Movie Musings: Disney and More

The Golden Touch of Costumes

In movies there are a lot of things that are essential to helping the actors look the way they need to look on camera, lighting, makeup—and sometimes even visual effects when actors are portraying non-human/fantastical characters on screen! A sometimes overlooked, but very important feature is costumes. While the actor is responsible for making the character seem believable on camera, the costume designer makes that believability look realistic, enhancing what the viewer feels with the right stele, look and feel of the time period. In this blog, I’d like to tell you about some costume designers who have each left a legacy in film for their strikingly beautiful designs in both color and black-and-white films.

Edith Head’s incredible costume designs are a staple in the history of movies. Her designs extend from the biblical epics, Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956), to holiday movie-musical classic White Christmas (1954), to the John Wayne westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965). She won eight Oscars out of a total of 35 nominations for her work, winning for: The Heiress (1949), Samson and Delilah (1949), All About Eve (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Facts of Life (1960), and The Sting (1973). Her last film to design costumes for was Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) which starred Steve Martin and Carl Reiner (Reiner also wrote and directed the film). 

Head had great relationships with many of the actors she dressed. She became great friends with Elizabeth Taylor, having worked with her on “Place in the Sun,” and she and her then-husband, Wiard Inhen put Taylor up at their house when Taylor’s marriage to Burton was in trouble. She also considered Grace Kelly her favorite star to work with and To Catch a Thief (1955) the favorite of her films as a costume designer, and Alfred Hitchcock her favorite director to work with. She shared her Oscar win for “Facts of Life,” with Edward Stevenson, who is known for having designed the costumes for Citizen Kane (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). She designed movie costumes for nearly 60 years, at a total of more than 400 movies and it is because of her work that many of these movies continue to stand the test of time today.       

Bill Thomas is a legend at the Disney studio, but is a costume designer who is not as well-known. He worked without receiving actual credit for designing the costumes for some films such as Running Wild (1955) and the Rock Hudson/Doris Day classic romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959)), and received a well-deserved Oscar for designing all of Jean Simmons’ outfits in the movie Spartacus (1960), an award that he shared with Fred Valles. After “Spartacus,” he came to the Walt Disney Studios where he designed costumes for pretty much every live-action film that the studio produced in the 1960s, The Parent Trap (1961), That Darn Cat! (1965), Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968), The Love Bug (1968), and many others. He is credited as the costume executer of Mary Poppins (1964), along with Julie Andrews’s then-husband, Tony Walton, who was the costume consultant. The only ‘60s Disney film that he did not design the costumes for was The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), though he did design for the sequel to that film, Son of Flubber (1963). 

Thomas received other Oscar nominations for designing the costumes for Disney’s Babes in Toyland (1961), Bon, Voyage! (1962), The Happiest Millionaire (1967), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). He continued designing costumes for Disney movies in the ‘70s with The Island at the Top of the World (1974), Pete’s Dragon (1977) and The Black Hole (1979). He also designed the costumes for the epic comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and the made-for-television movie Wonder Woman (1974), which aired before the series in 1975. He passed away on May 30th, 2000. Six years after his passing, the Costume Designers Guild Awards added him to Hall of Fame.         

Sandy Powell studied theater design at London’s Central School of Art, though she left before completing her degree due to receiving costume designing offers, one of whom was for director Derek Jarman. Powell made her film debut designing costumes for Cravaggio in 1986. She collaborated with Jarman again on The Last of England (1988) and Edward II (1991), which starred Tilda Swinton. These three films were all low-budget films, but her first big film came the following year with Orlando (1992), starring Swinton. It earned Powell her first Oscar Nomination for Best Costume Design. Although the award that year went to Gabriella Pescucci in The Age of Innocence (1992), she later became the winner of three Best Costume Design Oscars for Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Aviator (2004), and The Young Victoria (2009). In addition to a 12 Oscar nominations, Powell is also known for having designed the costumes for five other Martin Scorsese films besides “Aviator,” i.e: Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010), Hugo (2011), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The same year as “Shutter Island,” she designed the costumes for the film of The Tempest (2010), based on the Shakespeare play of the same name. 

Just recently, Sandy Powell designed the costumes for Disney’s live-action adaptation of Cinderella (2015) which earned her another Best Costume Design Oscar Nomination. Her designs will next be seen on screen again in Disney’s upcoming sequel to Mary Poppins (1964), Mary Poppins Returns (2018), and later in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman which will be released in 2019 and will be her seventh collaboration with Scorsese. Besides being a three-time Oscar winner, Sandy Powell is also one of the very costume designers ever to receive two simultaneous nominations for two different films released in the same year: Velvet Goldmine and Shakespeare in Love both released in 1998, and Cinderella and Carol, both of which were released in 2015 and starred Cate Blanchett. One might say that Sandy Powell could be on her way to becoming the new Edith Head.

It is easily agreeable that these three costume designers have all done an exceptional job designing movie outfits. Edith Head and Bill Thomas have both created timeless legacies with their designs, and Sandy Powell is undoubtedly working her way up to being considered one of the best. The success of many, many movies is certainly due, in part, to their “golden touch.”