If you loved the costumes from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet (remember Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt and Claire Danes’ white angel wings?), then you love the work of Catherine Martin. Martin is the Australian costume designer behind the film who has won four Oscars and worked side by side with Luhrmann for years on some of the most memorable costumes in Hollywood, from the gritty glamour of Moulin Rouge! to the opulent flapper gowns of The Great Gatsby. She’s known for both her historical authenticity and her wild sense of fantasy when designing period pieces. On Friday, Martin sat down with the international editor of Vogue, Hamish Bowles, for a Tribeca Film Festival talk to discuss how she got started, her collaboration with Miuccia Prada, which vintage pieces are hard to reproduce (denim), and why buttons are extremely important in movies. Here are the highlights:
On anachronistic period costumes:
I think it’s a deliberate choice to make the images and the characters more accessible to an audience. You don’t have the distancing of reality, per se, because what meant something in 1923 doesn’t mean something today. But I think it’s also about shamelessly pursuing the feelings described in whatever text you have. So you try to transcend being slavishly true because it might not help in the end. Does it help to see Daisy and Jordan on the couch in those huge, big white linen dresses that they wore in 1923 that basically just look like nighties now? In our minds, all of us have seen hundreds of flapper Halloween costumes, and we’ve looked on Instagram, and people have Gatsby-themed weddings all the time.
On a collaboration with Prada:
Although Miuccia says she only references the past she knows herself, things she’s lived through or seen. You can see she’s incredibly cultured, she comes from a historical European tradition, and in her clothes you can see that culture, being well read and surrounded by museums. But with her it becomes the future. It’s a very interesting thing, and it’s not consciously trying to quote the past. Whereas in a way they are both trying to get at something new, Baz and Miuccia. But Baz does it by very consciously quoting the past all the time. There’s a certain amount of irreverent nostalgia and it’s all about referencing the past to get to the future.
On her obsession with buttons:
I love a bit of trim and I love a button. I think buttons are very important. Because a button is this big [motions with her hands] on the screen because 30 percent of every film [is a close-up] so if you’re looking at a big plastic button on Leonardo DiCaprio and he’s going, “I love you baby, I love you,” and all you can see is the plastic button––it pushes you over the edge.
On her childhood interest in fashion:
I remember being the nerdy kid who would beg my parents to take me to the Victoria and Albert Museum and go through the costume section over and over and over again. My grandmother in Australia was a staunch Presbyterian, and every once in a while the ladies of the church would get out sort of dubious vintage clothing of dubious provenance and do a historical fashion parade and I just thought it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen. It all starts from loving clothes and loving the glamour and make-believe of what clothes can do for you.
On her creative partnership with Baz:
Baz is a visual director. He always is tearing pictures out of magazines or sticking things into his diary. That’s not to say that I sometimes vehemently disagree, but I get to walk into this incredible mind. Baz will say, “I have a scene set in an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx,” our job is to find images and actually flesh this out in a very real way. Or it might be someone’s apartment––we have this very happy family, they’re just as poor as this other sad family, find me two separate kinds of accommodation, one that’s happy, one that’s sad but in the same socioeconomic bracket, but the architecture actually speaks to the characters general malaise. You have to do a lot of detective work. In The Get Down a lot of it is oral history. What did Converse mean to you; what made a pair of suede Pumas in 1977 really desirable?
On portraying reality versus fantasy:
It’s good to have the written material and the image. Because if you look at a cancan dancer in the 19th century, they look like a granny gone bad and you then read the experience. I read a lot of American guidebooks to Paris, and it would be descriptions of people’s night out in the Moulin Rouge. And when you heard about what it actually felt like to be there, the image and the description didn’t match, because our modern-day connotations don’t equate with the image. It’s just reality and fantasy.
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