The costume vault

The magic and allure of Middle Earth, as a reader, always has been the fact that you can immerse yourself into this world to the point that it feels real. Everything Tolkien wrote, is so detailed and carefully crafted that every character, race, culture and location comes vividly to life in the reader's mind with spectacular clarity. Managing to capture this realism, this carefully constructed illusion that Middle Earth had existed at some point in time, was, undoubtedly, the biggest challenge Peter Jackson faced when he decided to adapt this cornerstone of fantasy literature. Every race, every character and every location needed to feel real, needed to feel like it had been lived in, like it had a history. And how do you do that? Through production design, photography... and costume design. I am going to focus on that last department and the various ways in which costume helps bring this world to life. On the first entry I looked into the designs for the Rohirrim through ...

Mad Max: Fury Road , the fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, is nothing like we've seen before. Certainly nothing like any Best Picture Nominee that's come before it. And there is, precisely, where lies its strength. Directed by George Miller (who had already directed the previous three movies of the franchise), this epic chase is, at its core, as simple as it gets. It hits all the notes you'd expect of a Mad Max movie, but somehow it has a magic that had not been captured before. More than a movie, it's an experience. Precisely because the story is so simple (basically, a two-hour-long chase), the movie has the time to really immerse you in the universe without any dialogued exposition or your usual tropes in fantasy worlds. And it's there where the costume design really comes into play. From the dictatorial world of Inmortan Joe to the rebellious Furiosa and her clan; the designs manage to transport the viewer into the crazy world that th...

Carol , a movie based on Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt , shows us exactly where The Danish Girl failed. The movie, directed masterfully by Todd Haynes, is the perfect mix between classical filmmaking and breakthrough storytelling. It's not afraid to take risks. This love story between two women (an issue that, unfortunately, is still either ignored or fetishized in the media) takes the canons of the classical Hollywood melodrama and subverts them masterfully as we follow the coming of age story of young Therese through her love affair with Carol. Haynes did something very similar with also acclaimed Far From Heaven (2002) which dealt with homosexuality and racial issues. Filled with an incredible sense of beauty and subtlety, the movie accompanies you through a highly emotional drama where the only villain is the prejudices of the world our characters live in (which is also our world and our prejudices to this day). The movie was robbed of a Best ...