The costume vault

J.R.R Tolkien's Middle Earth is a place of magic and wonder, a place of immortal creatures, warlike heroes and fair and virtuous maids. It's a land of legend, locked in an eternal strife between Good and Evil where kings clash with dark and malicious powers. And because of all this is, by nature, so far removed from us, the reader and the audience, it can be easy to look at it with cold detachment and not truly get invested in it. Or it would be if Tolkien hadn't placed a relatable heart at the center of the story. That beating heart that drives the Trilogy is found in the humble and kind hobbits, whom in their non-magical essence and their gentle hearts and simple minds create a familiar link with the reader that guides him through Tolkien's mystical world. It's the quiet and tranquil hobbits that lie at the emotional core of the story. But it's that same every-man quality of theirs that lies at the very center of this epic and its theme. Because of th...

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 ...

The hardest and most challenging task that any fantasy movie has to face is to make the audience believe that their world could, and does, indeed, exist. Without this, there is no investment on the viewer's part and, therefore, no interest. The failure to do so has been the doom of many epic productions through movie history. In fantasy books, the task is much easier; generally, it's up to the reader's imagination. But in a movie, everything needs to be specific. In a book, you can say "she looked angelic with the traditional veil of her people". In a movie, you need to see the veil, and it has to be both believable and unique like it could only belong to "her people". That need for specificity affects, mostly, two departments: production design and costume design. This is what is called "world-building", and in recent memory, one movie has become the ultimate referent when it comes to it: The Lord of the Rings  Trilogy (Peter Jackson,...