The costume vault

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...

Last time I dove into the complex and intricate world of Game of Thrones,  I focused on how the North, and its culture, was represented and reinforced through the Costume Design (read here ). Today, I am going to continue this series on world-building by looking at how Michele Clapton, the Costume Designer for HBO's multi-awarded show, builds the culture of a kingdom we haven't even seen yet: the Westerlands. Indeed, if last time I focused on the most beloved family of all Westeros, it's only fair I continue this by focusing on the most hated: the Lannisters. Originally, I wasn't going to focus on the Westerlands, because we've never been there on the show or in the books. But then I started thinking and realized that you can create a look that reflects the culture of a place, even when you don't get to see the place. In that case, the look of its inhabitants (which is what you, the audience, will see) needs to speak on its own. And that's exactly w...

As we promised a few weeks back, we are going to cover more tv shows from now on, mainly because there is just too much awesomeness in our TV's these days to ignore it. And for the last 5 years, the crowning jewel of TV costume design has been, without a doubt, HBO's Game of Thrones . So it was only logical to start there. The downside is that there is so much to talk about that it becomes really difficult to decide where to start exactly. G.R.R. Martin's sprawling epic covers many characters and many places, and therefore there's really a lot to pick up from. In the end, we decided that we would take a page out of the author's tactics and split it in several different series of articles to be published gradually. And so, this is going to be the first of many. And we probably should warn you, there will be spoilers ahead. CREATING THE SEVEN KINGDOMS Game of Thrones , from an adaptation standpoint, faced many of the same problems that Peter Jackson had to fa...