Frock Flicks is a wonderful blog from Trystan L. Bass, Sarah Lorraine, and Kendra Van Cleave, whose commentary on the historical accuracy and creative contribution of the costumes in historical movies and television is thoughtful, perceptive, and illuminating. They also have a great podcast. It was an honor to have the chance to interview them about their favorite designers and the most outrageously anachronistic movie hairstyles.

How did the site get started?

Trystan: We started with the podcast, and that rose from our general irritation over movies that claim to be historical but have historically inaccurate costumes. That said, our first podcast was for Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), which had pretty accurate costumes & just an anachronistic soundtrack (that I’m a HUGE fan of). We continued podcasting off and on from 2007 until finally in late 2014, we realized, hey, we’re all writers, let’s add a blog!

Sarah: I think we had always had something like the blog brewing in the background, even before we started the podcast. We all were on LiveJournal from the early-2000s and though we knew each other from some cross-over with local costuming events and various other activities, we didn’t really unify until LiveJournal brought us together. It was a few years of “blogging” amongst ourselves and a few other friends, complaining about historical costumes in film, when Trystan had this idea to start a podcast in late-2007. That started the ball rolling, but it went in fits and spurts until we started the website seven years later.

Did you study costume design?

Trystan: Nope. I learned to sew as a kid from my mom & grandmom, & I learned about historical costumes from watching shows like “Elizabeth R” on PBS in the 1970s.

Sarah: My undergrad degree is in clothing & textile design, which is similar but not the typical theatrical costuming degree in a lot of respects. I learned most of what I know about sewing by learning from my mom who is a tremendously talented seamstress, and then a few classes in pattern drafting when I was a teenager. I taught fashion design for a few years before running away to join a grad school program in Art History.

Kendra: Only two courses in college. Similarly to Trystan and Sarah, my mother taught me how to sew when I was young. I didn’t do much with it until I got involved in historical reenactment and dance, and then I suddenly had a huge incentive to get better! On the other hand, I did study historical clothing from an academic perspective in college and graduate school, and I continue to publish/present academic research on it today.

Do you have a favorite period for costumes?

Trystan: The 16th-century will always feel like home for me, but I’m fond of any era with big skirts and/or silly hats.

Sarah: Like Trystan, I’m deeply rooted in the sixteenth century, mostly because I grew up going to renaissance faires and, from my mid-teens onward, in the Society for Creative Anachronism. More recently, I’ve become interested in 18th-century costumes—my master’s thesis is focused on this era of clothing. And lately I’ve been VERY excited about 12th-14th-century French and English clothing. So, I’m all over the map! I can find something to get excited about in just about any era of Western clothing, no matter how weird.

Kendra: I started off doing Renaissance at Renaissance faires, but in terms of getting really into historical costume, it was Victorian for me. I focused on that for a number of years, then stumbled into 18th-century and went off the deep end. I’ve now studied and reproduced 18th-century clothing, almost exclusively, for years now! In some ways I’m like Sarah – I can find something to like about pretty much any era. But I do come back to the 18th-century, because my rule is if it doesn’t have ridiculous hair, I don’t want to know about it.

What were some of the first films to try for historical accuracy in period storytelling?

Trystan: Many films have tried in their own way. Walter Plunkett studied extant Civil War gowns to create costumes for Gone With the Wind, but the results still have 1930s seamlines. 1963’s The Leopard with costumes by Piero Tosi is credited as having the first truly historically accurate costumes, but the makeup looks awfully 1960s. The late ‘60s – early ‘70s ‘New Hollywood’ filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski went for a more realistic, gritty look in their films, & this may have turned audiences away from the hyper-artificial ‘Old Hollywood’ style of films. That paved the way for realism in historical dramas as well.

Sarah: I think Gone With The Wind is usually credited as the first film that really attempted historical accuracy, but the further we get from it, the more it’s very obvious that it’s a product of the late-1930s. Earlier films usually suffer from the same issues that modern historical films do—namely, they have a hard time completely letting go of current trends in make-up, hairstyles, and silhouettes. It wasn’t until the 1960s that filmmakers made a real effort to rise to the challenge of being historically accurate, damn the conventional beauty standards at the time. Historical fashion can be weird, and many people involved in the making of historical films, from the directors all the way down to the actors and costume designers really struggle with letting the period simply speak for itself. “Elizabeth R” (1971) was really pretty revolutionary in this aspect because everything, from the story to the sets to the costumes were portrayed with as little tinkering as possible. There were very little attempts to modernize the costumes to be flattering to the actor, or to pander to the audiences’ preconceived notions about what’s “attractive.”

