Harry Potter, costume design, and wizarding fashion in 1920s New York. (Part 2)

Previously: Part 1.

Most wizarding robes in the Harry Potter movies are a combination of bell-sleeved faux medieval robes, and old-fashioned suits. Gilderoy Lockhart looks like a 19th century dandy, Cornelius Fudge wears a three-piece pinstripe suit and bowler hat, and Remus Lupin dresses like an impoverished mid-20th-century academic. There's a variety of quite disparate looks in the wizarding world, but they all have a few things in common: mixed patterns, heavy fabrics, and multiple layers of tailoring. So even though most of the costumes incorporate elements of Muggle styles, they still don't look like something you'd often see on your morning commute. However, as I previously pointed out, they regularly rely on a late-19th/early-20th century aesthetic, meaning that the costume designer for Fantastic Beasts would be wise to go in a different direction. Personally, my first decision would be to radically alter the silhouette and fabric used for wizarding fashions overall.

The first thing you need to know about 1920s fashion is that everything uses a very flowing silhouette. The masculine and feminine ideals are very different from what we see today, right down to things like placement of muscle tone and fat, and general proportions. This is slightly more the case for women than for men, but men's suits are still pretty different in shape and cut from the way they look today. Also, the modern concept of flappers is pretty much a total fiction, which is one of the reasons why I never reviewed the latest Great Gatsby movie, and why I'm eternally frustrated by the concept of "flapper parties" and faux-1920s fashion spreads.

from The Great Gatsby, 2013.

First of all, the body shape required for flapper fashion is just as damaging as any other ~fashionable body type~ because, you know, you have to conform to a certain standard that most people cannot naturally achieve. Specifically, the flapper look required you to be slim, boyish and flat-chested, meaning that women bound their breasts and wore girdle corsets. Secondly, while flappers were a feminist movement in that they were all about female liberation, sexual freedom and not passively relying on the income of your husband, one of the reasons why they were seen as so rebellious and extreme was because they were hanging out in multiracial nightclubs and/or co-opting black jazz dance styles. So I'm not saying that it's bad to enjoy the concept of flappers (or the modern idea of "flapper fashion"), but there's a lot more to it than just going to speakeasies and cutting your hair short.

via New Republic.

The biggest issue with modernised versions of flapper fashions is that it's seemingly impossible for people to let go of present-day ideas of what looks sexy on a woman. Right now the two things to emphasise are skinniness and breasts, which is sort of the opposite of the way 1920s/flapper-era fashion works. Back then, the trend was to emphasise the legs and obtain a more boyish figure by smoothing the difference between waist and hips. However, the average woman 90 years ago had a different figure from the average woman today, particularly when it comes to waist/hip ratio (which was significantly greater in those days; women were historically more hourglass-shaped) and fat distribution. Google some pictures of people in the 1920s and you'll see what I'm talking about. You'll all notice that even though flappers were all about tennis and being sporty, they don't look toned and muscular in the way "sporty" people are nowadays.

I'd say that 1920s wizarding womenswear would have to emphasise bare legs, a boyishly slim figure (but not skeletally thin like current trends, because in the 1920s that still implied that you were too poor to eat), and waistlines tailored loosely around the hip. Also, a shape that tapers towards the ankles and calves, which is something you don't see much of these days. The other thing is that while the "weirdness" of the wizarding clothes in the Harry Potter movies is sort of connected with ideas of English/British eccentricity, so it'd be interesting to see how a rebellious, American new-money wizarding aesthetic would turn out. Normal muggle dresses that change fabrics and colours at the flick of a wand? Transfiguration? Flames...? 1920s party girls could be pretty punk rock.

via costumereference.

