Yoko Ono's provocative new menswear collection.

"I always wanted to put this line of clothing out in the world. But the humor of it was not understood, maybe, until now." -- Yoko Ono.

I've reviewed my fair share of supposedly-ridiculous menswear since starting this blog, and it always inspires a very different reaction to the more outlandish fashions for women. It's not exactly news that women get a lot more leeway than men when it comes to personal style, but I feel like Yoko Ono's designs are not even all that bizarre when compared to something like the puffball outfits and rubber fetish masks of Walter Van Bierendonck.

The clothes in Ono's line for Opening Ceremony (originally drawn in 1969, and inspired by John Lennon's "sexy bod") are relatively simple, mostly consisting of conservatively-cut trousers plus a range of t-shirts, jackets and hoodies. They're even in a restrained palette of black and white with a few pink accents -- and in 2012, pink is no longer a big deal for mainstream menswear. The "weirdness" is honestly very low-key, but is still getting huge amounts of publicity because a) Yoko Ono, and b) isn't it super hilarious when men's fashion makes overt references to sex?

OK. So. These clothes are not really what most people think of as "sexy". And since the main logo for the collection is a cartoon of a butt, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that Yoko Ono isn't 100% serious either. Plus, of all the things that Yoko Ono has done in her long career as an artist, activist and unreasonably-reviled widow of a famous dude, designing a collection of outfits with hands on the crotches and LED nipple accessories is not particularly shocking. And yet people who ordinarily wouldn't be paying attention to Yoko Ono or to menswear design are paying attention to this particular collection, because it's so utterly far from the norm.

Ignoring the obviously comedic touches like the crotch-hands and belts with doorbells on them, the main reasons why this collection can be described as "ridiculous" are to do with gendered dressing. For men, formalwear means covering your entire body except the hands and face, whereas for women it usually means that at least your arms and shoulders are bare, if not more. For women, accentuating and exposing various parts of your body is the norm, whereas pretty much all menswear boils down to the basic model of a suit or jeans-and-t-shirt combo. In this collection, Ono sticks to the jeans-and-t-shirt formula but adds enough implicit nods to feminine styles that for many men, wearing these outfits would be tantamount to dressing in drag.

“Men were always wanting us to look good and take off everything, and we were never able to enjoy men’s sexuality in that way.” -- Yoko Ono. 

Transparent fabrics? Exposed skin? Anything that hints at the presence of an erogenous zone? These are all design elements that are the exclusive purview of women's fashion, because much of womenswear design is about making the viewer look at and think about the body underneath the clothes. There are a hundred ways in which women are socialised to dress, sit and behave in order to attention to one's body in a certain way, but in the menswear lexicon there really is no concept of "clothing designed to make you think about nudity". A traditionally sexy outfit for men is an expensive suit; a traditionally sexy outfit for a woman is a tight dress with a lot of cleavage.

Final thought: If you think these clothes look a little odd when worn by professional models, then just try to imagine how they'd look on someone old or overweight. The analogy isn't exact, but while it's perfectly acceptable for a 50-year-old mother to show a little cleavage or wear a skirt to the office, the idea of a 50-year-old dad wearing a translucent shirt is practically inconceivable in mainstream society.

"Ring for your mommy."

As for artistic merit, this isn't the most interesting menswear collection I've ever seen but it's certainly not the worst. I think this is one of the few instances where the celebrity of the designer actually counts in the collection's favour, since if these same designs had come from an unknown designer or a major fashion label they'd have been dismissed as "weird fashion". Thanks to Yoko Ono's status as an artist (and the collection's tangential link to John Lennon), these designs are receiving enough mainstream coverage that a few more people than usual will be thinking about gendered fashion -- and that can only be a good thing.

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2012/11/29/interview-yoko-ono-on-assless-pants-and-the-color-pink/#ixzz2Dd6AREif

I always wanted to put this line of clothing out in the world. But the humor of it was not understood, maybe, until now.

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2012/11/29/interview-yoko-ono-on-assless-pants-and-the-color-pink/#ixzz2Dd6AREif

I always wanted to put this line of clothing out in the world. But the humor of it was not understood, maybe, until now.

Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2012/11/29/interview-yoko-ono-on-assless-pants-and-the-color-pink/#ixzz2Dd6AREif"

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Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. (Part 2)

Previously: Master & Commander, Part 1.

