LOS ANGELES: Helen Mirren's Elizabethan dress from “The Tempest” is covered with gold and silver zippers, all the way up to its ruffled collar. The hat that made Johnny Depp the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” was crafted from imported Italian leather woven with gold threads, and it was sized to fit the fluffy orange wig he wore beneath it. The costumes from “True Grit” were made new, then aged to look more than 100 years old, while much of the clothing from “The King's Speech” were original pieces from the 1930s. Film fans and fashionistas can get an up-close look at these Oscar-nominated outfits and nearly 100 other movie costumes at L.A.'s Fashion Institute of Design and amp; Merchandising's 19th annual Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibition, on view now. The FIDM Museum and amp; Galleries collects and displays movie costumes to allow future fashion designers and the public to see the creativity and craftsmanship behind the clothing that makes memorable characters on screen, says curator and fashion historian Kevin Jones. “Costumes perform. They're often the first thing that speak to the audience, before the actor even speaks,” he says. “They set the time, the place, the economic status. It's the great power of costumes for film.” Oscar-nominated costume designer Mary Zophres spent months researching the look and style of 1860s Arkansas, where the adventure tale “True Grit” takes place. Once she became fluent in the era's fashions, she ordered multiple outfits made for each character, then had the new clothing aged to appear almost 140 years old. So Jeff Bridges' giant overcoat from the film only looks shabby. Historical costumes are more expensive to produce, Zophres says: “The earlier you go, the more money it costs.” Production on “The King's Speech” started less than six weeks after Jenny Beavan was hired to design its costumes, so to outfit the royal 1930s drama, she rented as many original pieces as she could from a costume house in London. What she couldn't find, she made, including the suits worn by King George VI (Colin Firth) and several dresses worn by the Queen Mother (Helena Bonham Carter). For a picture set in the recent past, it's common for costumers to use a mix of rented originals and custom-made new pieces, Beavan says. “The concept is that I do a drawing and then it gets made and I walk around being sociable with the actors,” she says. “It's not about a two-dimensional drawing. It's about a three-dimensional person, their body language, their involvement, their personality.” The clothes have to consistently fit the character, plus fit in with the landscape and lighting in the scene, Jones says. Costumes help establish who a character is over the duration of the film and how they fit into the overall story. It can be particularly challenging when some characters exist only electronically, says Colleen Atwood, who has designed costumes for many Tim Burton films and is nominated this year for her work in his “Alice in Wonderland.”
