Dreamweaver: Sandy Powell’s screen presence

Born, raised and still based in South London, Sandy Powell has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Costume Design, and the BAFTA equivalent, fifteen times by each Academy. She started her film career in the 1980s creating costumes for queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, while also working on numerous live contemporary dance productions for choreographer Lea Anderson. She has won three Academy Awards, for Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Aviator (2004) and The Young Victoria (2009), and three BAFTAs, for Velvet Goldmine (1998), The Young Victoria, and The Favourite (2018). In 2023 she was the first costume designer to be awarded a BAFTA Fellowship.

Mark C. O’Flaherty: Your job is to create characters intrinsic to the narrative of a film. Are you also creating a narrative and character yourself? Every aspect of your image has always seemed so considered.

Sandy Powell: I don’t think so. When I’m working on a film, I define a character by what they wear. I have to get into that character’s head and figure out what they would choose and why. I don’t do that with myself. Having said that, I have dressed in a certain way for a situation. At the start of my career, I used to wear what I thought of as my ‘lucky outfit’, the Gaultier bomber jacket and black nylon leggings that you photographed. I’m not superstitious – it just made me feel confident. There are times when clothing needs to be armour, but when I dress with that in mind, I don’t feel like I am dressing out of character. Around about the same time I was wearing that Gaultier outfit, I wore a lot by Val Piriou, who was a designer from France who won Designer of the Year in London in 1990. She died of AIDS in 1995 at thirty-one. Tragic.

Mark: When did the orange hair begin?

Sandy: I was fourteen. Henna hair dye colour was the only thing I could afford when I went into the original Biba on Kensington High Street, although I then went on to shoplift makeup in Big Biba (sorry, Barbara Hulaniki!) when I was about sixteen. I’ve had unnatural hair colour ever since. It just feels right to me when the alternative is mouse brown.

That Mick Rock video sums up so much for me. It’s such a gorgeous image

Mark: There are so many interesting things going on in fashion in terms of gender. When you wear a suit, is that you playing with the idea of gendered clothing? A woman wearing an oversized blazer suggests an inherent confidence, because women’s clothing isn’t grounded in the measurements and precision of tailoring, but there are still lingering conventions that dictate how men’s clothing should look.

Sandy: I’ve always worn suits, going right back to the 1980s. I don’t see it as gendered. I wear dresses, but I’m much more comfortable in something tailored as opposed to pretty or ‘feminine’. I’m not doing it to get noticed, it just makes me feel confident and I know that it looks good.

Mark: I remember Bryan Ferry saying in an interview once that in the early days of Roxy Music he pretty much only wore his Antony Price suits, because he knew that in the future a suit wouldn’t look old-fashioned in photographs, whereas anything that was ‘fashion’ would look dated. You’re now known for wearing a certain cut of suit from that same era, the early 1970s, but you’ve made it your own, and it looks totally contemporary, which in a way proves his point.

Sandy: I had that first suit made for me in 2015 by Ian Frazer Wallace who I have worked a lot with at the Whitechapel Workhouse. I wanted a perfect copy of the pale blue suit that Freddie Burretti made for David Bowie for the ‘Life on Mars’ video in 1971. That Mick Rock video sums up so much for me. It’s such a gorgeous image, so ingrained on my memory – the white background, the orange of his hair, blue eye make-up and pink lips. I wanted to have a version of that suit made for me, and I knew I could get the cut perfect, but I couldn’t find the right blue fabric. Then I was on a job in LA, had a spare half an hour to go to a textile shop, and there it was on the top shelf – just enough for what I needed. I’ve now had a batch of suits made from the same block. Some of the details are different, but it’s always the same shape.

Mark: That blue suit is now as synonymous with you as it is with Bowie, and of course the calico toile Signature Suit, with the 200 film industry autographs on it, has become as famous. It went straight from our shoot to the V&A. How did the idea come about?