Kendra: Absolutely agree. I’ll just add a few of my favorite films from the 1970s that strove for accuracy, like The Story of Adele H. (1975) and My Brilliant Career (1979). This trend towards accuracy got a huge boost with the films of Merchant/Ivory, starting with The Europeans (1979) and peaking with A Room With a View (1986).

What are some of the most outrageously anachronistic hairstyles in period films?

Trystan: Brad Pitt’s very 1990s hair & beard in Legends of the Fall pisses me off more than anything else. It’s dumb because the actual 1910s costumes are quite good.

Sarah: Hair and makeup seem to be the hardest things for period films to overcome. Raquel Welch’s hair and makeup (not to mention costumes) in the otherwise AMAZING The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (1974) stand out like a sore thumb. Clearly the filmmakers were pandering to her ego by allowing her to have her own costumer and hair stylist, and it really shows.

Kendra: The majority of films tweak the hairstyles to echo contemporary styles, but my favorite is any film made in the 1960s, because you’ve got modern hair that’s bouffant and hilarious. Cleopatra (1963), Becket (1964), Doctor Zhivago (1965) are all great. And then you’ve got the 1990s-2010s trend for hair-worn-down, which probably irritates me far more…

Who were some of the most successful pairings of designer and actress? Helen Rose and Elizabeth Taylor? Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn? Edith Head and Grace Kelly?

Trystan: How about Adrian and Joan Crawford – he created what became her signature big shoulder-pad look. But I love a lot of the classic-era designers, especially Orry-Kelly who did the original Auntie Mame and Some Like It Hot.

Sarah: I’d go with Maurizio Millenotti and Franco Zeffirelli. Millenotti designed pretty much every one of Zeffirelli’s most famous historical period pieces from Romeo and Juliet (1969) to Hamlet (1990) and tons of Zeffirelli’s stage productions for the last 40+ years.

Many movies have memorable scenes where the lead actress takes an awful dress, makes a few artful snips, and turns it into something sensational, including “Houseboat,” “Bells are Ringing,” “My Favorite Wife,” and “True Lies.” Do you have a favorite? Or a favorite “I’ll just whip this dress up and look ravishing at the party” dress? “Pretty in Pink?” “Cinderella” with some help from the mice?

Trystan: I’ll show my age & admit I love the scene in Pretty in Pink where Andie rips apart two prom dresses to make one new (& weirdly not-great) prom dress. I love the concept & the soundtrack, if not the execution.

Sarah: Ack! What Andie does to that poor dress in Pretty in Pink kills me! I’m a purist, and the end result is such a horrible design. She could have gone to the prom and been retro-fabulous! But I guess it’s all about individuality and “vision,” right? And I could believe a high schooler made that dress in the end… Anyway, I’m going to go with Scarlett’s curtain dress in GWTW. Yeah, it wasn’t a dress to begin with, but the end result is certainly iconic.

Why can we always tell immediately that a movie is actually from, say, the 40’s or 50’s, rather than one that is made now and set in the past?

Trystan: Up until the 1960s or so, Hollywood studios mandated that their big stars kept the then-contemporary makeup (& sometimes hairstyle) even if doing a historical film. The studio wanted the actor/actress to be recognizable to the public so people would still go to the movie. Stars sold films, & it was very much a factory system. In general, historical accuracy was not a high priority (not that it always is today).

Sarah: Yep, what Trystan said. It’s hair and makeup. Thirdly, and for similar reasons, it’s also silhouette. I mean, look at a film like Raintree County (1957) or Cleopatra (1963) and you know you’re rooted in the late-1950s and early-1960s with the bullet bra bustlines on all of Elizabeth Taylor’s gowns.

In a movie like “Carol,” how is the period detail used to help tell the story?

Sarah: I can’t speak to “Carol” specifically, because I haven’t seen it yet, but I do know that Sandy Powell is one of the designers known for her obsessive level of historical detail. And I think it’s one of the driving factors in any good historical film—that eye for detail on the part of the costume and set designers helps to create a believable, three-dimensional world that feels “authentic”. It’s contrasted with recent shows like “War and Peace” where everything feels very superficial because the costumes read like costumes, not clothing. Sometimes that’s intentional—I’m thinking specifically of Anna Karenina (2012), which, love it or hate it, was attempting to create the feeling of watching a surrealistic puppet show. Other times, it’s unintentional because the costume designer just doesn’t have the ability to create a sense of depth to the costumes. I don’t think “the eye” is something that’s really taught in design—you have to develop it yourself and not many people care to.

