The costume vault

The 17th century is Hollywood's forgotten century. Whilst productions set in the Tudor era, or the Georgian era or even the Victorian, are aplenty, for some elusive reason, there aren't many that tackle the period between 1620 and 1700 (and the great majority of these rare movies are adaptations of the Three Musketeers ). On the other hand, when you turn your head towards the European panorama, you will find quite a larger number of movies set in the Baroque Period. One of these movies, and one of the most well-known (if only because it's shot in English instead of French or Spanish), is Vatel . Vatel (2000) is a period drama directed by Roland Joffé, the acclaimed British director of The Killing Fields (1984), The Mission (1986) and The Scarlett Letter (1996), amongst others. The movie tells the real, yet highly dramatized, story of François Vatel, and it premiered in the Official Selection of the Cannes Festival, gaining quite a lot of critical acclaim. ...

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...