Sandy: I was asked to pose for a portrait for BAFTA, and they wanted me shot in a workroom. I thought about making it more interesting by wearing a toile, and I realized that the one of the suits looked really good. It was also a blank canvas. Awards season was coming up, I had been nominated for both a BAFTA and Academy Award for work on The Irishman (2019), and the Art Fund campaign to buy Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness, had just started. It felt like prophecy. A lot of us who were involved with Derek had talked about how we could raise awareness and donations, and it seemed like such an obvious idea: wear the calico suit to events, get celebrities to sign it, and sell it. It also meant I didn’t have to think about what I was going to wear all season. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are on the lapels, Donatella Versace is on the back. There’s Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt, Renée Zellweger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elton John, Joaquin Phoenix and Laura Dern. It sold for £20,000 at Phillips, the individual who bought it then donated it to the permanent collection at the V&A and the Art Fund hit their target of £3.5m to protect Prospect Cottage and support future residency programmes there.

Mark: You’ve also worn full-on glam red-carpet dresses to the Oscars. We photographed the gown you wore when you won the award for The Aviator, which is the same dress Cate Blanchett wears in the film, with the identical Art Deco pattern, but in a different colour. How do you feel in a dress in that kind of situation, as opposed to a suit?

Sandy: Usually freezing and exposed. You’re on that red carpet with bare arms, and then you’re inside and it is brutally air conditioned, so you’re cold, but you’re also sweating because you’re nervous. It’s a horrible combination. Also, you have to wear heels unless the dress is long enough to cover flats, and after a couple of hours it’s agony.

Mark: You’ve clearly always known the power of clothes and used that skilfully. The first time you came to what we might consider the general public’s attention was at the Evening Standard Film Awards in 1992. You won an award, partly for your work creating the costumes for Jarman’s Edward II. I remember watching that ceremony on TV, at home with my parents. I was a young gay man in the suburbs, growing up in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and there was this amazing looking woman on stage in a rubber dress and evening gloves at the Savoy who ambushed the whole event with a speech about how the Evening Standard’s editorial stance was wickedly homophobic and stigmatizing of people with HIV and AIDS at that time. It was all done with a huge smile and if you turn the sound off, it looks like any other gracious acceptance speech, but because you were in a rubber dress and pearls and because of what you were saying, it was deeply subversive. Jarman was a cult figure for young queer people of the era, and his diary record of that night, published as part of Smiling in Slow Motion (2000), is brilliant: ‘The audience were gasping, her intervention so impressive she was joined by Shirley MacLaine, who left the ridiculous Bubbles Rothermere’s party in support when she found out Sandy’s ticket was torn up in her face.’ Tell me about the part that dress played in that event, and how you felt.

It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever had to do, but I had to do it

Sandy: Well, the Evening Standard always told people if they had won in advance, so I knew was getting the award and would be on stage, and I had an opportunity to do something. I needed an outfit. I was friends with the latex designer Kim West and asked her to make me something glamorous. She came up with a full-length capped-sleeve dress that I wore with pearls and evening gloves and big hair. Doing evening dress in rubber was a way to subvert things. The dress was part of what I was going to do. It was about being naughty. It made me feel good and I absolutely needed to feel dressed up. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever had to do, but I had to do it. I wasn’t thinking about any impact that might have on my career. I wasn’t establishment. I was arthouse and independent. I was there for Derek and did it for him. He launched my career. I am sure some people decided not to employ me because of that evening, but equally there were people who had respect for it.

Mark: What happened to the dress?

Sandy: I carried on wearing it out for another two years. Then I was in New Orleans working on Interview with the Vampire (1994) wore it to a huge Halloween party, and it just sort of exploded on the dancefloor.

Mark: Interview with the Vampire is one of several films you did with Neil Jordan, and your first major Hollywood moment. One of the reasons you got the Evening Standard award was for your work with Neil on his earlier film The Miracle (1991), and then you did The Crying Game with him in 1992 – both much lower budget than the Anne Rice adaptation.

We photographed the sequin dress and studded leather jacket that Jaye Davidson wears in The Crying Game. You told me you found the sequin dress in a store in Covent Garden, and the jacket was something you owned and customized for yourself, but it became part of the transgender character of Dil. How often does your personal wardrobe end up on screen?

Sandy: Quite often, if it’s a period piece – and by period, I mean the 1990s. The Thierry Mugler catsuit you photographed has been on screen several times. It was last on an actor in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) who was playing a prostitute, straddling Leonardo DiCaprio. Seeing my own clothes on screen is like a private joke. I like that something that has a history with me is having another life on screen. There’s an antique ring that I bought at Gray’s in Mayfair years ago that has been worn by Natalie Portman playing Anne Boleyn, Judi Dench as Mrs Henderson, and Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria.

