Emma
Clip | 4m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
Costuming can often be overlooked when reviewing a film. Mikayla Daniels has the details.
Costuming can often be overlooked when reviewing a film, but it plays a major role in the setting, tone, and helps actors better understand their character. Mikayla Daniels discusses the incredible work that went into the costuming of this film.
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SATURDAY NIGHT CINEMA is a local public television program presented by KSPS PBS
Emma
Clip | 4m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
Costuming can often be overlooked when reviewing a film, but it plays a major role in the setting, tone, and helps actors better understand their character. Mikayla Daniels discusses the incredible work that went into the costuming of this film.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Welcome to my web comments on the Saturday Night Cinema broadcast of “Emma” from 1996.
I'm Mikayla Daniels here to share a bit more about the film.
For this web blog, I thought I'd like to highlight the incredible fashion in this film.
We can often overlook the role that costuming has on a film.
Costumes communicate the details of a character's personality to the audience and help actors transform into new and believable people on screen.
Costume design goes beyond clothing.
It combines deep research, unbridled creativity, and technical mastery.
Every stitch and fabric selection is deliberate, imbued with purpose and meaning.
Through their artistry, costume designers become storytellers in their own right, breathing life into the characters and shaping their very personas on screen.
In many cases, costumes also inform the audience of the world the story is set in.
Emma had a British costume designer, Ruth Myers, who created and designed the clothing for the film.
She said that she wanted to mirror the lightness of the script within the costumes, and give a spark of color in life to the early 19th century setting.
Accurately designing for a period piece like this film requires intensive research.
During her research, Myers noted a similarity between the fashions after the Napoleonic Wars and the 1920s, saying they had the same sort of flapper ish quality.
It was a period of freedom of costume for women, and it was a period of constant diversions for the upper classes, picnics, dinners, balls, dances.
“What I wanted to do was make it look like the watercolors of the period, which are very bright and very clear, with very specific colors.” Myers went on to reveal that she did not want the costumes to have a heavy English look.
Instead, she wanted to get the freedom of bodies that you see in all the drawings, “The form of the body underneath, the swell of the breasts.” Myers told Barbara DeWitt from the Los Angeles Daily News that using pastel colored clothing to get the watercolor effect was one of her major challenges during the production.
The designer was later criticized for being inaccurate, but she stated that she did not want the costumes to look like old or sepia.
Myers only had five weeks in which to create 150 costumes for production, and she was constantly working on the set.
Personally, I agree with Myers and think her vision of the pastels made this film have a softer and more romantic feel than had the costume costumes stuck with the original color schemes of the time period.
This is similar criticism that has been given to a current popular period set drama series, Bridgerton.
We need to look at the fact that film is a visual medium, and the tone of this film is lighter than the costumes and set pieces should match that vibe.
It's all about creating your world that you want your audience to live in for those few short hours, and that's not always what is historically accurate.
One of the more talked about dresses from the film is, of course, Emma's wedding dress.
It was made from silk crepe and embroidered with a small sprig pattern, while the sleeves in the train were made from embroidered nets.
Of the dress, Myers stated that the inspiration for Emma's wedding dress began with a small amount of exquisite vintage lace that became the overlay.
She said, “I wanted a look that would work not only for the period, but one that would also compliment Gwyneth Paltrow's youth, swan neck and incredible beauty.
I was also hoping to evoke happiness and the English countryside.
The sun did shine on the day we shot the scene.” I hope you enjoyed my extended comments on Emma, and be sure to look around our Facebook page and KSPS.org for more blogs, polls and trivia from all the hosts and Movie Maverick Mike.
And don't forget to tune into Saturday Night Cinema on KSPS PBS.
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