The clothes in "Hillary and Jackie" evoke a mood and a time that's much closer to our own, showing us little English girls in early-1950s hand-knit Fair Isle sweaters and caps; later, we get a swinging-'60s Jacqueline du Pré in a red vinyl minidress and shiny black car coat. And Powell must have had a field day with "Velvet Goldmine," set in London in the early '70s. Although the movie's outlandish glam-rock confections, replete with spangles and feather boas, are what stick in people's memories, the "street wear" garments Powell devised for the characters are actually more effective, and brilliant in the way they evoke both the mood of the era and the sensibilities of the characters who wear them. The opening sequence shows a gaggle of kids running down the street in bell-bottoms, tiny T-shirts and Edwardian thrift-store fare, set to Brian Eno's "Needle in the Camel's Eye." It's a euphoric opening, and the clothes play a big role in it -- they're clothes for playing dress-up, part of the tool kit teenagers use to reinvent themselves, along with music and sex and drugs and whatever else. One of the movie's central characters -- an ambitious and sexually adventurous party girl, played by Toni Collette, who's ultimately crushed and humiliated by her rock-star boyfriend -- is a vision of careless, blissful freedom in her '70s jewel-colored velvets and quivering feathers. When we see her character circa 1984, after having fallen on hard times, her anonymous black shirt and pants and aggressively somber silver jewelry mark her as a person who's chosen to recede and wither, in a wrenching contrast to her younger, bolder self.

"Velvet Goldmine" and "Shakespeare in Love" may seem like two disparate projects for one designer to have worked on in the same year, but they're really just an unusual and slightly mismatched set of bookends. Because they're both about performers, people who devote themselves to creating new, miniature worlds for audiences, they're both excuses for lots of excess and pageantry and rich fabrics -- a costumer's dream. But even though "Shakespeare in Love" may seem like the less contemporary of the two pictures, in some ways it's actually more modern, with its little anachronistic jokes and often breezy dialogue. Its story is a piece of whimsy held in place by a few real-life historical figures and a fragile fact or two. And because it's set in a time none of us actually remember, it's relatively untainted by nostalgia.

In fact, what's striking about the costumes in "Shakespeare in Love" is how modern they are -- they're more like stylized love letters to the clothing of the era than faithful re-creations. Powell admits certain sacrifices of historical accuracy: Reportedly, Miramax studio executives wanted to make sure the men wouldn't look "silly" in their tights, so Powell made the jackets a little longer. But even Powell's sacrifices have the ring of truth. It was a stroke of genius to put Joseph Fiennes' young Will Shakespeare in a quilted, fitted gray-blue leather jacket -- to reincarnate him as a sort of Elizabethan Wild One. If you're watching carefully, you'll notice that sometimes the jacket is worn as a vest, sleeveless, over a loose-fitting shirt. I'm not sure zip-off sleeves existed as an option in the late 1500s, but it's an idea whose time should have come long ago. Will's jacket is a marvel of dawn-to-dusk versatility, the kind of thing that could take you from an early morning of scribbling with a quill pen through a sword fight to a late night of revelry and carousing -- without even a change of accessories.

Yet it's the dresses and jackets Powell devised for Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola that stand out most. Viola's costume changes are almost a plot device -- they help move the story along, if only because you wonder what she's going to turn up in next. The detail on each of Viola's costumes is a source of wonder: The filigreed metal "cages" that encase the cap sleeves of one of her dresses are almost like jewelry in themselves. The blue velvet jacket she wears when she's disguised as a boy looks fairly undistinguished until you see it from behind, particularly in the scene in which she reveals her identity to Will. Then you notice the rows of tiny tucks lined up along the collar, fanning out like the sun's rays. They seem like a frivolous detail -- who, save clothing junkies, is going to be looking that closely? -- but in addition to being simply beautiful, they're probably a shaping device, allowing the collar to fold softly around Paltrow's swan neck.

The lines of Viola's clothes tell us almost as much about her as her spoken lines do. Powell puts her in iridescent pleated gauzes, a golden peach ball gown that shimmers like a dragonfly's wing, a pale aqua dressing gown that looks suitable for an undersea princess. Even her high ruffled collars don't restrict her movement; there's always something light and airy about the way they frame her face. Viola seems sparrowlike, free, a delicate but willful creature that could be borne on the air. Only in her heavy, pale-gold wedding dress -- worn as she's being married to a man she doesn't love, an arrangement she's bound by law and family duty to honor -- does she look stiff and restricted. Not even her flowing wedding veil lightens it.

The wedding gown is the only one of Viola's dresses in "Shakespeare in Love" that's "wrong" -- which is precisely what makes it right. Viola moves differently in it; she's more tentative, uncertain, and suddenly, less girlish -- its thick quilted bodice seems to be her first lesson in feeling weighed down and bound. Of course, in real life, Elizabethan women's clothes were mostly uncomfortable and restrictive by today's standards. That everything Viola wears, save for that wedding dress, looks so light, so casual in a way, is part of Powell's triumph. She's not out to capture history in the circumference of a farthingale or the diameter of a ruff. She's out to write another kind of truth -- a kind of truth that anyone in a Polartec pullover and a pair of jeans can relate to -- in the drape of a skirt or the cut of a sleeve.

And to suggest that if the greatest playwright who ever lived had had the chance to reinvent his jacket as a vest by zipping off the sleeves -- well, he just might have taken it.
salon.com | May 6, 1999

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