Directors and costume designers know very well that a specific garment or accessory can completely change or influence the way a character moves on the big screen and there have been cases in the history of cinema when entire productions relied more on the costumes than on the actors/actresses, the plot or the screenplay (yes, you got it, the very cringing Mirror Mirror by Tarsem Singh with costumes by the late Eiko Ishioka is a perfect example…).
I was recently rewatching French comedy Une veuve en or (A Golden Widow, 1969 – with many thanks to Kutmusic for digging it from its archives for me) and the costumes donned by the main character in this film made me ponder a bit about this issue.
Directed by Michel Audiard, this comedy starring Michèle Mercier as Delphine Berger and Claude Rich as her husband, the promising artist Antoine Berger, was considered by some critics as a light and funny giallo (it was a French-Italian production) tinged with black humour and with quite a few grotesque and surreal moments.
The plot is rather simple: Delphine’s rich uncle dies and leaves everything to her niece at one condition, she will have to become a widow within three months from his death, otherwise his fortune will be donated to a Jewish organisation (warning: the film contains stereotypical jokes about Jews that may not be deemed by some viewers as politically correct - for example, when the heads of the organisation discover Delphine will inherit a fortune only if her husband dies, they try to protect her husband to get the money...).
Delphine is happily married but the thought of what she may be able to buy with millions of dollars - furs, cars and even a jet - prompts her to hire a hitman (albeit a rather mediocre one) to try and eliminate her husband. The results are hilariously tragicomic and, to get rid of the corpses, Antoine keeps on turning into statues for his bizarre installations the bodies that pile up around him.
French couturier and milliner Jean Barthet (mentioned here and there in previous posts) designed the costumes for Delphine.
When the film opens the Antoine and his wife are on their way to the funeral of Delphine’s uncle and she is wearing a hat that looks like a more futuristic version (it features see-through PVC inserts that form a sort of visor) of Balenciaga’s 1967 hat, characterised by an extremely large and elliptical brim (originally matched with a solemn silk gazar one seam wedding gown). Fashionistas will remember this hat also in its more modern incarnation, included in Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2012 collection.
The hat - decorated with black plastic elements - appears in a red and in a black version in the film and was also used for the French poster of the movie, a drawing portraying a naked Delphine wearing the hat and sitting on a tombstone.
A few modern celebrities tried to show us poor mortals how easy it is to pull off Balenciaga’s cumbersome architectural hat with almost no efforts.
Delphine (who dons the hat matched with a black mini-dress decorated with the same plastic elements that adorn the hat - see third image in this post) wears it instead with utterly comical results (if only fashion would laugh about itself a bit more…): she gets indeed stuck in a door while rushing to the funeral, traps her husband under her hat as they kiss in their car in the middle of the traffic and realises it’s so cumbersome that it doesn’t even allow her to swiftly run, like all her greedy relatives, from the graveyard to the notary’s office to read the uncle’s will.
Barthet’s costumes in this film were a combination of the most fashionable looks from those years, Delphine's wardrobe is indeed a sort of summary of the main ‘60s trends (while Antoine's studio includes iconic pieces of interior design from those years such as Quasar Khanh's inflatable furniture). Delphine is a young, dynamic and carefree woman and a wannabe widow and often wears minimalist mini-dresses à la Pierre Cardin or à la André Courrèges.
When she sets her mind upon killing her husband she is wearing a red PVC raincoat reminiscent of Cardin’s ready-to-wear 1969 designs that turns her from loving and naive wife, in a nutshell from a little red riding hood-like figure, into a murderess; when Delphine goes to hire a killer from the bizarre company Murder Incorporated (killing in style seemed to be a prerogative of quite a few films from the ‘60s…) she wears a sleeveless orange mini- dress matched with a short coat decorated with a white and orange checkered motif that calls to mind Courrèges’ red and white designs from his Spring/Summer 1965 collection.
More elaborate looks follow when Delphine becomes a carefree widow (well, there’s a twist in the tail, but I don’t want to ruin you the story…): when her husband “dies” she opts for another extravagantly outlandish lampshade-like Barthet hat, though in this case the futuristic PVC disappears in favour of a more dramatic and traditional tulle veil.
Her new wardrobe as a widow also includes a dress made with metallic discs à la Paco Rabanne, two black and white pony print ensembles with hats and a bathing suit reminiscent of Rudi Gernreich’s designs with cut-out motifs around her hips.
Since Barthet was mainly a milliner, Delphine wears a lot of hats in the film, but the best one remains the black one she chooses for her uncle's funeral.
Modern fashion has seen quite a few more wearable versions of Balenciaga's 1967 hat or Barthet's felt and PVC headdress for Delphine, such as the leather pieces in Hussein Chalayan’s A/W 2010 collection or the visors integrated in the hats in Chalayan’s S/S 2010 designs.
The contemporary version of the visor-cum-hat designed for Delphine by Jean Barthet is probably Noel Stewart’s iridescent visor for Chalayan's Spring/Summer 2012 collection (third image in the following picture). Guess that, if a director would ever set on shooting a remake of A Golden Widow, this is what they should opt for to bring Delphine from the '60s to our times.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Nice, I think your idea is very valid. It's how we portray that kind of outfit that really puts us in a different role of some sort.
Posted by: Spiderman Costumes | May 08, 2012 at 10:20 AM