The characters in Master & Commander have a lot to say about the division between Navy and non-Navy sailors, whether it's out loud in dialogue or implicitly through their costuming. The final battle of the movie hinges upon the HMS Surprise being mistaken for a whaling ship, a ruse which is helped along by the recent addition of some former whalers to the crew. The idea of a Navy ship being neat and organised is so ingrained that their "disguise" is merely to seem messier and less competent than usual, and for the officers to wear brown oilcoats over their uniforms. For the everyday crewmembers, the task of upholding the image of the British Empire is to keep the ship running as cleanly and smoothly as possible; for the officers, it's to maintain an appearance of upstanding British aristocracy even in the middle of a storm.

The finest example of the British Seafaring Gentleman archetype in Master & Commander is, surprisingly, not Captain Aubrey. In fact it's one of the midshipman, Peter Calamy. Calamy is the most well-respected of the midshipmen -- experienced enough to be a good leader, but still young enough to be idealistic. With his short hair, sideburns and long trousers he definitely falls into the category of the proto-Victorian gentlemen, and unlike the younger midshipmen he's relatively clean and kempt. By contrast, Aubrey looks a lot more 18th century and careworn, and has clearly relaxed with age. Most of his clothes are old and worn, and in private he regularly strips down to stained shirtsleeves and knee-breeches. 

Aubrey's second in command, Tom Pullings, falls somewhere between Aubrey and Calamy. Pullings is an established officer in his own right, meaning that M&C isn't really "his" film and far more screentime goes to the aging hero (Aubrey) and the various coming-of-age stories of the midshipmen. In style he generally takes after his role-model Aubrey, with long hair and relatively traditional dress, but I'd say he's neater and more put-together -- which may partly be down to his role onboard ship. Since Aubrey's method of leadership is rather paternal and flexible, Pullings has to be more by-the-book in order to balance things out. The most interesting thing about Pullings' costuming is his bicorn hat, which he wears "fore-and-aft" in contrast to Aubrey's "athwartships" style. Athwartships was the style favoured by the older generation, modelled off Nelson's style, and this type of variation within the uniform is a clear sign of how much Naval uniforms were influenced by changing fashions.

I find it interesting, the way men's fashions and the value of personal style are so evident in this movie. Most of the officers take pride in their appearance even if only out of societal pressure, but it's a type of vanity that doesn't really have a modern equivalent -- particularly among men. These are 19th-century men who are influenced by 19th-century dandyism, even if they aren't dandies themselves. Being clean and well-turned-out was associated with things that don't necessarily have anything to do with fashion these days: patriotism, manliness, aristocracy, and competence. It's often the case that a character will be mocked for seeming too prissy or obsessed with their appearance (for example, the pastel-coloured Naval officers and East India Trading Company men in Pirates of the Caribbean), but I feel like the attitudes expressed in Master & Commander are far truer to life than that. These men aren't trying to impress women (because there aren't any), they aren't really trying to impress each other (because there's no privacy onboard ship, so everyone sees each other at their worst), and they certainly aren't keeping up with a strict uniform code as in the modern military. They're just living up to a set of standards that don't exist in modern society.
While the crew of the Surprise are somewhat ragtag and the officers are governed by the twin masters of 19th century fashion and the Naval uniform code, Paul Bettany's Dr Maturin is very obviously a civilian -- and very obviously unconcerned with Naval ideals of masculinity and Britishness. I'm not overly familiar with the original Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I do know that Maturin is the character who changed most between the books and the film. Although in M&C he's still an Irishman, his history as a spy and a laudanum addict is erased, as are his extreme levels of scruffiiness when compared to the other Gentlemen onboard the Surprise. Instead his lack of seamanship is emphasised, both in terms of his total lack of interest in sailing and in his many philosophical differences with dyed-in-the-wool Navy men like Aubrey.
The relationship between Aubrey and Maturin is the focal point of the film, with the unusually forward-thinking Maturin providing the audience with an outsider's view of Navy life. As a scientist and a rationalist, Maturin is a kind of Spock figure to Aubrey's Captain Kirk, since much of Aubrey's skill as a captain comes down to instinct and experience. Because he's the ship's doctor and the captain's closest friend, Maturin gets a lot of leeway when it comes to eccentricity, but he still wouldn't get away with the way he acts unless he also had the respect of the crew. The main reason he's allowed to dress and behave the way he does is because he's the only real civilian onboard, and therefore doesn't have to fit in with the crew or with the strict upper-class guidelines of the officers.

