Voxfrock’s pick of The best film of 2015 opens in cinemas today. Yes! Voxfrock awarded five-out-of-five sparklers to The Dressmaker, an evocative excursion into the meaning and power of fashion, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, produced by Sue Maslin and based on the popular book of the same name by Rosalie Ham. Here, Janice Breen Burns meets two of its key creatives, celebrated veteren costumers Marion Boyce and Margot Wilson.
Kate Winslet’s Tilly Dunnage cuts a magnificent figure in The Dressmaker’s opening scene in a Dior-esque travelling frockcoat with deeply kinked waistline and skirts swelled over voluptuous hips. Later, she arrives like an Balenciaga-esque bombshell in eye-popping, figure-hugging red moray silk, cartoonishly glamourous amid the dusty rabble, drab folk and outback shacks of her old hometown.
Fashion has changed Tilly, from backward “Dunny” girl of Dungatar, to confident woman of the world, with a career as dressmaker for legendary couturiers Christian Dior, Cristobel Balenciaga and Madame Vionnet under her belt. The new Tilly moves back with her mad mother, Molly (the marvellously funny Judy Davis), and frock by frock, transforms – and exacts a peculiarly effective revenge – on the town that shunned her as a girl.
“They go from looking pale and a bit tea-stained,” says Ms Winslet of the town folk, “To looking like they’re all walking down a red carpet. It’s really quite striking.” So striking that, not since Sofia Coppola’s orgasmic study of ribboned pumps, farthingales and towering powdered wigs in the sumptuous Marie Antoinette (2006), has the transformative power of fashion been so deliciously plumbed on film.
“This is a film about so many extraordinary transformations,” says costume designer Marion Boyce, recently renowned for Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. “It’s about how fashion can be incredibly powerful. How Tilly plumbs (the town women’s) inner goddess and how, in a well cut, beautiful frock, your stance is different, you move differently, there is a lightness to you….”
Ms. Boyce held creative sway over 350 costumes in total, all but those reserved for Miss Winslet’s character. She transformed “Gert”, for example, a dusty young dullard played by Sarah Snook in spectacles and sacklike dresses, into a glamour queen worthy of Dungatar’s most eligible bachelor. (Miss Snook’s character transformation, photographed, second from left above, and main picture, top.)
Later, as the newly sophisticated “Trudy”, Gert also performs in one of the film’s most evocative scenes, an exotic avian tableau. “I wanted (the women of Dungatar) set like birds against these beautiful, petrified trees,” Ms. Boyce recalls of her vision for the scene. “I wanted them preening themselves, preening their plumage like birds.”
There is probably PhD thesis worth of meanings in The Dressmaker and its excursions into fashion as plumage, as disguise, as leverage into more liberating, thrilling lives. But, most importantly, it is a visual feast of gorgeous frocks and skilful tailoring, anchored for flattery and released for graceful movement around breasts, waists, hips and behinds. The craft and meanings of a long gone era.
“The 1950s was a time when skilled people would build a frock from (two-dimensional) fabric, into three beautiful dimensions with darts and panel lines,” says Ms. Wilson. “These days, perhaps that still happens in haute couture, but now there’s stretch in almost everything so you don’t need to build frocks, and so much fashion has to be mass produced, there just isn’t the time or the skills…”
The Dressmaker is whimsical and hyper-real, a fashion fantasy in which Dungatar’s townsfolk blossom like flowers, glide like swans, fizz with the happiness and sheer beauty of their new selves in new frocks. Know that feeling? It’s the power of fashion.
Jbb@voxfrock.com.au
