CONVERSATIONS ON DESIGN IN THE MODERN ERACONVERSATIONS ON DESIGN IN THE MODERN ERA
The groovy fashion trends of Britain’s Mod Movement ushered in the 1960s. The Vietnam War, race riots, and the new drug culture eclipsed them by decade’s end. The hippie culture that replaced the Mods’ was almost anti-fashion.
Out of the ashes of the old studio system came a new breed of director—the auteur—including Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski. Costume designers, no longer under long-term contracts to studios, began aligning themselves with directors to ensure future work. Savvy designers developed a keen appreciation of their directors’ sensibilities, making them invaluable from project to project. The creative shorthand that arose between director and designer saved time and money as well.
The 1970s saw Hollywood bring gritty realism to the screen like never before in films like The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976). That decade also included a wave of nostalgia that harkened back to an earlier day in films like The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), and The Great Gatsby (1974).
In the 1980s, independent filmmakers such as David Lynch, Ismail Merchant, and James Ivory took moviegoers to worlds as varied as the planet Arrakis and Edwardian England. Hollywood surrendered, or at least shared, its influence on fashion with pop culture like never before as a young Madonna gyrated in her music videos sporting lingerie on the outside of her clothing.
The 1990s and 2000s saw the rise of digital filmmaking and the Hollywood blockbuster. Budgets soared, and designers moved into the role of managing large departments. In the era of the Internet, costumes could be created a continent away from a director, with camera phones making the approval process instantaneous. Costume sketches, once hand-drawn, could be rendered on computers, allowing for a more realistic interpretation of how an actor would appear on screen.
In this chapter, Hollywood insiders share their views on the state of movie design from the 1970s to the present.