Oscar- and Bafta-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan discusses five iconic looks in Disney’s showstopping update of its classic character Cruella. Nikki Baughan reports.
From dresses made of garbage and thousands of petals to that iconic Dalmatian-spot coat, the costumes of Walt Disney’s updated Cruella are all undeniable showstoppers. And yet, insists the film’s British costume designer, two-time Oscar winner Jenny Beavan (Mad Max: Fury Road, A Room With A View), they only work so well because they are in service to the story, not meant to take centre stage themselves.
“I always look for the narrative line and you have the perfect one here with Cruella’s progression,” Beavan says of the updated story, set in the 1970s, which sees Emma Stone’s orphan and wannabe-fashion designer Estella take on legendary couturier The Baroness (played by Emma Thompson) and, in doing so, morph into her alter ego Cruella. “The showstoppers were all written in the screenplay with a certain amount of description, because it was all tied into what she was doing,” she explains.
Beavan, who says that she used Disney’s 1961 animated original and also the 1996 live-action feature (and its 2000 sequel) starring Glenn Close as touchstones, drew plenty of inspiration from her own experiences of the 1970s. Then, she was a 20-something making her own outfits from fabric purchased at Liberty, the London department store where Estella finds her first job in fashion before catching the eye of The Baroness.
“It’s funny,” she says, talking to Screen International from Australia, where she is working on Fury Road prequel Furiosa. “When you work on something like this, it all comes back and you remember moments from your own life.” With a team of around 15 people, Beavan designed costumes for the main characters and then “carefully sourced” rental outfits for the hundreds of extras, visiting vintage shops for research. “I went to Portobello [Road market in London] every Friday, to get inspiration and pieces,” she says. “There was all kinds of long boots and skirts — that’s the ’70s to me, it’s the look.”
Despite the huge amount of work involved, Beavan had a very short time to work on those looks. “We had 10 weeks from me saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do the job,’ to the start of principal photography,” she says. Then Stone broke her collarbone and needed six weeks to recover. “She was mortified,” recalls Beavan. “And I was profoundly grateful. I kept saying, ‘I’m really sorry and I hope you’re not in too much pain, but thank you because it gives us an extra six weeks!’”
The work has given Beavan her 11th Oscar nomination — and her ninth from Bafta for film work, netting five wins in total to date — but is she satisfied with the result? “You watch it and it’s always amazing how fast the costumes fly by,” she says. “You realise you don’t actually need 5,000 costume changes because you don’t see them; but I’ve never learned that, so I still overdo it. But, of course, it’s all a bit too much,” laughs Beavan, as she takes Screen International through five of Cruella’s most elaborate looks. “That’s the whole point!”
Outfit 1: Transformation dress
The first time Estella appears as Cruella, she attends The Baroness’s Black & White Ball dressed in a white cape that burns away to reveal a stunning red dress, which is a reworking of one of The Baroness’s own classic creations.
Beavan: “It was written in the script that the white cape burns away. I did look into the possibility of doing it for real; not that we ever would have, but I wanted to know that you could. There’s something called fire wire, which could be built into the cloak, and at one point we did a mock-up of that.
“For the dress itself, because it’s a Black & White Ball, we felt that red would be the most anarchic colour. Yellow simply wouldn’t do the job. It’s inspired by [British-American fashion designer] Charles James — he made these spiral creations. Ian Wallace, one of my incredibly talented cutters, has always wanted to make one and decided this was the opportune moment. I said, ‘Go for it,’ and he absolutely did, he made a phenomenal dress. And we developed this asymmetric look for it, which became Cruella’s style.
“The only problem was I felt that Emma Stone wouldn’t be able to move enough in it, that we should give her a bit more knee room but she swore she could. And she looks so great in it.”
Outfit 2: ‘The Future’ motorcycle outfit
Cruella roars into one of The Baroness’s red-carpet galas, wearing a motorcycle jacket with pointed shoulders and a tyre-track print, along with gold sequinned trousers.
Beavan: “I had a wonderful cutter from Australia, Kirsten Fletcher, who did these wonderful constructions, and this is a like-nothing-else biker outfit. At that time, we were just beginning to edge the Cruella shoulders in. Without overdoing it, I wanted to make a little homage to the Glenn Close Cruella and make you believe that, given another 20 years, our Cruella could become that character. And then it was about pushing it a bit with the sequinned trousers, which look so good at night, and the bike-tyre detail on the jacket.