While he isn't as unkempt as his print counterpart, Paul Bettany's Maturin still bears very few signs of a 19th century gentleman's interest in fashion. He has no time for masculine posturing, and when it comes to his appearance he's something of an eccentric-intellectual stereotype -- all shabby waistcoats and old coats. Probably as a concession to the movie's 21st-century audience, Maturin's periwig has been traded in for a distinctly modern (well, Victorian) hairstyle. His most unusual outfit is the one he wears while exploring the Galapagos islands: a patterned banyan robe, a straw hat, and lace-up leather spats. It's an interesting combination: old-fashioned knee-breeches like Aubrey, coupled with the distinctly casual and unpatriotic addition of an Indian-style overcoat that has little in common with the more formal Naval fashions of the day.

Click here for more Movie Costumes I Have Loved.

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Now I, too, can look just like Joseph Gordon Levitt and Sherlock Holmes...?

It's a while since I wrote a genuinely stupid post (see also: my immortal treatise on the topic of wallpaper in BBC Sherlock), but I got some new shoes today and they're OMG totes amazing, you guys. OK, "new" may not be the most accurate word, but believe me when I say that when it comes to spending £20 on men's shoes, going vintage is infinitely better value than buying something new from, say, Primark. These particular shoes are in a style I've been vaguely admiring for a while, now: a kind of cross between desert boots and wingtips.

I've never written a post about Inception (one of my very favourite movies for contemporary costume design) because the topic has already been covered very skillfully by someone else. But I will say that one of my favourite details in the movie is the pair of boots worn by Joseph Gordon Levitt's character, Arthur. All of the main characters in Inception are snappy dressers in their own way, but Arthur is definitely the most dapper and fashionable of the lot. And in almost every scene in the movie he's wearing this particular pair of John Varvatos spectator boots:

Arthur's style is neat as a pin and very tailored, but these boots are clearly a favourite of his because not only does he wear them in the "real life" scenes, we see him wearing them during the dream sequences as well. As an extractor, Arthur is on the run for the duration of the movie, so it makes sense for him to have a relatively limited wardrobe. But since Arthur is kind of a clotheshorse, that wardrobe is very carefully coordinated and the boots must fit in with his palette of brown, green and beige. In the real world he's restricted by that palette because that's all he has to work with, but when he's performing an extraction he has the option of wearing whatever he likes -- and yet still often dreams up his beloved old spectator boots. I like seeing characters who genuinely enjoy their clothes, and I think this is a great bit of characterisation -- particularly since the boots are so appropriate for Arthur's job. As he regularly has to take on the role of a corporate spy, it's useful that the spectator boots can easily pass for wingtips when worn with a formal suit. But they're still practical enough for running or fighting when the going gets tough.

At the other end of the scale we have Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes, another character who only owns one pair of shoes -- although in this case it's because he doesn't care about clothes at all. Seriously, Holmes' costuming in Elementary is a walking example of "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap". Money from the costuming department, that is, because I'm pretty sure the character himself bought all his clothes in bulk from the local Goodwill. I'm certain that a lot of thought has gone into how scruffy he looks at all times, particularly since it's now been acknowledged onscreen that Holmes sees absolutely no point in dressing up to align with other people's standards. While his shoes aren't exactly the same as Arthur's, I enjoy the way two such similar items of clothing can mean completely different things -- stylishly scuffed vs lazily unpolished, favourite accessory vs the first thing he could lay his hands on, and so on.

I don't usually post pictures of my own clothes, partly because I'm a shiteous photographer and partly because it feels kind of awkward to put oneself up for public scrutiny on a blog dedicated to overanalysing clothes. But in this case: whatevvvvs, because I love these shoes. They're scuffed as hell, but I'm chill with that. Also, they go with my pewter trousers, which I wear constantly. A similar style to Holmes and Arthur's shoes, but with a little Adam Lambert thrown in for good measure. ;)

Link: Costume design in CBS's "Elementary".

