There’s one thing that British and Italian TV channels share at the moment: the amount of poor-quality and mind-numbing programmes they broadcast. Yet, amazingly, yesterday evening BB4 broadcast Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo. Though I cringed when the voice introducing it said – twice and in two different ads – that it was a Mafia film (set in Sicily? Italian film? No doubt, it must be about the Mafia…dear oh dear), I managed to keep my disgust under control and my fingers off the remote control and not to switch channel. I’ve been having “beautiful costume design” withdrawal symptoms for a while now, as I haven’t seen amazing costumes in a film for quite a while, so I pretended I didn't hear the silly and incorrect ads.
The costume designer in The Leopard was Piero Tosi, who worked on the film with tailor Umberto Tirelli, who at the time was working with the Safas tailoring house. I already mentioned these two names in previous posts, so if you have been following this blog you might be already familiar with them.
Costume-wise The Leopard was an absolutely extraordinary work of art as something like 2,000 costumes were made for this film. Visconti was one of the most meticulous Italian directors, he loved historical accuracy and had a great attention to details. Tirelli often remembered him working together with the costume designers, picking the colours for the costumes, studying the silhouettes and the shapes, sampling the fabrics and checking upon the work made by the tailoring houses.
The team at Safas started working on The Leopard in early 1962. In January of that year the work mainly focused on doing the costume sketches, then Tirelli went to Sicily to look for second-hand and vintage clothes that could have been adapted for minor characters such as shepherds and peasants. Tirelli was skilled and found what he was looking for, but when it came to the uniforms for Garibaldi’s soldiers things got really difficult. The Garibaldini soldiers’ uniforms comprised a red shirt and pale blue trousers, but Garibaldi’s army was made of volunteers, so each soldier that arrived sported a different uniform, often made by his mother, grandmother, sister or girlfriend, therefore all the shirts were different, all the trousers unique. How to replicate this peculiarity? Ten different dressmakers were chosen to make 300 shirts, so that the shape and cut of this garment would have been completely different. Some shirts sported hand embroidered numbers, others had rounded collars; some were made of a sort of woollen fabric, others in cotton (Garibaldi had recommended to wear woollen shirts, but many people were too poor to afford them). The shirt colours were altered by burying the shirts in the ground or bleaching the fabric. The same thing was repeated with the trousers, that had the basic cut of denims, but were made in cotton, wool or gabardine and came in different shades of grey and blue.
If this sounds to you already quite obsessive and slightly maniacal, it’s because you still haven’t heard about the ball scenes. Originally Visconti wanted to divide the film in two parts and dedicate one part entirely to the ball preparations, showing the girls getting dressed and going to the party, but the production company rejected his suggestion as it proved too expensive. For the ball Tirelli and his team did 400 costumes: 50 liveries, 150 ball gowns and 200 tuxedos and uniforms. In a way, the tailoring house was lucky: when Tosi’s assistant Bice Brichetto visited the location of the ball scene, Palazzo Gangri, she found in the attic a whole wardrobe full of garments that were adapted and reused for the servants’ liveries. But while the formal suits and uniforms for the male characters weren’t too difficult to do, women’s dresses were a real challenge.
The women who belonged to the Palermo aristocracy dressed as if they lived in Paris, favouring Worth’s creations or opting for designs inspired by his crinolines. Tirelli travelled all over Italy to find old laces and fabrics, vintages taffetas for bold coloured gowns that were later worn in the films by the “monkey girls”, the noisy young girls spotted by the Prince of Salina at the ball. Originally Visconti would have liked to shoot the ball scenes at candlelight, so Tosi and Tirelli had to take care of the intensity of the light and of its effects on the dresses while choosing the fabrics. In the end, both candle light and artificial lights were used but the costumes still looked extraordinary colourful and striking.
But there’s more about the ball scene: to make the ball gown worn by Claudia Cardinale, Tosi opted for a refined organza by Dior supported by twelve layers of tulle. Tosi and Tirelli also “tortured” the actress constricting her curvaceous figure in a bustier and reducing her waist from 68cm to 53-54cm. Visconti took one month to shoot the ball scenes. At the end of the shooting Cardinale was not only naturally tired, but she also had many bruises on her body.
The art and skills that went into the costumes and the obsessive historical details used to make all the garments in this film are probably among the reasons why The Leopard is still considered a work of art. It was a pleasure to see it on TV again even though they ruined all its poetry by broadcasting after it a documentary with chef Antonio Carluccio exploring Sicilian cooking tradition and the dishes mentioned in The Leopard, obviously introducing the programme as a documentary about, well, "Mafia food”. I felt like screaming, but thinking about all the beauty I had just seen in Il Gattopardo prevented me from doing so.
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Brilliantly and accurately written. Great attention to artistic details and Visconti's film. Luchino paid truly serious attention to historical details. It wasn't a Hollywood-style interpretation. Tosi did well with Claudia Cardinale's dress. She was easy to work with with a smile, considering the dress was painful and did cause bleeding. Always will remember that. Tragic about "mafia" stereotype.
Posted by: Doug | October 16, 2010 at 06:12 PM