“It’s also a nod to how I recall the 1970s. I was in my 20s, I’d started working in theatre so I could buy a few clothes. I used to go to Liberty and buy fabric and make stuff. But there was a lot going on in the 1970s. We’d had this extraordinary moment in the 1960s, when we had come out of the boring, mumsy 1950s, and the 1970s were about consolidating those ideas and making some very interesting looks. I wore military jackets with layered skirts and Doc Martin boots; it was a real mix, and outfits like this were designed to have that spirit.”
Outfit 3: Garbage truck dress
A garbage truck crashes one of The Baroness’s events and pastel-toned fabric spills out of it. Cruella emerges wearing a bodice adorned with newspaper clippings about herself and, as the truck pulls away, we realise the fabric is, in fact, the extensive train of her gown.
Beavan: “Again, this was in the script. The train of the dress is supposed to be The Baroness’s 1967 spring collection, hence the soft cuts and the spring-like colours. Again, Kirsten made it and it was about working out the logistics, we had to keep it quite light so it could move easily. The newspaper bodice [featuring headlines about Cruella’s anarchic achievements] we printed ourselves on paper silk, as that’s far easier to deal with than real newspaper. We filmed that at two o’clock on a freezing London morning, down at the bottom of Regent Street. That’s where it had to fall off the truck, so it all got a bit damp and we were continually having to tweak the newspaper running up her back. My memory is that they got it in one or two shots, and we were so grateful for that.
“An outfit like this is at least a month’s work, and then we have to test it and make any adjustments that are needed. There was a huge amount of making, checking and redoing. And, of course, we had to make two each of most of the outfits because of the stunts, and it’s cheaper and more effective to have a second option if anything goes wrong than to try and mend it on the fly. So we had two of this one, and of the petal dress. It would be crazy not to.”
Outfit 4: Petal dress
At another red-carpet event, Cruella locks The Baroness in her car and climbs atop it, covering the windows with a huge skirt made of red petals that she has topped with an excessively gilded military jacket.
Beavan: “I don’t know how many organza petals were on this dress, but I think it’s in the region of 5,000. Again, that was Kirsten Fletcher, and she got a team of trainees and students to help because every petal was hand-sewn on. We tried various other techniques, but this was the only way to keep it the right weight. Because Emma has to climb onto the car and swish it around, we tested everything so we knew that when she swished it, it would land bang in the right place, and you can just see Emma Thompson’s face peeking out of the window.
“That military jacket top indicates she’s going into war [with The Baroness]. Jonathan Burniston, who was part of Kirsten’s team, made that; he found all sorts of bits and pieces and he kept adding them. I thought, ‘They are a bit big,’ but it was wonderful. People were having so much fun making these outfits and when they’re having fun they produce great work. Obviously if it had been too ridiculous, I would have said something, but when you’re doing something on that scale you rely on the people who are making it to bring that extra special something.”
Outfit 5: Dalmatian coat
After sabotaging The Baroness’s fashion show, Cruella holds one of her own in the street and, to the strains of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, parades the catwalk in a black-and-white Dalmatian-spot fur coat with buckles and a full asymmetrical skirt.
Beavan: “[In terms of the Dalmatian coat being the iconic Cruella look], I didn’t think like that. I looked once at Glenn Close’s coat, and once at the animated version, just to know where I was and what I wanted to do. But it’s so different. I just wanted every costume to be right for its own bit, and not overthink things; it’s about the character of Cruella slowly creeping in. It’s always about using the clothes to tell the story, to find the character’s arc. We came up with this half-and-half design, precisely because we didn’t want to overdo it.
“This sequence was the most challenging for me. The dancers who are behind Cruella, in what’s supposed to be her fashion show, proved to be very difficult to design for [they are all in different punky outfits]. I did about six different designs. Then when we shot it, it was 11 o’clock at night in Greenwich in December, and they all have to emerge from a fountain and they are all wet. Looking back at that scene, I think the outfits don’t pop quite as much as they should, as they were soaking. That was definitely a moment of angst.”
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