Mark: All those films would have had substantial budgets, and that’s always in evidence in those lavish Tudor or nineteenth-century dresses, but the early work would have been done for next to nothing. Derek Jarman’s films are now lauded as masterpieces and immensely influential, but Caravaggio, which was one of the most talked about films of the year when it came out in 1986, had a budget of under £450,000. At the time, Duran Duran were spending twice that on a three-minute pop video. All of you involved made it look ravishing.

There’s the great story about Christopher Hobbs, the art director, painting a floor black and flooding the space to make it look like Vatican marble. Obviously, the lighting played a great part in how everything worked so well, but how did you manage to pull together a wardrobe that looked as lush as Caravaggio’s actual paintings?

Sandy: We recreated a couple of the paintings as tableaux, and I dyed the fabrics to match the colours in the paintings, but other than that I think it was all down to the wonderful chiaroscuro lighting by the cinematographer, Gabriel Beristáin. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing but was obviously inspired by and responded to Derek’s vision. His reference for most of the film was Italian neorealist cinema – I remember him screening the 1948 Bicycle Thieves for us.

Mark: There’s a generation now obsessed with Derek Jarman who weren’t born when he was alive. Take me back to the beginning of your story with Derek.

Sandy: I had been working with Lindsay Kemp, who I knew about from my obsession with David Bowie and their early work together. I saw him perform Flowers at the Roundhouse in the mid-1970s, and I knew I wanted to be part of that world. While I was at art school, he was teaching classes at the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden, and I signed up. Then I asked him if could show him some of my work, we became friends, and I dropped out of Central St Martin’s. I worked on the costumes for Lindsay’s shows on tour, dyeing things in hotel bathrooms and weathering them with a blow torch.

Then I went to work in London with a small theatre company. I created the costumes for a punk-meets-eighteenth-century show at the ICA called Rococo, in 1983, and I invited Derek to come and see it. I had seen Jubilee (1978) and The Tempest (1979) and was aware that Lindsay and members of his company had been featured in both of them, as well as in Sebastiane (1976). I loved both the visual splendour and sense of anarchy in his films, and they were more theatrical than the mainstream, so for me it felt like a natural progression. Derek also seemed like he’d be an interesting person to work with. So I got his phone number via a mutual friend who had met him at Heaven, called him up, and invited him to the ICA. He came, then asked me to tea at his flat at Phoenix House, which is what he did with anyone he liked or was interested in. I said I wanted to do costumes for film, and he suggested I start by doing music videos.

The first thing I did with him was ‘Touch the Radio’ for the band Language (1983), using all the costumes I made for Rococo. Then I worked with him on stuff for Wang Chung, Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths. We did Bryan Ferry’s ‘Windswept’ in 1985, with a cast of dancers dressed as whirling dervishes, and I remember being so nervous because Ferry was so devastatingly good looking. Then Derek started talking about making Caravaggio, and it just happened. Suddenly we were making a film.

Mark: Derek was obviously bringing his unique, queer perspective to the Caravaggio story. What were you bringing?

Sandy: It was instinctive. I was just working in the same way I had worked in theatre when the Arts Council funded everything, which meant we had the resources to be experimental. Everything was unconventional but timeless. I had never worked on a conventional play, and there wasn’t a strict way of researching period details – I was just creating costumes for whatever felt right for each person in each scene. Derek had a wonderful ability to communicate his ideas and vision yet allow his collaborators the freedom to experiment, make mistakes and make their own mark on the work.

Mark: What have you kept from the Jarman years?

Sandy: I have a Caravaggio costume that Nigel Terry wore, which was part of PROTEST!, the Derek Jarman retrospective in Dublin in 2019. I used to have the dress that Tilda wore in that, but I lost it. I may have worn it to Kinky Gerlinky or something. That’s often what happened. Things would be worn to parties and vanish. I have all of Tilda’s costumes from Edward II (1991) and from Wittgenstein (1993). I’m glad I have those. It’s a part of history.

Mark: What is the research process like when you’re working with a substantial budget on what you once called at the Academy Awards ‘films about dead monarchs’? How do you go about sourcing textiles, and how has your process changed since you did Orlando in 1992 with Sally Potter?

