Sandy Powell OBE
From sumptuous royal spectacles to the lawless grit of 19th century New York, triple Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell has fashioned legions of cinema’s most memorable characters.
Interview Katie Baron / Photography Perry Curties
Sandy Powell (OBE) doesn’t mess around. Thrillingly uncompromising and wholly intimidating in all the best possible ways (both in her art and in the flesh – more on both later), Powell isn’t only the costume designer’s designer. She’s also cinema’s bridge to fashion-fascinated audiences for whom the characters she has stirred into theatrical life are as real and enduring as they come.
Now, 50+ films into a four decades-long career, those lives are diverse and many. As a whirlwind explainer: she’s a triple Academy Award winning creative as lauded for her work on ground-breaking indie films with meagre budgets and arthouse flavours like Caravaggio (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) as blockbusting megaprojects with couture grade fashion and forensic detailing including Cinderella (2015), The Aviator (2004), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Disney’s upcoming Snow White (2024) comprising literally thousands of handmade costumes. There are also those that fall beautifully in-between, like cult classic Interview with a Vampire (1994) which has spawned a million Halloween cosplay fantasies, the poignant restrained glamour of 1950’s era Carol (2015) and the audacious period black comedy The Favourite (2018) for which BAFTA glory came despite or maybe because of shoe-string spending (“working on a tight budget definitely comes with a degree of adrenaline, and the impetus to innovate”). From politically charged realism to epic aristo-odysseys, predictable she is not.
Born in Wandsworth, brought up in Brixton, London, where she still lives, Powell recalls always wanting to stand out visually (“I was obsessed with trying to look different, or maybe just wanting to show off,” she laughs) drawing and sewing for both herself and her dolls from an early age. Hitching her appetite for getting stuck in onto her penchant for rebellion (“I don’t intentionally intend to break the rules, but it happens”), in the ‘70s she did an art foundation course at Saint Martin’s School of Art, then studied theatre design at Central School of Art & Design but dropped out in her final year to pursue fringe theatre with “partner-in-crime” and choreographer Lea Anderson MBE, whose degree show was her first piece of costuming proper. That early appreciation of fashion in motion and the power of DIY creativity led her to iconoclastic mime artist, choreographer and Bowie mentor Lindsay Kemp whom she’d tracked down to London’s famous Pineapple Dance Studios where he was teaching. Incredibly, she was taken under his wing and immediately entrusted to his show, including Nijinsky at La Scala in Milan. She describes it as a formative period of profound influence and opportunity (they remained friends until his death in 2018): “He was theatrical about everything, which was exhausting but so fabulously entertaining. And he made everything seem possible.”
Working with Kemp led to the equally avantgarde brilliance of the late Derek Jarman, another seminal figure in London’s subversive ‘70’s/80s creative scene, whose phone number she’d cadged from a mate in a club. Initially supporting his vision on music videos for bands including Scritti Politti and The Smiths, her first feature film was Caravaggio, a fictionalised reimagining of the life of the titular Baroque painter (also the cinematic debut of legend Tilda Swinton). “It was a wild party,” says Powell. “I think most of us involved in it were under 25. We’d shoot, make costumes, go clubbing at the Café de Paris.” The influence of ‘70’s London, including Bowie (albeit from afar), Kemp, and Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba – the department store that epitomised the era’s electric merging of music, fashion, and sheer attitude into one mesmerising presence – remain a powerful aesthetic touchstone for Powell, and her feel for fashion as a catalyst for transformation: “I’m not sure if it was because it was such a creatively explosive time or because you’re at your most sponge-like as a teen, but it’s a point I often return to. Biba in particular was somewhere where I learnt that fashion was also armour.”
