‘YOU shouldn’t stare,” Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) says flirtatiously. “Well, you shouldn’t look like that,” a smitten James Bond (Daniel Craig) responds. It is a scene from Sam Mendes’ Spectre (2015). Madeleine is in an ethereal sea-foam bespoke dress, Bond in a white tuxedo.
“She was traveling. That light green dress that she wore in the train was specially made for her. I wanted a dress that she could roll in and could be glamorous and where she could breathe,” costume designer Jany Temime (House of the Dragon, Judy, Harry Potter series) told Bloomberg.com, adding that of all Madeleine’s clothing, “I loved the green dress best, and the tuxedo,” she said. “She had that dress. He had that white tuxedo. They are in Morocco, in a train, which is an incredible look. Together they are like a dream couple.”
GHOSTLY. SPECTRAL.
THAT dress, one of the most unforgettable gowns ever worn by a Bond Girl, was designed by Lesley Mobo for Ghost, a British fashion label founded in 1984. The floor-length satin dress, called the Salma, features a cowl back, capped sleeves and boat neck. It heightened the Gallic allure of Seydoux, who played a sharpshooting psychiatrist and assassin’s daughter.
“It was part of the Ghost classic collection. But we’ve been updating it when the new owner, Touker Suleyman from British Dragon’s Den, asked me to help me revive the brand,” says the Aklan-born, London-based Mobo. “So my first point was to redesign and revive the core collection. It took a lot of time to develop the collection because the fabrics were specially designed for Ghost as well. It used a particular technique of boiling a fabric to shrink it and give the dress that vintage feel of a bias-cut dress.”
The brand’s in-house PR organized the whole marketing team to coordinate with the Spectre costume designer. “I remember I was in Manila with my mother and brother when we saw the huge poster of Léa. I felt proud of myself and the whole team for that,” Mobo recalls. “It was like a dream come true, really. I made my brother and my mother proud but I wish my dad had been alive to see it then. I think he would have been so proud of me because he was a big James Bond fan. He introduced me to some old films, like You Only Live Once and Goldfinger.”
Everything like that is just luck and a bit of PR magic, Mobo muses. “But what I love about it is that the dress was all over the world in massive posters and it was in the iconic train scene of the film. So it was good for Ghost in the end, and I felt I had done my job for the brand.”
SCIENCE-FICTION. HIGH FASHION.
THE impalpable Michael Cinco also had a stellar year in 2015. His haute-couture creations seen in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending, about “a young woman [Mila Kunis as Jupter Jones] who discovers her destiny as an heiress of intergalactic nobility and must fight to protect the inhabitants of Earth from an ancient and destructive industry;” and American Horror Story: Hotel, the horror anthology TV series created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, where Lady Gaga plays The Countess, a blood-sucking fashionista. (In 2018, Cinco also dressed Kris Aquino as the haughty Malay Princess Intan in Crazy Rich Asians.)
Cinco created the wedding gown of Jupiter in a climactic scene, where she is forced to marry Titus Abrasax (Douglas Booth) before Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) thwarts the ceremony. “Mila’s wedding gown was custom-made,” says the Samar-born, Dubai-based designer. “I was contacted by the costume designer Kym Barrett, who asked me if I could help her design the wedding gown costume. She saw my dress in Swarovski magazine and immediately looked for me from the Swarovski company files.”
Of the designs that Cinco submitted, Barrett (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Aquaman, The Matrix and Romeo+ Juliet) selected three for the movie. “All the costumes I made were paid for. First, she asked me to create a dress in yellow for one scene. For the second one, she asked me to create the dress that she saw in the magazine [both dresses were ultimately not used]. The last one was the wedding gown but I didn’t make the headdress.”
The ravishing creation is a Swarovski-encrusted nude illusion dress with swirling embroidery and huge floral appliques in the bodice and all over the hemline. “I was so excited and overwhelmed when I saw my dress in the movie,” Cinco says.
The photos Barrett saw in Swarovski magazine were from his 2011 “The Impalpable Dream of Aphrodite” collection: “I did the Red Charity Gala, then the next day I flew to New York to attend the WGSN Fashion Awards where I won the Breakthrough Designer Award, then the next day I went back to Manila to do my Philippine Fashion Week show. After two days, I did the Slim’s 50th anniversary tribute.”
‘RESPECT’ BEGETS RESPECT.
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, was a larger-than-life genius. As entertainer and activist, she was the voice and embodiment of Black Excellence. She was also a tortured soul. So when Tony Award-winning costume designer Clint Ramos was tasked to dress up Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson for the Liesl Tommy-directed biopic Respect, he told Variety.com that he always kept in mind, “How did she use clothing as armor or as a distraction from her trauma?”
The Cebu-born, New York-based Ramos is an alumnus of the Philippine High School for the Arts, University of the Philippines Diliman and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has done costume design and scenic design for several theater productions all over the world (including Tanghalang Pilipino), gaining nominations for his work. Respect is perhaps his most high-profile project to date, and Hudson (handpicked by Aretha) his most ardent collaborator.
“Aretha was a very photographed star, but a lot of the film imagines what could have happened outside of that public persona. That was the biggest challenge. What did she wear when she was battling alcoholism or when she was really disappointed in her marriage? These were the things that kept me up at night—not the gowns and the glamour, although reimagining those beautiful outfits was really fun,” Ramos said to Vogue.com.
One of Aretha’s favorite outfits that Ramos recreated is the “Amsterdam Dress,” a gold metallic number that she must have bought off-the-rack. It is also the one used in the movie’s poster. “This is one of the moments when you can appreciate that couture is [touched] by very little technology. Everything is done by hand. You see the labor and craftsmanship,” he told Variety.com. “I loved the geometric pattern and how it created a mesh around her body. I decided to do something softer and something that would cling to her curves better. That’s when we decided to bead it—but on the diagonal so it skims the body. It’s very heavy and weighs around 40 pounds. It’s very pale pink and champagne pearls with Swarovski crystals all over it.”