed completely in black. “I wanted her colors to be strong and jewel-like tones, and attractive but cool,” she notes. “None of them have any warmth to them really.”

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Sandy Powell for Cinderella

Helena Bonham Carter appears as a beggar woman who is later transformed into a fairy godmother. Though opposite in looks, Powell says she treated both outfits the same by giving each a sculptural feeling. As for the fairy godmother’s wings, those were Carter's idea. “I wouldn’t have put wings on,” Powell says, though she ultimately embraced the look. “I think it was very successful, and I will give her full credit for that.”

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Sandy Powell for Cinderella

Because this is a fairy tale, Powell found it easy to have fun with her designs. “You got the excuse to be bold and I suppose in the back of my mind I’m thinking that this has to appeal to a much younger audience, children as young as four or five, so there’s a certain amount of graphicness to it, really quite obvious shapes and silhouettes and colors,” she says. That’s true of the stepsisters, Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger), whom she dressed identical but in different colors.

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Sandy Powell for Carol

Director Todd Hayne’s drama Carol also involves Powell and Blanchett, who plays the title character always looking perfectly put together. Powell describes Carol's style as having an “effortless sophistication,” and adds, “she had to look elegant and sophisticated but not intimidating compared to her character in Cinderella, so I wanted it to look as though it all came completely natural.”

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Sandy Powell for Carol

Powell took inspiration from bits of color seen in street photography of 1950’s New York. “In the photographs, you see a sort of highlight of yellow in a taxi cab or a red traffic light or a piece of neon,” she says. “That’s kind of what I used in the costumes: elegant color palettes for Carol and then a pop of color like the coral scarf and hat, or Therese’s beret and scarf.” Powell calls Carol’s look above one of her favorites. And that coat? Powell picked the blonde mink number because she thought it would complement Blanchett's coloring, and help her stand out when she meets Therese (Rooney Mara) earlier in the film.

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Sandy Powell for Carol

Compared to Cinderella, Powell says Carol was much more restrained. “There is nothing fantastical about it at all,” she notes. “It’s about real people in a real time in a real world.” That real world of 1950’s New York, Powell continues, is something Haynes really wanted to highlight.

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Sandy Powell for Carol

Carol’s polished outfits, like her chic, blue dress pictured here, went on to have a big influence on Therese’s style, inspiring her evolution from a simple style to something much more refined.

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Sandy Powell for Carol

Case in point, Therese is first seen with a more dressed down appearance. “It’s simple but pops, a common look for a young woman who recently left college and doesn’t have much money,” Powell says of Therese's style at the beginning of the film. “It’s sort of artsy, but unselfconscious. I think at that point in her life, clothes aren’t her priority. Her art, her photography, is what she’s interested in.”

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Sandy Powell for Carol

The more time Therese spends with Carol, however, the more she becomes drawn to style. “She’s not so much interested in her own appearance until she meets Carol and starts noticing what’s attractive about her,” Powell begins, “and is kind of obsessed by and in wonderment of her sophistication, just the texture and the feel and the look of her.”

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Sandy Powell for Carol

As the film nears its conclusion, Therese is completely transformed, appearing in a stylish, tailored number, paired with a new 'do and more confident attitude. “By the end of her journey of discovering who she is and finding herself a job which pays enough money, she buys herself a first outfit – a grownup outfit – and that’s the suit that I made especially for her,” Powell explains. “Her own style is not an exact replica of anything Carol wears but it’s sort of influenced and inspired by [her].”

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Paco Delgado for The Danish Girl

“The first meeting I had with [director Tom Hooper], he told me to think that Lili was a woman trapped in a man’s body and that man’s body was a jail somehow for her,” costume designer Paco Delgado explains of his starting point with the costumes in The Danish Girl, which tells the story of transgender pioneer Lili Elbe and her wife, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). “Then we tried to make two complete opposite worlds.” Before transitioning, Lili was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener (pictured above), a man who wore very tailored clothes with high, structured collars that acted as a sort of armor.

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Paco Delgado for The Danish Girl

As Lili transitions, Einar’s world slowly fades. Eventually, Lili opts for items with a lot movement, in warmer shades and lighter fabrics like silk. But here, Lili wears a fitted, beige suit, straddling a masculine-feminine line. “I think it’s very interesting how ambiguity [can be] much more threatening,” says Delgado, who already won the trophy for Excellence in a Period Film for The Danish Girl at the 2016 Costume Designers Guild Awards. “If Lili went into the streets wearing a lady’s dress people probably wouldn’t have felt so strange, but it was a man’s suit with very feminine [details].”

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Jenny Beavan for Mad Max: Fury Road

The looks of director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road were a collaborative effort, particularly between costume designer Jenny Beavan and hair designer/makeup artist Lesley Vanderwalt. Nicholas Holt’s War Boy Nux is a perfect example. “Nux only wears trousers with his pockets to keep his personal items,” says Beavan, who took home the prize for Excellence in Fantasy Film for Fury Road at the 2016 Costume Designers Guild Awards. “A lot of his look has to do with the scarification, the white powder they all cover their bodies with as a sort of homage to Immortan Joe, and probably to try and stop the rotting skin conditions they have.”

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Jenny Beavan for Mad Max: Fury Road

Hugh Keays-Byrne’s tyrannical leader Immortan Joe has a look that’s both elaborate and functional. On the style front, he has metal detailing and a skirt inspired by Japanese anime that Beavan calls an unexpected choice for a baddie. As far as purpose, Joe covers himself in the aforementioned white powder to alleviate his skin problems, wears a protective cover over his chest and uses a respirator mask. “We just had to give him that really frightening look,” Beavan says.

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Jenny Beavan for Mad Max: Fury Road

“His nose was rotting so he had this silly, little metal cover [over it], and was obviously wired up with all sorts of contraptions to help his bodily functions,” Beavan says of The People Eater (John Howard), another antagonist in the film. He wears a suit, a decision stemming from the idea that he was “a banker gone really, horribly wrong,” she explains.

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Jacqueline West for The Revenant

In director Alejandro Iñárritu’s survival epic The Revenant, frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is brutally attacked by a bear and eventually left for dead by his crew. But he fights for his life, and uses the skin of the animal that mauled him to do so. “It had a real symbolic meaning for Alejandro and Leo that the thing that almost killed him ends up saving his life,” costume designer Jacqueline West tells EW.

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Jacqueline West for The Revenant

For Glass, West was inspired by the concept of a hooded monk to show the character's deeper connection with nature. “The idea that Hugh Glass wasn’t just your mercenary hunter, but he was out in the wilderness looking for something more spiritual was a very important aspect of creating [this] look,” West details.

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Jacqueline West for The Revenant

West credits Iñárritu as being a major inspiration on the film. “He was so passionate about telling this story of some of our first contact with Native Americans, the spiritual journey of Glass and his evolution, his enlightenment through the Pawnee experience, the relationship between a father and son,” she says. “It all seemed so personal and so internal.”