Kendra: I’d also add that when it’s done right, period details can help to inform the viewer about the world of the movie/show. Queen Elizabeth I, or people of the 1950s, etc. all experienced a life that was in part informed by their clothing – and their clothing often mirrored what was going on in society. So in a film like Carol, you have the older, richer woman (Cate Blanchett) wearing super upscale clothes, and then the younger (Rooney Mara) in a more Beatnik-influenced wardrobe. You can immediately get a sense of the different generations, and thus different perspectives the two characters are coming from. And, the viewer can clearly see that these women are living in a more restrictive era that puts a higher price on gender conformity – all those girdles and skirts and lipstick tell you that visually.

In “Carol,” Sandy Powell was attached to the film before the director and most of the cast. What does that say about the influence of a costume designer on storytelling?

Sarah: I think Sandy Powell is a special case. She’s one of the top two or three costume designers active in Hollywood right now, and she’s got several Academy Awards to back her up. In all likelihood, the producers had a real firm vision of what the movie should look like, what aesthetic they wanted to depict, and knew that Powell was their top choice because she can pull off that level of depth and richness for the screen. I know she’s worked a number of times with Cate Blanchett, who was one of the producers, so it may well have been Blanchett’s insistence that Powell design the costumes.

Kendra: Yes, there are a couple of other superstar costume designers right now – Colleen Atwood is also at the top of the list. I don’t know if they are representative of most other designers, however.

If you could have just one dress or hat or item of jewelry from a movie to wear, what would it be and where would you wear it?

Trystan: Just one? That’s mean!

Sarah: Oh, man… That’s hard to pick just one! It would probably be something from “Elizabeth R”, like the Phoenix Portrait gown, so I could wear it at Ren Faires and SCA events and make everyone mad with jealousy.

Kendra: Cruelty! Costumer abuse! But if I have to pick, I’ll go with Helena Bonham Carter’s striped suit and ha-uuuuuuge hat from The Wings of the Dove (1997). And I’ll wear it everywhere.

How is costume design changing to reflect technological innovations like HD and 3D? What are examples of fabrics or details that are authentic but do not come across well on film/digital?

Trystan: I think it must be more challenging for TV costume designers today because every detail WILL be seen, thanks to high-def TVs. This is most noticeable when you watch older, pre-HD shows on TV now – they can look like crap! You see details in makeup, hair, fabric quality, & costume fit that didn’t show up before or at least weren’t so obvious. The worst example is the 1970s BBC Six Wives of Henry VIII – in the final episodes, the aging makeup on Keith Michell looks super thick, chalky, fake, and pancake-y. In still photos, he looks believable, but on my HD TV, yuck!

Sarah: I think anything shiny will look super-fake on hi-def TV screens. Even if you’re using an authentic reproduction of cloth-of-gold, it will come across looking like fake lamé, which makes it even harder to make a case for authenticity on film.

Why do 30’s movies have SO MUCH FUR?

Trystan: Because that’s what was fashionable in the 1930s!

Sarah: What she said! PETA didn’t exist in the 1930s and there wasn’t the same level of awareness we have now about animal cruelty and whatnot. The flip side is that nowadays historical films don’t show enough fur—yet leather pants are in virtually every historical film since the 1980s. Probably because many of the historical films focus on eras where men’s clothing is considered less masculine by today’s standards, so leather pants are seen as more accessible to modern audiences than, say, wool leggings or knee breeches.

Who’s your all-time favorite costume designer?

Trystan: Hard to pick, but I have a soft spot for Colleen Atwood because of her collaborations with Tim Burton. She really gets his sense of dark whimsy and can bring it to life in stunning clothing art. This really shows in her designs for Sweeney Todd.

Sarah: Right now I’m very into the work of Maurizio Millenotti, but a close second is James Acheson who designed Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and The Last Emperor (1986), among others. We just recorded a podcast about his work in Dangerous Liaisons and in the research I did beforehand, I learned that it was filmed on a $14 million budget, which was TINY even by 1980s standards. To put it into perspective, the competitor film Valmont (1989), which was based on the same story, had over twice the budget and twice the amount of time to film (10 weeks for the former vs. 26 weeks for the latter). And Acheson’s costumes are far and away better than the costumes in Valmont. It’s because Acheson has “the eye” for detail that I was talking about earlier. And if I ever hear anyone try to claim that historical accuracy in a film wasn’t possible due to budget constraints, I’m going to point to Dangerous Liaisons. It was proof that a shoestring budget is does not preclude historical accuracy!

Kendra: Jenny Beavan and John Bright. The gorgeousness and accuracy of their costumes on numerous Merchant/Ivory productions just cannot be touched.