The costume vault

Last December, as 2019 ended, it took me a good two weeks to realize what the arrival of 2020 meant: another decade has come and gone. The 2010s are finally over, and, as any decent blogger knows, the only acceptable way to celebrate this achievement is by making my own Top 10 of the Decade List (even if I might be really late to the party at this point)! I am not going to lie: ensembling this list has been a hard endeavor. Not because there weren't many good costume designs, or because there were too many, but because I truly have a horrendous memory and couldn't, for the life of me, remember which movies had come out in the last decade. This, coupled with the fact that the early 2010s, basking in the post-economic crisis dread, weren't very welcoming to the idea of big productions with luxurious visuals and out there costuming, made the list hard to put together. A brief reminder before I unveil my fabulous list!  What makes a great costume design? Wel...

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...

2015 has come and gone already, and it has left us with a wide array of movies to look at: some good, some bad and everything in between. Here I will not be looking at the quality of the movies themselves but at the quality of their costume design. And in that regard, 2015 has left us with some really good stuff. This will not be a top 10 because I could not find enough movies with designs that I really loved, and therefore it stayed as a top 7 list. Also, the order is rather random. All of the designs mentioned below are really great on their own and I don't think they can really be properly listed. And so, I begin. I - A GOTHIC OPERETTA: Crimson Peak  designs by Kate Hawley Guillermo Del Toro's new movie is, easily, one of the most gorgeous movies released this past 2015. The sets, the photography and, of course, the costume design were stunning to look at. The designs, done by Kate Hawley (who also worked with Del Toro in Pacific Rim ), are the perfect ...