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Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. (Part 1)

Master & Commander is #1 on my list of movies where I pine for a sequel. The thing is, even nine years on, they could still totally make one. The hope just makes it all the more painful, my friends. Master & Commander is so close to perfect that it even withstands the presence of Bach's Prelude for Cello in G, one of the most overused pieces of classical music in movie history. And as for the visuals, while M&C is mostly dominated by Naval uniforms, I find its costume design to be far more satisfying than a hell of a lot of other historical movies.
As a war story with an all-male cast, Master & Commander is immediately predisposed to look more realistic because in movieland, war + men = dirt = authenticity. While men's costumes in period dramas are typically less showy than women's, they tend to be a lot more accurate because female characters are almost always idealised. Pirates of the Caribbean came out at around the same time as M&C, and while it's a Disney comedy about zombie pirates and therefore can be taken with a pinch of salt, it's still weird to see so many scenes where Keira Knightley looks immaculate while the male leads look like they haven't washed for a week. The female lead in a historical drama is expected to be alluring regardless of the state of everyone else, but the cast of M&C is made up of rugged, grime-spattered sailors who occasionally happen to be played by handsome movie stars. They even made the actors get their teeth stained in the name of historical authenticity, which I can pretty much guarantee has never happened to Keira Knightley in anything. Although in Master & Commander's defence, a 19th century Naval ship is one of the very few instances where it's legitimate for there to be zero female characters, so it doesn't actually bother me in that regard.

Regular readers will know that I have a soft spot for movies where a lot of the characters are in uniform, because it forces filmmakers to be more thoughtful about costume design. One of my favourite examples of this is Alien, another shipboard film that actually has a few parallels with M&C when it comes to the divide between officers and working stiffs. The thing that makes Master & Commander particularly interesting in this regard is that in 1805, British Navy Uniforms really weren't all that uniform. The first Naval uniform guidelines were issued to officers in 1748, and by 1805 those had been narrowed down to a more-or-less uniform selection of navy blue coats, white waistcoats and so on. But that still didn't translate to everybody  looking the same, and the general attitude towards the uniform was very different from the way it is today.
The uniform's main purpose was to create a clear distinction between the upper and lower classes onboard ship, so it wasn't hugely important for all the officers to wear precisely the same thing -- just for them to represent the officer class in a respectable manner. The basics of a Naval officer's uniform were a navy blue coat, white breeches or trousers, a white shirt, and a waistcoat. Within those parameters, you can already see a fair amount of variety among the officer characters in Master & Commander. It's closer to a strict office dresscode than a modern-day military uniform -- as in, you have to wear a sombre suit, but your boss doesn't tell you what colour of tie to wear. If you look at the officers onboard the HMS Surprise, you can tell they're wearing near-identical coats and other "uniform" items, but their waistcoats, shirts and cravats are often different, as are the styles in which they wear them. The standards were more exacting when it came to dress-uniform occasions but for everyday wear, officers had a certain amount of leeway.
Military uniforms in the early 19th century were closely tied to current fashions and images of masculinity, so it's not surprising that the uniform guidelines were so malleable. Not only was there a certain amount of fashion-based posturing among officers in real life, but there was also a generational divide -- one that we see quite clearly in this film. Captain Aubrey, a traditionalist in early middle-age, represents the old guard in canvas knee-breeches and long hair. But the teenaged midshipmen look more like Victorians in terms of style, with short hair and long trousers. The enlisted men wear what were known as "slops" -- non-uniform clothing that was generally bought either from the ship's stores or at the docks when the ship was berthed. Enlisted/pressganged men often made and mended their clothes themselves, whereas the officers, as Gentlemen, were expected to pay for their uniforms to be made from scratch. Since mass-production wasn't yet an option, the officers would have their uniforms tailored professionally, which further adds to the lack of uniformity among the ranks. Aubrey is probably wearing the same coat he's had for years, whereas a younger officer's coat would be tailored to a more modern style.
One of the things that makes this movie seem so true to the period is the widespread grime and the characters' attitude towards it. This was the beginning of the "cleanliness is next to godliness" era, with a great deal of pressure being put upon people to look smart and therefore "civilised". There are several scenes where Midshipmen are told to smarten up or Aubrey references the importance of neatness and efficiency to a British Navy vessel, but to a modern eye everything still looks filthy. Maintaining an image of British aristocracy and cleanliness is no picnic when you have a full-time manual job sailing an 18th-century frigate, and have relatively little fresh water or, indeed, soap.
This post is already getting too long, so I'm going to split it into two and write about the individual character costumes in the second half. But for now, have some nerd facts:

• When filming onboard ship, the actors in Master & Commander were segregated according to class, meaning the officers never socialised or ate with the enlisted/pressganged men.
• The reason why a long pigtail is the stereotypical fashion for the enlisted/pressganged sailors was originally because it showed you hadn't recently been shaved for lice.
• When it came to "uniforms" for the enlisted men, captains were encouraged to set guidelines, which were semi-enforced by the ship only selling a particular colour of fabric to the sailors for clothing manufacture. Of course, this also meant that captains could effectively make their entire crew dress in red gingham, if they wanted to. According to legend (mmm, reliable), the captain of the HMS Blazer made his crew wear blue-and-white striped jackets, which may or may not be the original source of the modern-day blazer jacket.

