Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Miuccia Prada on designing costumes for The Great Gatsby



Despite claims that the Roaring Twenties has never influenced her collections, Miuccia Prada's design aesthetic proved to be a match made in party-dressing heaven for 'The Great Gatsby' costumes.

Nevermind that The Great Gatsby star Carey Mulligan and Prada dresses go together like cheese and wine, Miuccia Prada's involvement in the forthcoming film happened rather unwittingly.

It turns out the film's costume designer, Catherine Martin, used existing Prada and Miu Miu looks for a screen test. WWD reveal that the clothes looked so good, Martin approached Mrs Prada to create 40 looks for the film's party scenes.

The film's director, Baz Luhrmann, "wanted to show her [Mulligan's character Daisy Buchanan] as the most beautiful and rich woman on earth" says Prada, who was "relieved" to be able to use her archive as a starting point for the costumes - such as the 'chandelier dress' from her spring/summer 2010 collection, which was appropriated for Daisy.

Oscar-winning Martin, who is married to Luhrmann, revealed how she didn't want to get lost in trying to replicate every minutiae from the fashions of the era. She explains: "The reality is that from 1920, I could find a photo or a fashion illustration that would support almost any choice that we've made in the film. But we are not making a documentary. We are trying to express a story in a way in which Fitzgerald's visceral modernity is able to transgress the plane of the screen."

Conversely, Prada claims she hadn't been influenced by the decadent Jazz Age of the 1920s in her collections.

"That's what's interesting," she explained. "The point of view can transform things so much. Yes, probably a few [dresses] had that kind of edge, but almost none were meant to be the Twenties when I did them. I was really fascinated by that."

Selected costumes from the film will be exhibited in the Prada store on Broadway in New York, from tomorrow. Featuring gowns, dresses, hats, shoes and jewellery as well as sketches, production stills, backstage footage and trailers from the film, the exhibition will travel to the Prada Tokyo Epicenter store from June 14 to 30, and the IFC Mall in Shanghai in mid-July.

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