While Powell’s a professional time-traveller – no epoch is out of bounds, with many regularly fused together – it was especially handy for musical drama The Velvet Goldmine (1998), the sumptuous story of a gender fluid superstar in the orgiastic throes of glam rock. It was her first time working with director Todd Haynes who remains, alongside Martin Scorsese, an enduring collaborator. They share, she says, a wealth of commonalities in their visionary approaches to filmmaking: “They’re both very well-read, they understand how to communicate visually, including with clothes, and they also both want to know what every scene, every second will look like. They also come with extraordinary layers of information.” With Scorsese, she’ll receive what’s tantamount to a dossier of research relating to characters, plots, spaces and places (“some films will have been in the research phase for years when I come to them”), while Haynes always has a playlist, sometimes with songs featuring in the film, other times purely to establish mood. “I want to know everything they’re thinking about, I absorb it all.”
On occasion, even the tempo of the script influences the costuming. On Yorgos Lanthimos’s royalty-skewering The Favourite (“a film too low-budget for the costumes to be historically accurate”), she switched damasks, silks and velvets for monochrome cotton and laser-cut vinyl from Shepherd’s Bush – not solely to subdue costs but to give a modern edge to the weight of history, reflecting the subversive bite of “the contemporary writing and reducing the normal flamboyancy of the styling to leave space for the dialogue.”
While choosing favourite characters isn’t really her thing, Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2022) would be the main contender, offering up a great example of her continual need to navigate the psychological territory of director, actor and character to hit the perfect mark: “Despite the brutality, he [Bill the Butcher] had to be dandified to show his wealth and power in that intimidating way a well-dressed person can have. Daniel had his own fairly fully-formed ideas of how it would work, but when he saw what I’d done – taking a long, lean silhouette and making it even more slender, grander and more dominating, with the accentuated top hat and the sweeping canvas coat [made from an old army tent], he knew it was the way to go and the character clicked into place.” The story also reveals her hands-on design process (actress Olivia Coleman has previously quipped about Powell chasing her around to pin a textile swatch onto her back) where sketches generally only appear as a PR sweetener after the fact. “I like to work directly onto a mannequin and the first time I meet an actor I’ll generally try something on them. When you first meet them, you have to gain their confidence, which is why I tend to show instead of telling.”
Her capacity to remain creatively resolute, inextricable from that rebellious streak, power the Powell mythology. Aside from the obvious rigour involved in project research, work ethic (“some projects last as long as a year, during which time you basically have to sacrifice your relationships with friends and family”), passion and humour, she has a palpable air of not giving too many fucks about what others think; the magnetic hallmark of those who don’t need the sustenance of adulation. Which isn’t to suggest arrogance – she is respectful and emphatic about never enforcing her choice on an actor or director (“it is always, always a conversation”) – but that her vision is crystal clear, a necessity for top tier filmmaking: “I am uncompromising, I’m not afraid to say what I think.” It’s compounded by the aforementioned look, for Powell is a relatively rare breed of designer whose personal style is as distinctive as the characters she births. With her signature soft shock of vermillion hair and unparalleled line in suiting she’s become a poster-woman for individuality. Currently starring in Loewe’s SS23 campaign, she’s anti-normcore to the max (“I don’t go for perfection like Anna Wintour, but I would never go to work in a tracksuit”).
Indeed, the ordinary can often be the hardest thing to crack. Summoning everyday style with accuracy is, says Powell, exceptionally difficult. Most pertinent when casting extras, particularly children, she reveals it’s key to
remember that most people’s clothes won’t fit perfectly orbe new “because real life means eclectic style, things bought at different times and in the process of being grown out of”. Like the awkward styling of so many swiftly manufactured bands, all-new screams you’re faking it. Current film, Oliver Hermanus’s Living (2022) about a civil servant in post-WWII London whose terminal medical diagnosis overhauls a dreary life, is a key example, involving reams of rented vintage fashion: “It’s a quiet film about a real person and one of the most satisfying things was seeing the original footage at the beginning segueing into our work. It matched perfectly, which was wonderful.”
With so much under her belt, is there, I ask, a story she’s itching to get her hands on? Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is the answer. A novel traversing themes including the construction of desire, gender and sexuality and a beacon of magic realism (real life co-mingling with the wonders of surrealism), it’s been aborted several times to date with no takers on the horizon but could just be the most thrilling Powell project yet.
Hair & Makeup - Margot Schifano