Link to Part 2.

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Rick Owens, Spring 2013.

Rick Owens is a maximum expert in the field of draping people in 37 yards of fabric that look like either dust sheets or blackout curtains. Conversely, he's also pretty damn good at tailoring, albeit the sort of tailoring required to make the shoulderpads fit really well on things that look like a High Priestess costume in an episode of Star Trek. Given this combination of gothy apocalypse drapery and Needs More Gold alien royalty-wear, it's probably not all that surprising that I kinda love him.

pics from Style.com

This season's show opened with the simplest outfits in the collection, a selection of shapeless shifts that will be surely an A+ choice next time you decide to dress up as a Sexy Coffee-Filter for Halloween. Not being massively psyched about beige shift-dresses at the best of times these outfits didn't really grab me, but thankfully things warmed up pretty quickly after that.

 I loved the styling in this show. This is what Tilda Swinton's kids look like, right?

This is probably what the costumes in Dune would've looked like if the Dune movie hadn't been a visual representation of David Lynch being handed an unlimited budget and promptly going into a psychic tailspin.

(OK, Google just refreshed my memory re: Dune, and actually the costumes are one of the best things about that movie.)

When I'm a rich old lady (which will definitely happen because people whose speciality is "writing niche reviews of movie costume design" always end up rich, am I right?) I fully intend on being a collector of high-end fashion. My entire collection will be made up of outfits that look exactly like black plastic bags but inexplicably cost $$$, and when people look at my collection and judge me I'll just cackle the laugh of the 1%.

Rick Owens provided several variations on the black-plastic-bag theme this season, although I'm sparing you the bin-baggiest of them because I'm a kind and considerate person. Instead I picked out the slightly superior bug-lizard outfits, which are actually pretty OK as long as you're comfortable with looking like you just made a smock out of Xenomorph hide.

The final third of the show was where the Needs More Gold alien priestess outfits truly came into their own. Honestly, I'm rather confused about the target audience this season. The show wasn't particularly out-there in terms of extreme style (although the catwalk itself did involve a waterfall of foam), but at the same time it wasn't wearable or on-trend enough to truly court the Ready-To-Wear crowd. Although the balance of layers and the relaxed, unusual tailoring style are pure Rick Owens, the overall mood and colour palette are a lot less grungy and dramatic than I'm used to seeing from him -- so I'm not altogether sure that he'd even retain his usual audience. Still, it's an eyecatching and interesting collection.

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Skyfall: The Costumes

Previously: Part 1: Bond as a blunt instrument. and Part 2: The new Bond Girls.

You thought Bond Season was over? Well, it's never over. I gotta be suitblogging 24/7, or else I wither away and die. Bond costumes are always a big deal because the films rely so much upon 007 coming across as the coolest guy you could possibly imagine, which can sometimes be a little tricky when you're dealing with a man who wears a two-piece suit every day of his life and spends most of the time interacting with other men in two-piece suits. But hey! They managed it. And will almost certainly be ignored at the Oscars for their trouble, because when it comes to costumes nobody ever nominates movies set in the present day.
The lynchpin of Bond's style is his timelessness. His staple outfit in the novels is a navy blue suit with a black silk knit tie, a costume that can be handily reintroduced at any point during the five-decade history of the films. While Bond's style does evolve somewhat over the years, the only slip-ups have been when he tried to be too on-trend, such as that period in the '70s when Roger Moore thought it would be a good idea to start wearing flares. In many ways 007's character is rather conservative, meaning that while he does come across as stylish and timeless, he's also the type of guy who'd be tremendously out of place in mainstream modern culture. Even back in the '60s he was overtly and manfully ignorant of popular culture, claiming that the Beatles were unlistenable. The James Bond brand has survived this long in part because it's so damn hard to make him seem out of date.