For men, there are two major differences from today, one rather more noticable than the other. The most obvious difference is that everything is a lot baggier than the suits you see noawadays. The trousers look comparatively oversized, and jackets are far more loosely tailored. Also, everyone wears a hat. The less obvious difference is that many clothes, particularly trousers and jackets, would've been hand-tailored to fit the buyer -- or at least altered to fit. Meaning that you're way more likely to see guys wearing things that don't look like they fit very well. Although I suppose this would be less of an issue for wizards, who might be able to alter or mend things by magic.
The main thing that will govern the costumes of wizarding New York is how close US wizarding culture is to the muggle world. I think it's safe to say that wizards and muggles will be separate, but how much will wizarding New York be influenced by the rest of the city? Are robes a British/European tradition that never even made it across the Atlantic? Does everyone just dress like a muggle? And how will New York's immigrant population affect its magical culture in general? I find it hard to believe that countries from all over the world will all have the same attitude to muggles, or even to magical culture in general. Surely not everyone uses the Latinate spells of Hogwarts, or dresses like the witches and wizards of British/Western European folklore. Whatever this movie turns out to be about, we're sure to learn huge amounts about non-British wizarding culture that we never even considered before.

See also: Leyendecker and the Arrow Collar Man.

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Costume design, JK Rowling's new Harry Potter movie, and the wizarding fashions of 1920s New York.

JK Rowling announced yesterday that she's teaming up with Warner Brothers to make a new series of Harry Potter movies, instantly causing the the top of my head to flip open with excitement. The HP books shaped my childhood, and my love of the series was recently rekindled when I got to report at LeakyCon London Harry Potter convention last month. The prospect of an entirely new story set in the wizarding universe already has me grinding valium into my martini. STAY CHILL, SELF. IT WON'T BE OUT FOR ANOTHER TWO YEARS. We need to set up a Harry Potter-related group therapy session, stat.

The new movie(s) will focus on Newt Scamander, the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the definitive textbook on magical creatures. He already seems to me like an ideal choice of protagonist, because he has a strong connection to the wizarding universe but no real link to the events of the Harry Potter series. I'd be very leery of a Harry Potter spinoff that seemed to act as a prequel or sequel to the series itself, but I feel like JKR is pretty unlikely to do that anytime soon. Most interestingly, the Fantastic Beasts movie will take place 70 years prior to Harry Potter (ie, the 1920s), and begins in New York. I'm already brimming with speculation over what this means in terms of worldbuilding and, of course, how the costumes are going to look.
The Harry Potter books are so utterly British (and JK Rowling is so amazing at writing about the British class system) that I'm already enthralled by the idea of a story about a former Hogwarts student in New York City. We learn virtually nothing about American magical culture in the books, which is probably on purpose because it's best not to think too hard about the concept of an international wizarding community. Like, why do other countries never intervene when a tiny racist cult is going around killing people and taking over the government in the UK? My personal assumption was that Britain is seen as so backward and eccentric compared to the rest of the wizarding world, that other countries have a total non-intervention policy. Considering Britain's disastrous muggle/wizarding conflicts, class system, and inexplicable decision to segregate all children by personality type at age eleven, it hardly feels like a place that's very in touch with the outside world. Well done, you put all the ruthlessly ambitious kids together in a school house that's known for producing dark wizards and racist fanatics. What could possibly go wrong? Without the "benefit" of the Hogwarts house system, who knows what wizarding society would be like.

There are a few things we can expect from the setting of 1920s New York. The most obvious, to me, is greater racial diversity than we saw among the main cast of the HP films. While the books are open to interpretation, the movies are very white when it comes to speaking roles, particularly among the adult characters. The casting generally defaulted to white unless the character is explicitly described as otherwise (ie, Kingsley Shacklebolt), which is partly down to the semi-accidental racism of almost all movies casting white actors by default. The other reason is that the books give the impression of being set in ~historical~ England.
Even though Hogwarts is in the Scottish Highlands and the main storyline takes place in the 1990s, the overall feel is that of an English boarding school adventure story, a genre that largely focuses on the period on either side of WWII. The only other major locations are London and Hogsmeade, both of which seem decidedly Dickensian and pretty distant from the multicultural world of 21st century cities. Hogwarts feels like a 60-year-old story taking place in a medieval castle, while general wizarding society has something approaching a 19th-century class structure. The only three wizarding households we see are Malfoy Manor (literally a manor; owned by aristocrats), The Burrow (just outside a small village in Devon), and Grimauld Place (a decaying Victorian town house). None of these exactly scream "modern, multicultural Britain". If Hogwarts had been located in central London during the same time period, it would've been harder to get away with casting almost everyone as white.

