The costume designer behind the (Impossibly Stylish) Supervillain #Cruella

Two-time Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan talks through Cruella’s most elaborate looks from Vogue UK.

‘Costume designers don’t get much cooler than Jenny Beavan. The British septuagenarian made global headlines in 2016 when she won the Best Costume Design Oscar for her sensational work on George Miller’s dystopian nightmare Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). It wasn’t her first Oscar – she’d previously taken home the prize for A Room with a View (1985) and has been nominated for The Bostonians (1984), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Anna and the King (1999), Gosford Park (2001) and The King’s Speech (2010).

But, despite her wealth of experience, her latest project was initially a daunting one: Cruella, Craig Gillespie’s raucous origin story for the fur-loving supervillain Cruella de Vil, as played by a cackling Emma Stone. Set amid the punk-rock revolution in ’70s London, it follows aspiring designer Estella (Stone) who catches the eye of industry fixture Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson).

A showstopper is Cruella’s look when she’s standing on top of a car wearing a long pink skirt and jacket with miniature horses and carriages on her shoulders. How did you create that?

“That jacket was a work of art. I found a beautiful jacket that could have worked, but we decided to remake it. Then, the whole point of the frilly skirt was that it had to enclose the Baroness’s car. It had to be enormous and light enough that she could wear it, but also heavy enough that you could swoosh it around [the car]. That was a real challenge because at first, it was just far too heavy. In the end, it was made by Kirsten Fletcher, who’s an incredible costume maker, and I had a lot of students hand-sewing petals in my workroom. Apparently, there were 5,060 petals in total.” Read more here  …and also read here about the amazing set design