Wednesday, 30 December 2015
The costume design for the short-film Versus
The Assistant Designer of the brand, Victor Alvarez, tells his experience as the Costume Design Director for Versus, the new short-film made by the Eguren Brothers and featured by Jon Kortajarena.
Fashion in the film
Under my perspective as a Fashion Designer, Costume Design represents nowadays one of the most important fields in which you can be as much creative as you can with a budget you have to work with. It is not developing a collection for a certain kind of customers with a particular lifestyle that is identified with the brand itself. It is not about researching trends and applying patterns into fabrics. Costume Design is about creating a character, making it visual, making it real, and translating all the emotions and personalities into fabrics, patterns and details.
The movie screenplay is crucial at the beginning. It is in the skeleton of the story, how you start giving form to the ideas. But the most important thing is to understand the director’s mind because inside is where the puzzle is. In this case I had to understand Versus’ screenplay and Juanito’s character perfectly, to design a suit that would reflect his personality. As a start point, we have to have in mind that Juanito is a character created by John. The way they interact with each other psychologically made me think about dark colors, sharp patterns, psychedelic attachments and conceptual meaning over the skin of the character. The challenge started when all of this had to be coherent with the Latino side of Juanito, something that has never done before and I was excited to design.
Ideas come first
- I wanted to create a comfortable suit but fitted and light as the Italian feeling, with silk satin peak lapels and silk covered buttons mixed with canete and light virgin wool. Precise cut in the shoulder lines and good construction as the British sartorial jackets have in the chest.
- Tailored cut for white shirts that instead of being tuxedo shirts are just a game of patterns and fabrics that give the effect of a clean and wide collar shirt.
- Lining printed with a tattoo of Guadalupe’s Virgin because of the Latino background.
- Silver studs on the back, giving light in the darkest places.
- Monk shoes with modern soles and a lot of details everywhere.
The idea is to make a suit that apparently is ordinary but if you look deep into details you realize that not everything is as it seems. Production is the next step, and time management is crucial. In our case, thanks to the network that FER has, everything was under control:
- Fabrics such as extra light pure stretch virgin wool, silk canete and silk satin come from the best manufacturers from Italy, as well as the shirting.
- Studs were applied in Italy too.
- Same producers for Dior and Hermes made the shirts.
- The suits were made by the same producers for Ozwald Boateng, Michael Savage, Hackett, Margaret Howell and Victoria Beckham, among others.
- The same artisans for Loewe worked leather goods, and a master shoemaker in London has made the details for shoes.
- Graphic prints for the lining of the jackets have been printed in silk satin in the print studios of a renowned fashion school in London.