It goes without saying that Bond films are going to be immensely stylish all round. But if you know me at all (or my philosophy re: character-driven costume design, anyway) then you may be able to guess why I enjoyed the costuming in Skyfall so much. Much of the film's success stems from the fact that all of the side characters are fully-fledged people rather than being two-dimensional stereotypes, which immediately makes them easier to design for. And of those characters, pretty much all of them (the exceptions are Kincaid and Sévérine, and to a certain extent Eve) wear some variation of a suit most of the time they appear onscreen. For a high-profile, high-budget movie like Skyfall, a great deal of thought must go into costume and character design, but when so many of the characters have to wear "similar" outfits then it gets much more interesting.
More detail on Bond's own costumes is hardly even required. Once again Daniel Craig goes into battle wearing a selection of fashionably tailored suits that look so tight they might as well have been sewn around his body. Like several other movies in the franchise, Skyfall's first act shows Bond getting knocked down and having to drag himself back from a combination of gunshot wounds and alcoholism. Luckily, Naomie Harris is there to help him shave off his angst-beard. (Gotta love an angst-beard.) For a while he slums it on the beach with an unnamed girlfriend and predictably Bond-like quantities of booze, but soon enough he ditches the wrinkled trousers and grungy leather jacket and it's back to Tom Ford menswear for the rest of the movie. Since the filmmakers expect the audience to have at least a passing familiarity with Bond already, there isn't much need for any further extrapolation, costume-wise.

Tanner is the Agent Coulson of MI6. Bland in appearance, he nevertheless seems to be fairly high up in the hierarchy, and cares deeply about his job. He wears the most "normal" suit of them all, looking like an everyday businessman compared to Bond's expert tailoring. Ralph Fiennes' Mallory is at the other end of the scale, wearing old-fashion and heavily masculine suits with high-waisted trousers held up by wide braces. This fits in very well with his character, who at first represents the British government before evolving into a younger version of the type of gentleman's-club, ex-military M we saw in the earlier films.
I really liked the new Q. While Ben Whishaw looks like a bit of a dweeberoo, his character was unexpectedly confidant and funny. Most action/adventure movies require a geek character to do some dramatic typing and shouting about subroutines and firewalls while the hero shoots at things, but they generally tend to go the route of one-note nerd stereotype. But rather than reeling off Whedonesque pop-culture references or freaking out in the face of danger, Q is calm and witty, an excellent foil to the dark sarcasm of the rest of the MI6 crew. He and Bond are physical and philosophical opposites, but they warm to each other quickly as Q earns Bond's respect with far more ease than most people. Q's clothes have a vintage/hipster aesthetic, with him wearing a no-doubt expensively geek-chic zipper cardigan and an oversized anorak that makes him look even tinier and younger than he already does. (N.B. The day I found out Ben Whishaw was an entire decade older than me was the day I started looking up cursed portraiture on Etsy. That is some Dorian Gray shit right there.)
As the female head of a government agency, M's fashion choices are in some ways more limited than those of her male counterparts. Appropriately for a person who relies upon anonymity, she wears the most unobtrusive suits possible, in dark or neutral colours and with a reasonably feminine cut. My favourite outfit of hers was for the journey to Scotland, where she was bundled up in a warm woollen coat and a blanket for the long ride in Bond's chilly and uncomfortable Aston Martin. (N.B. I very much enjoyed this hint at Bond's value of style over substance: the beautiful but impractical vintage car.) Oh and as a side note for the true nerds: I'm pretty sure the grey trenchcoat she wears to visit Mallory at the beginning of the film is meant to be the same one she wore in Casino Royale.

Something I picked up on during my second viewing -- and probably qualifies as costume design conspiracy theorising -- is the similarity between Helen McCrory's outfit during the enquiry scenes and one of the suits worn by M earlier on in the movie. Helen McCrory's character is a government minister who leads the questioning during the enquiry into MI6, and she seems particularly keen on taking M down. The suits in question are both made from a kind of rough, tweedy fabric tailored softly around the body with a collarless neckline. I think I noticed the similarity partly because M's suits are usually rather more traditional in cut and fabric, and partly because Helen McCrory's character bears more than a little resemblance to M herself. Not only do they have the same upper-class accent, but Helen McCrory is somewhat facially similar to Judi Dench -- although of course this could all just be coincidence. But I like to interpret this scene as the younger, more idealistic and rule-abiding M interrogating her older and more cynical counterpart.

Eve's costumes showed a very strong sense of personal style, mostly following a warm colour palette of golds and oranges that suited Naomie Harris beautifully. Although the gold dress she wore during the casino scene was the most memorable of her costumes, I particularly enjoyed the outfit she wore at MI6 headquarters. The soft blouse and mustard-yellow skirt stood out from the horde of grey-blue suits in the background and fit perfectly into the kind of Topshop business-casual fashion one sees a lot of in central London. When she returns at the end of the movie to begin her new role as Moneypenny she's considerably more formal, wearing a tight blue dress with asymmetrical seams similar to those of the gold casino dress.

