Photograph courtesy of SCAD
Lengthy earlier than Sandy Powell’s costumes would grace the silver display, she was stitching her first daring creation at 5 years outdated. It was a pint-sized bikini, and the beginning of a exceptional profession. 4 many years later, she’s nonetheless reworking materials into unforgettable characters, every with its personal story to inform.
Now, three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, recognized for her work on movies like The Favorite, Shakespeare in Love, and Carol, showcases her visionary expertise off the display with a brand new exhibit at SCAD FASH Museum of Vogue + Movie. “Sandy Powell’s Dressing the Half: Costume Design for Movie” shows her iconic creations and presents an immersive look into her character-driven artistic course of.
Photograph courtesy of SCAD
Spotlighting Powell’s 40-year movie profession, the exhibition options greater than 125 costumes and props from almost 30 movies. Though Powell is well-known within the worldwide movie group as an iconic costumier—and the primary and solely craftsperson to win the coveted British Academy of Movie and Tv Awards (BAFTA) fellowship in 2023—that is her first museum retrospective. However she’s lengthy thought of having an exhibition, if solely to have someplace to show her ever-growing treasure trove. “I’ve fairly a big assortment of my very own costumes, which I’ve been sneakily amassing through the years,” Powell advised The Hollywood Reporter.
After many years of utilizing the corners of her home as archival storage, her costumes have lastly discovered a spot past the silver display at SCAD FASH. “There’s part of me that doesn’t need them to come back residence,” she says. “I’d like them to remain out, being checked out.”
Rafael Gomes, curator and artistic director for SCAD FASH, approached Powell two years in the past to gauge her curiosity in doing an exhibition. “That includes the work of Sandy Powell has been a aim of ours because the museum opened almost a decade in the past,” Gomes says. “SCAD FASH at all times desires to spotlight the perfect in costuming and style, and Sandy Powell is such a extremely awarded and revered designer, artist, and storyteller in her subject.”
Photograph courtesy of SCAD
In 2021, the SCAD Savannah Movie Pageant honored Powell for her excellent achievements in movie costume design. From there, Gomes says, the artwork school and designer shaped an in depth relationship that finally led to the brand new exhibit.
The present is designed cinematically, following a timeline of Powell’s life and highlighting the movies that impressed her most iconic work. Every costume is displayed inside an elevated black field that “mimics larger-than-life movie cells,” says Gomes. Lit from beneath, with the lights targeted on the clothes, they replicate the sensation of watching a film in a theater.
Every costume show at SCAD FASH invitations guests into the scenes of Powell’s most influential tasks. As company stroll in, they’re instantly taken to the set of Caravaggio, Powell’s first function movie, which was launched in 1986 and marked the start of her fruitful collaboration with director Derek Jarman.
Since then, she’s labored with a number of the greatest names in movie, together with Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes, and Yorgos Lanthimos, and costumed movies starting from The Wolf of Wall Road to Velvet Goldmine. Powell says she notably enjoys working with administrators who’re fascinated with visible particulars: She advised Tough Draft Atlanta that Martin Scorcese as soon as instructed her to look at a complete French movie simply so she might see the stripe on an actor’s collar.
Working with Scorsese on movies like The Aviator and Gangs of New York helped solidify Powell’s curiosity in costume styling utilizing coloration idea. Whereas curating her exhibition, Gomes seen how a lot consideration Powell gave to the colours of every piece of clothes.
“I seen a recurring use of a selected shade of blue-green all through Powell’s movies. That’s a element that one notices as they transfer by way of the present,” Gomes explains. “An important instance is the practice inspector costume worn by Sacha Baron Cohen in Hugo, which Powell designed on this particular shade in order that the viewers would visually gravitate to this character in crowded scenes.”
Photograph courtesy of SCAD
Powell’s use of visible storytelling is clear in her work in Todd Haynes’ 2015 movie Carol, the place she blends her designs into the material of the characters’ narratives. In a documentary that accompanies the SCAD FASH exhibit, Powell dives right into a tan fur coat she created for Cate Blanchett, who performs the titular character as she grapples together with her sexuality and failing marriage. “The one we really used was pieced collectively by outdated bits of classic coats, just because I used to be decided to get the best coloration for her—as a result of it’s Cate,” says Powell within the documentary. “It was very fragile. It cut up each single day of the shoot, so daily the costumer was beneath, stitching or taping up the splits.” This “unhappy coat,” she explains, exemplified Carol’s unraveling life. Simply as she comes barely undone in every scene, so does the fur she wears on her again.
To Gomes, such particulars are what make Sandy Powell a real visionary within the movie business and produce her creativity to life in a approach that extends past clothes. The influence of her costumes is monumental, he says: “Her work in and of itself can be utilized as a supply of style historical past.”
‘Sandy Powell’s Dressing the Half: Costume Design for Movie’ is on view now at SCAD FASH by way of March 16, 2025.
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