The costume vault

If there is an element of the Art Department often overlooked by audiences when regarding filmmaking, it's the Prop.              PROP (noun) (IN FILM/THEATRE)               An object used by the actors performing in a play or film:               The only props used in the show are a table, a chair, and a glass of water . But why am I speaking about the prop when this is a Costume Design focused blog? It is true that the prop can be something as far removed from costume as a chair or a plate. But it also can be something that easily and naturally intersects with the Costume Design: a piece of jewelry, a shield or a handbag. It's in those cases when a great prop design can bring a lot of narrative meaning in a similar fashion as Costume Design itself. And it's those cases that I am going to be looking at in here. I am going to dedicate this series to spread the virtues ...

Having already focused on three of the major players of the Seven Kingdoms (the Starks in the North , the Lannisters in the West and the Tyrells in the Reach ) I am going to change the focus a bit and instead of focusing on a family or a region, I am going to focus on a city and how costume design can help visualize and even explain its intricate inner workings. The Seven Kingdoms, as Martin created them, have a long and sprawling history behind them that has helped to form the traditions and culture of each of these kingdoms, shaping them into what we know. And, as I've established in previous articles, the most important task that the Costume Design faced was being able to create the sense that these cultures not only truly existed, but that they had existed for a long time. So, how do you design for a city that has no history? Without further introduction, let's turn our attention to Westeros' prosper and rich capital and see how the political game can s...

In honor of the return of HBO's Game of Thrones to our screens this past summer, and as an apology for my extended hiatus, I am going to dive back into the complex visual world of Westeros once again. Previously in this series, I've focused on how the North (read here ), the Westerlands (read here ) and their respective cultures were represented and reinforced through the detailed Costume Design. And, today, I  am going to do the same by looking at how Michele Clapton, the Costume Designer for HBO's multi-awarded show, builds the culture of the Reach and the Tyrell family. The Reach, just like the Westerlands, it's a region that we've barely physically seen on the show until very recently. And, because of it, most of what we know about it has been inferred through their visual style and the sporadic dialogue exposition. Which, in turn, speaks very highly of the incredible work done by the Costume Design Department when it came to projecting information regar...

Within our current media landscape, heavily populated by Young Adult novels and their inevitable adaptations, there is one YA novel that stands above the others. Not because it's necessarily better, but because it's the mother of them all and has, at this point, spawned a thousand rip offs and copycats. We are talking, evidently, about The Hunger Games . The 2008 novel by Suzanne Collins (and its 2012 movie adaptation) could actually be blamed for the dystopian obsession in media that has dominated the movie/book industry for the last years. And, whilst dystopia can be a very clever tool for pointing out real problems in our society, it needs to be careful not to oversimplify those problems and therefore, trivialize them. But what does this have to do with Costume Design? Sometimes, the visual choices taken in this type of media can actually come to reveal even more problems with our social worldview than the creators originally intended. In this particular case, th...