Cate Blanchett is The Wicked Stepmother
Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell had the pleasure of recreating Cinderellas total look and lots of the cast members for the upcoming film that is due to be released in March of next year! I’m so uber ecstatic to see this film and I have the deets on a recent interview with costume designer Sandy Powell about the dress and so much more inside! If you truly love period films and costumes, you are in for a treat! Prance inside why don’t you!
“The bad guy is always the most fun to dress,” admits three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell. “And the good, kind person is always the most challenging.” Disney’s live-action Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh and due out on March 13th, gave her plenty of room to stretch in both directions. Lily James stars as the ultimate little girl’s fantasy figure, and actress Cate Blanchett is Cinderella’s evil stepmother.
For Cate Blanchett, whom costumer Powell has dressed in a few films had this to say…“To be in dialogue with Sandy instantly makes an actor’s internal work become more active and purposeful,” she says. “She invites grace, chutzpah, and irreverence, and one’s performance must rise to the occasion.”
Powell was aiming for the look of “a nineteenth-century period film made in the 1940s or ’50s,” she says. Cinderella’s stepsisters sport the yellow and pink of 1950s sorority sisters. “They are meant to be totally ridiculous on the outside—a bit too much and overdone—and ugly on the inside,” Powell says. Dressing Cinderella herself, meanwhile, required a subtle rethinking of the tale’s traditional iconography. “I didn’t want her in rags, as she is often portrayed in the storybooks,” Powell explained. “What I gave her instead is a dress that starts out pretty and ends up looking faded, tired, and worn out.”
Cinderella’s dress is breathtaking and simply magical! It’s made of a cerulean gown with a voluminous skirt composed of more than a dozen layers of gossamer-fine silk in different shades of pale blue, turquoise, and lavender. “When I first put it on, I felt both empowered and scared,” James recalls. “How could I live up to this? Then I realized I could use that fear to show me how Cinderella would feel at that moment.”
Cinderella’s signature slipper, meanwhile, is made of crystal, designed in collaboration with Swarovski, and based upon a shoe from the 1890s that Powell found in a museum in Northampton. That shoe had a five-inch heel and no platform. “So besides the fact that Cinderella’s slipper is crystal, the shape of the last makes it impossible to walk in,” Powell says. “I was amazed that I was allowed to do it—that nobody wondered how they were going to reproduce it for children. But then,” she muses, “I guess the glass slipper is the ultimate fetish shoe, isn’t it?” This was all sourced from Vogue.
Helena Bonham Carter is The Fairy Godmother
Lily James is Ella & Richard Madden is The Prince
Images courtesy of Disney
