Dressing the Part

When I finished the dress, I just thought, Oh no, it’s all wrong,” says Atonement costume designer Jacqueline Durran. “Why didn’t I change the shoulder, or the draping? But you just get to a point where you can’t bear it anymore, and you let it go. I’m completely amazed by the way it turned out.” Durran is speaking, of course, of that dress, the exquisitely draped, bias-cut, vibrant green, turn-Keira Knightley-into-a-screen-goddess dress that Durran created for the scenes in which Knightley sees, falls madly for and has steamy library sex with her housekeeper’s son. (It’s also the dress that helped garner Durran her second Oscar nomination.)

The opening segment of the film consists, Durran notes, of perfectly remembered moments as a woman looks back on her life; the green dress, therefore, was to be contemporary in its style, and not necessarily historically spot-on. “I like things that are puzzles, and I tend to think of costume design as a puzzle,” says Durran. “You’re taking fabrics and a time period and a color scheme, and putting them together in a way that, presto, makes sense visually.”

For Durran and two other red-hot costume designers, Mary Zophres and Karen Patch, the work of outfitting casts for movies is less about creating a general aesthetic tableau and more about finding and designing thoughtful, specific looks. Call it the character-driven approach to costuming: Think Jeff Bridges, as the Dude in The Big Lebowski, shuffling through a grocery store in shorts and a bathrobe—an ode to slackers that Zophres came up with in a fitting. Or, as in The Royal Tenenbaums, a heavily kohl-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow swathed in a fur coat, which Patch chose after watching The World of Henry Orient, a Peter Sellers film in which a young girl scampers around New York in, yes, a fur coat. “I approach my movies from the point of view of the characters, to help tell their story,” says Durran.

“The clothing should never distract from the actor or the plot,” says Zophres. “I love clothes, but I love movies and telling stories more.”

For Zophres, who costumed the cast of this summer’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the key to creating appropriately clad characters is all about collaboration. She has worked frequently with Steven Spielberg (those pillbox hats and nipped suits in Catch Me If You Can are hers) and Joel and Ethan Coen (remember Catherine Zeta-Jones’s curve-skimming red dress in Intolerable Cruelty?). She’s also designing the costumes for the largely male cast of The Trial of the Chicago 7, Spielberg’s feature about the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, due this fall. “I think I’ve been a successful designer because I work closely with directors,” she says. “With directors, you always have to give them a choice—something to say no to—and lead them in the direction that you think is the right way to go. But you’re serving their story, so they are the ones making a decision.”