That The Elephant Man dresses up inquiries into genuine, turbulent grace in the historically staid traditions of biopic and period costume drama reveal David Lynch’s aspirations to be as formally experimental as they are narratively humanistic.
Mean Girls is a time capsule filled with clothing that defined not just the year 2004, but how it felt to be an American teenager in 2004—the Juicy Couture tracksuits, the Seven for All Mankind jeans and heart-shaped Return to Tiffany & Co. charm necklaces, the teeny tiny rainbow monogrammed Louis Vuitton bags and equally miniscule miniskirts.
Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright is a slippery treatise on performance and presentation, with complex and concerted attention to how its characters dress.
The title of Mike Leigh's Meantime is quite literal and temporal. Everyone is trapped in the stagnancy of unemployment, and so waiting—literally just sitting around—becomes the primary action of the film.
Superbad is as much a time capsule of the way teenage boys talked in 2007 (about each other and women) as it is reflective of a style of popular American comedy reaching its peak.
Labor often calls forth another version of the self; the working version of Maureen in Personal Shopper is competent and well-spoken, and what’s more, she seems to make decisions with ease—even while her own personal life has stuttered so thoroughly to a halt.
In Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Mr. Rogers enacts the opening costume-change ritual. There’s something mythic about the transformation, something primal. This is what Mr. Rogers does: he changes his outfit. And thus, he becomes Mr. Rogers.
In its distinct way, the style in The Wiz stitches America’s troubling past to an imagined Black future, creating something truly surreal.
Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street—released 50 years ago this October—suggests that there is perhaps not such a clean line between the Old World and the New, between rejecting or accepting acculturation, and that maybe that blurriness can both ground and liberate.
Opening Night was John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands' sixth collaboration. Two disruptors tearing down the walls of an establishment to forge a different kind of accepted entertainment, free from the bars of script, transmutable to those changed by it. A shedding of costume.
Virtuosity may be uneven, but its style is decidedly assured, and the film’s costuming stands out as a sartorial cipher to a past that informed its anxiety over what was coming next.