Sévérine undoubtedly wears the most ostentatious costume in the movie, in the form of her translucent black evening gown. As the polar opposite of Bond's low-key, timeless suits, this costume will start looking dated almost immediately, for all that it took six months 60,000 hand-applied crystals to create. The whole look, from Sévérin's dramatically dark lipstick to her claw-like false nails, is purposefully attention-grabbing, but it only really works because Berenice Marlohe is so stunning. My opinion is that the dress is a lot of effort for comparatively minor effect, since tattoo-inspired crystal patterns on sheer black are kind of tacky, and the whole style seems about ten years too old her. I guess Sévérine is meant to look vampy, but the reality is that she's crammed into a weirdly rigid bustier and ultimately ends up looking rather more Liza Minelli than femme fatale. This was my least favourite of all the outfits she wore throughout the film, although I admit that it does fit her character fairly well.

Despite the importance of Silva's role, I actually found his costumes to be among the least interesting in the movie. Appearance-wise, most of Silva's impact was down to a combination of styling (the unnaturally blond hair and eyebrows) and Javier Bardem's performance. Silva is a character who looks far, far better in motion than he does in pictures, mostly because it takes a very skilled actor to sell that level of ridiculousness. Not everyone could carry off that wig, for one thing. And as for the costumes, I suspect he was intended to have slightly bad taste? He isn't badly dressed, as such, but the loud Prada shirt combined with a dark waistcoat and pale jacket looked purposefully weird compared to Bond's more sombre style. Still, I far preferred that outfit to the black leather coat he wore for the final showdown, which almost made it seem like Silva was purposefully dressing up as a supervillain.

Click here for previous James Bond posts.

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Skyfall: the new Bond Girls.

Previously: Skyfall: Bond as a blunt instrument. 

In the form of Judi Dench's M, Skyfall gave us two things I never thought I'd see in a Bond film: an awesome female character who is emphatically not a Bond Girl, and a secondary character who has real impact on the plot. The latter is almost more surprising than the former, because Bond movies are by nature such a one-man show. The formula is simple: someone melodramatic, weird, and probably foreign wants to torpedo the world economy and/or build a giant space-laser, and Bond has to stop them. Along the way, Bond is helped or hindered (in the case of most Bond Girls, usually both at once) by various other characters, but ultimately he's a lone wolf. Skyfall is the only movie I can think of where a secondary character receives so much screentime and is so clearly vital both to the story and to Bond as a character.
Judi Dench's M was partly inspired by real-life MI5 director general Stella Rimington, the first woman to hold the job and the first to have her identity revealed to the general public. While Rimington served from 1992-1996, Judi Dench's M was in the job from 1995 (GoldenEye) until the present day, making her 77 years old at the time of her decision to fight Javier Bardem's campy cyber-terrorist supervillain using home-made nail bombs and a sawn-off shotgun. If you don't think that this is the best thing ever, then you're clearly a slug, because, well... do you know how many old ladies you see in roles like this? The list pretty much begins and ends with Helen Mirren in RED. And before you all rush to the comments section with your various Favourite Old Ladies Who Get Shit Done (although obviously I would very much appreciate that list), remember that for every fifty Dumbledores in popular culture, we get maybe one or two Professor McGonagalls. M's role in the earlier movies was mostly that of a generic representation of The Man rather than a person with much background of his own, but Judi Dench's M grew into a fully-fledged character in her own right -- in many ways, an antihero as compelling as 007 himself.

Judi Dench is the one actor who appears in the "old" Bond movies as well as the post-Casino Royale reboot series. M's characterisation as a calculating, rational leader provided a counterpoint to Bond's rebellious streak, even as Bond transformed from slick, charming Pierce Brosnan to the rather more aggressive Daniel Craig. Skyfall gave M a far greater role than before, however, as she provides the motivation behind the villain's mania as well as a link between Bond's glamourous world of espionage and the more mundane problem of the government enquiry into MI6.
Although Eve and Sévérine are the most nuanced and interesting Bond Girls the franchise has seen so far, their characters are very old-school. Classic Bond Girls typically fall into one of two categories: helpful, independent women (often spies) like the Mary Goodnight character in the novels, and disturbed and/or morally ambiguous sexpots who either betray Bond after they sleep together, or die. While these two stereotypes are founded in Ian Fleming's rather formulaic writing, Eve and Sévérine are both much more than the sum of their parts. I already wrote a bit in my previous post about how satisified I was with Eve's transition from badass action hero to Miss Moneypenny (which was very much in-keeping with the film's overall theme of the blurring definition of what it means to be an "active" agent), but Sévérine's role, though smaller, was just as interesting.