Sandy: The research process has always been the same apart from the fact that we didn’t have the internet in 1992. I still always begin with books. I have an extensive collection of books on costume, art and photography. I find you can get inspiration for anything regardless of the subject or period of the subject you are researching. I will begin by looking at the actual period either in paintings, or photographs if it is post mid-nineteenth century, then look further afield to contemporary fashion and modern art. Sometimes it’s the combination of colours in a painting or in nature that will inspire a costume I don’t have a silhouette for yet.

Finding the fabrics often starts way before I know what the costume is, and more often that will dictate the design. I love looking for fabrics myself, but often on bigger projects I employ buyers who have thousands of contacts and resources, and they bring me swatches to choose from. I do still always find the time to go to a fabric shop myself. It’s one of my favourite things to do. That’s when and where the ideas happen.

Mark: Often when you’re working on a character, they are on a journey. How do you tell that part of the story through costume?

Sandy: Well, if you look at Carol (2015), Rooney Mara’s character Therese Belivet has a trajectory. She starts out as young and slightly naïve, verging on Beatnik, but still conservative. Then she meets Carol, who is dead chic and confident, and becomes a little bit bolder, until she starts wearing tailored suits, like Cate Blanchett’s character. But there are no rules to the way you develop a character, each one is different. It’s much more interesting to work on a character that develops.

Sometimes that’s just about how they wear something, and how it fits. When you talk about having a ‘fitting’ with an actor, people assume that means getting everything to fit perfectly. But that’s not what it is – it’s about getting to grips with the character and what works for them. Maybe it’s messy. Maybe they don’t tuck their shirt in. Maybe their trousers are too short, too long, or too tight. Sometimes it’s a certain style of jeans. When I was dressing Julianne Moore’s character for The Glorias in 2020, I needed a certain bootcut of Levi’s that were popular in the 1990s, but I couldn’t find precisely what I wanted. Sometimes I ask myself why I’m agonizing over something that might be a miniscule detail, when an audience might not spot that an alternative was used. But while I’m working to please an audience, I’m working to please myself more. If I wasn’t doing that, I couldn’t do my job.

Mark: The costuming in The Irishman is nuanced but inherently restrained. But in something like Orlando, it is one of the most significant visual elements on screen. Likewise with The Favourite, where it’s a period piece, but deliberately monochrome, which brings a whole mood. Then there’s Far from Heaven (2002) where every aspect of the colour is so studied and lush.

Narrative Thread

Sandy: We had extensive meetings on that film about the production design and cinematography, studying the Douglas Sirk films that were the inspiration. Todd Haynes had a Pantone strip of colour attached to each scene in the script. It wasn’t necessarily a specific reference to something, like the wallpaper or a dress – it was just what was in his head and what he was feeling. So that was all we needed, to see those colours. I worked closely with the art department, and that goes for every film.

Mark: I’m interested in the relationship between fashion and film. The first time we ever spoke was after Interview with the Vampire, when we talked about Brad Pitt’s fur-trimmed coat, how beautiful it was, and how lots of your male friends had said the same thing as me and wanted to own it. I have a theory that cinema sits above fashion in the hierarchy of influence. Designers constantly take from film – McQueen did a whole Givenchy collection in 1998 based on Sean Young’s character in Blade Runner, and his menswear collection in 2009, The McQueensbury Rules, was based on one of your films, Gangs of New York (2002).

Sandy: Really? I had no idea about that! But I don’t agree with the theory. I think film takes from fashion and fashion from film. It’s not a hierarchy. I always look at fashion, for whatever period I’m doing. I use fashion photography as a reference. I need to be able to work out every aspect of something.

Meanwhile, my personal relationship with fashion has changed. I have young people who work with me who come in wearing a totally different outfit every day, while I like a uniform. I can’t think about what I’m going to wear every day. I had a denim suit made by someone in New York, based on some of my favourite Comme des Garçons pieces, and I wear that all the time when I’m working. Derek was similar – he would always wear a boiler suit or a workwear jacket when he was filming. I don’t like the idea of trends. I like Gaultier because he did the same things time and time again through his career, and never became old or boring. My go-to is always Comme des Garcons. I still wear the pieces I first bought in 1985, and they haven’t dated because they’re above fashion. I don’t like fashion for the sake of fashion. But ultimately the history of it is my passion and I am in the privileged position of getting paid to indulge in it. C

Dressing the Part: Costume Design for Film runs until 16th March, 2025 at SCAD

Narrative Thread: Conversations on Fashion Collections is published by Bloomsbury