While English boarding schools, rural manor houses and Dickensian London all inspire certain ideas of how characters and stories "should" look, 1920s New York gives us entirely different expectations: flappers, jazz, gangsters, the Harlem Rennaissance, and the Great Gatsby. Plus, having read the mystery novel that JKR recently published under a pseudonym, I'd say that she's listened to criticism since the HP books were written, and puts a lot more thought into writing diverse range of characters. Either way, I'm gonna be majorly disappointed if the Fantastic Beasts movie doesn't include at least one scene where clueless Hufflepuff Newt Scamander wanders into a wizarding jazz bar and/or encounters some kind of prohibition-esque NYC hijinks. Also, there must SURELY be at least one black market magical creature smuggler in this movie, right? (CAST TOM HARDY IN THIS ROLE. CAST TOM HARDY IN THIS ROLE.)
Thinking abuot JKR's transition from page to screen, I'm curious to see what happens with regards to worldbuilding. The later HP films are genuinely good, and I think it's safe to assume that Fantastic Beasts will be of a similar tone (ie not a "children's film"), but much of the enjoyment for HP fans comes from the fact that we're aware of the extended universe behind the movies. Sure, there are plenty of people who never read the books, or read the books after watching the films, but JKR's strength lies in attention to detail, specifically when it comes to worldbuilding and minor side-characters. The HP universe is so rich and complex that every chapter contains some new spell or backstory detail or minor character, and all of them are interesting enough to warrant their own story. But you really can't get that level of detail in a film. I can imagine JKR getting frustrated at the limitations of writing a screenplay, but who knows. She spent a decade consulting on the original movie series, so she's hardly a novice.
When it comes to costumes, I'm hoping that Fantastic Beasts looks drastically different from the Harry Potter series. Obviously 1920s NYC is pretty distant from a medieval castle full of teenagers in the 1990s, but the historical setting may be a hindrance because the HP series already looks like a historical drama. The costume designers did an amazing job, but they were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place when it came to transferring wizarding fashions from book to film. The robes in the books are described as being an entire outfit (rather than a sort of optional overcoat, which is how they look in the movies), with most people also wearing pointy hats. Wizarding styles were intended to be so different from muggle clothes that pureblood wizards don't even understand muggle fashion, with some wizards even having a problem with the concept of trousers. But it's difficult to transfer this look to a movie set in present-day Britain, because most characters would look so weird that audiences might find it distracting. So the designers had to think of other ways to set traditional wizarding fashion apart from the muggle world.
Even the robes worn by older witches and wizards are often close to just being a three piece suit or a dress, aside from especially "magical" characters like Dumbledore, McGonagall and Snape. Lucius Malfoy may be a traditionalist but his leather battle robes are an exception, with most of his costumes looking like a cross between an old-fashioned suit and a costume from a historical drama. The most common style among wizarding characters is some kind of normal-looking outfit with a robe-like coat over the top, while "dress robes" are just muggle eveningwear with the men's outfits taking on a slightly 19th-century aesthetic.

In my opinion the most well-designed "traditional" wizarding outfit is the original Quidditch robes, while the Hogwarts uniform is basically a normal British school shirt-and-tie uniform with an academic/graduation gown instead of the blazer. And hardly anyone wears a hat, because it's difficult to identify with a teenage everyman hero when he's wearing a pointy hat and an ankle-length gown. Even the casual clothes worn by Harry, Ron and Hermione have changed from book to film, I think. I always felt like the clothes worn by the kids in the books implicitly fit in with the boarding school aesthetic (ie, nonspecifically mid-20th century non-fashions, like wearing knit sweaters all the time), while the movie updates them to wear more contemporary outfits like jeans, hoodies, and t-shirts. I'd be interested to know whether the appearance of characters and costumes in the earlier film adaptations actually changed the way JKR described them in the later books.

Continued in Part 2.

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