Word: velvetized
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Moviedom is filled with memorable fashion imagery--Vivien Leigh's Gone With the Wind green velvet, Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina cocktail sheath, Jean Seberg's T shirts in Breathless, almost anything Mike Myers wore in Austin Powers--but how often can articles of clothing be credited with having a performance-enhancing power akin to, say, a film's director? It happened, it seems, during the shooting of Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, an homage to the David Bowie '70s and the world of men in makeup. According to Toni Collette, who played a rock-star wife, all the leopard print...
...Come the Academy Awards next month, Powell, a 38-year-old Londoner with 25 pictures and two previous Oscar nominations to her name, will be up again for a statuette--and the competition will include herself. Last week the designer received two Oscar nominations--one for her work on Velvet Goldmine and the other for the hit romance Shakespeare in Love...
...would be easy to sum up Powell as merely a lover of the period piece. After all, in addition to Velvet Goldmine and Shakespeare, her resume includes The Wings of the Dove and Orlando as well as Edward II, Rob Roy and Michael Collins. But what seems to attract Powell most are characters who lead showy, tumultuous, unhesitant lives, the sort through which she can indulge her taste for bold color and texture to the fullest. "I couldn't do a project if it was all just fantastic costumes and a rubbish script," she explains. "I couldn't be bothered...
...decadent sequins and satin that make up Velvet Goldmine eclipse everything else in the film. Recalls director Haynes: "When she agreed [to work on Velvet Goldmine], I started leaping up and down because I knew how important the costumes were to this film. Sandy's work is impeccably rich." Powell's best move in Goldmine, albeit the quietest, is ensuring that rock-star Brian Slade, the film's lead character, never looks all that different offstage than he does when he's performing. His lover and rival Curt Wild opts for black behind the scenes, but Slade believes in glam...
...childhood in that studio, with my head in a vise as my poppy beat me with a cattle prod. A lot of the stuff that we produce today in these multi-million dollar studios, with all the fancy equipment, with the vises made of softest velvet, just don't compare to the songs I made in that little toolshed studio. Something about that studio was never really recaptured...