Female sexuality in Bond films has always been slightly incomprehensible because one of Bond's defining characteristics is that he's totally 100% irresistable. In the past, this particular detail has lead to all sorts of charming scenes such as Sean Connery wrestling Honor Blackman's previously-lesbian Pussy Galore into submission (Goldfinger, 1964). Up until very recently the Bond franchise was a transparently misogynistic series about an even more misogynistic character, but we've finally reached the point where the filmmakers have worked out that it's possible to keep Bond in-character without the film itself being sexist. The scene between Sévérine and Bond in the casino was my favourite example of this.

Sévérine could easily have been created by Ian Fleming himself. Beautiful, mysterious, and troubled, she grew up in the sex industry and spends her life trapped and used by evil men like Javier Bardem's Silva. Bond may be able to help her but she can't fully trust anyone, and in the end Bond's priority is saving the world (and M), even though he finds time to sleep with Sévérine on the way. But instead of this being a case of a sexy Bond Girl stereotype falling into bed with Bond, Sévérine's actions seem far more like an act of desperation rather than her just being another notch in Bond's bedpost, and her death was the first time I've ever actually cared about the demise about one of Bond's seemingly disposable love-interests. Bérénice Marlohe made impressive use of her limited screentime, ramping up the visibly crazy-eyed pessimism as she tried to broker a deal with Bond in front of a horde of armed guards.
Unfortunately, Sévérine was the focus of my least favourite scene in the movie; the one scene where I was truly disappointed in Skyfall's ability to tell a feminist James Bond story. Fifty years ago, Bond walking in on a woman in the shower wouldn't have raised an eyebrow because Connery's (and Ian Fleming's) Bond was, quite frankly, rather rapey -- plus he existed in a far less "realistic" world than Daniel Craig's. But this time round, even though there was a kind of tacit agreement between Bond and Sévérine, I was still pretty weirded. The way the scene was edited made it look like he'd just shown up and stepped into her shower unnanounced, which is particularly worrying when you realise that the only thing Bond really knows about Sévérine is that she's functionally a prisoner in her own home. I suspect, or at least hope, that the creepy subtext there was unintentional, since it actually seems a little out og character for 21st-century Bond. While Daniel Craig's Bond is significantly more brutal than many of his predecessors, he's also written as having more emotional intelligence (not to be confused with actual emotion, for all that Daniel Craig admits to having cried over the Skyfall theme song) than his 20th-century counterparts. Although the Bond we see in Skyfall has learnt from his "mistakes" in Casino Royale, he doesn't seem like someone who'd exploit an civilian victim for personal vain -- although he would prioritise the mission above helping her, if necessary.

I feel like Skyfall has really moved the Bond universe past the gender roles it's been relying upon for the past half-century. Not in a "sexism is over!!" way because, uh, no, but but more in the sense that the division between field and desk agents is highlighted rather than the division between Bond (as action hero) and his love-interests. In the past, Miss Moneypenny was Bond's anchor to a more comforting view of MI6 -- a friendly face to act as buffer between his action-filled existence and the sometimes stuffy environment of M's office. But while scenes set in MI6 Headquarters used to centre around exposition and Bond's various clashes with government beaurocracy, Eve Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw's Q show us a different side of "office work". For the first time we get to see Q (in a very different incarnation from the avuncular Desmond Llewelyn) in an active, frontline role. Balancing out Bond's return to old-fashioned, stripped-down violence, Q's job as MI6's resident computer expert means he's the only person who can fight Silva on his own terms. And Ralph Fiennes' Mallory, originally introduced as something of an antagonist to our beloved M, turns out to be much more than the conservative bureaurocrat he first appears.
Silva's infiltration and destruction of MI6 HQ proved that there's really no such thing as a safe desk job any more. Although Eve was clearly uncomfortable with her role in Bond's injuries and the subsequent loss of M's hard-drive, she was still a badass and capable agent, holding her own when Silva attacked the government enquiry near the end of the film. Her transition from field agent to M's bodyguard/personal assistant is the living embodiment of the blurring lines between what counts as a "dangerous" job in MI6. And if anything, it highlights Bond's role as the last of the true field agents, the ones whose job is purely that of a Licence To Kill rather than having to deal with the politics of the London offices.

Part 3: The Costumes.

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