Alice in Wonderland

Since I specifically set up this Blog to talk about costume design, I thought that this would be an ideal subject to cover. I have recently watched Alice in Wonderland (2010), only for the second time, and I have only just started to appreciated how truly remarkable the costume design is. The costume designer was Colleen Atwood, who has worked on a number of other movies directed by Tim Burton, namely Dark Shadows. I have put with the evaluations some images from the movie, and preliminary sketches that the designer used to create her masterpieces. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

ALICE

Alice wears many outfits during the film, mainly because of her constant change in size. I can only wonder at how difficult it was to make sure the dresses would look equally as good when they were digitally scaled up or down. Here's my take on the two main dresses she wore.Alice's first dress is worn when we first meet her. It is an absolutely gorgeous sky blue colour. There is lace at the neckline, but apart from that, it is completely different from the dress in the 1951 film, or the little white apron of the Disney movie. I presume this is because  she is to be portrayed as an older girl in this film, maybe 19 or 20. The embroidery around the bottom of the skirt is in a deep blue, and was added to give more interest to the dress - as Alice falls down the rabbit hole you see the bottom of her dress a lot more closely, as well as the many petticoats and underskirts she wears.

Her other main outfit is the red dress that the Red Queen has fashioned for her when Alice is discovered in the gardens. In the film the queen says "Use the curtains if we must" and that is the effect the dress aims to achieve. My favourite touch on this dress, even though some may think it insignificant (maybe they didn't even notice it), is the cord around the waist - just adding to the whole 'scrabbled together quickly out of the curtains with no consideration to appearance or style' look. This is my personal favourite outfit from the film.

THE RED QUEEN

In the film, she is portrayed as a mixture of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen (who is in Alice Through the Looking Glass) - which is the reason for her obsession with hearts. There is only one dress that we see the Red Queen wear in the film. It  has tight fitting sleeves and an even tighter bodice, presumably worn with a waist cincher (either that or Helena Bonham-Carter has a ridiculously good figure). It is based on the typical Elizabethan style of dress, with its puffed cap sleeves and large ruff at the neck. The latter, however, was for a reason. It had to be exaggerated to accommodate her digitally enhance head! About the fabric, Atwood said “[She’s] vaguely trailer trash material, so we used less luxurious fabrics. Hence the gold hearts made out of gold foil, which were a little tacky but still queen-like.”  Clashing fabrics were used to contrast the fairy-like dress of her sister.

THE WHITE QUEEN

For the White Queen, Atwood was most definitely influenced by the French court of Louis XVI, it looks as if Marie Antoinette could have worn it and looked as equally at home as Anne Hathaway. The bodice is actually surprisingly low cut for such an innocent as the White Queen, but the ruffles of silk-like fabric make sure it stays a feminine dress. Panniers are used to give Hathaway's dress that ultimate fairy-tale look, as if she wasn't sweet enough already! It's is a shame we don't see the White Queen so much in the film, as her dress is one of the most delicate and intricate of all the costumes.

                            THE HATTER

The hatter is mad, as if you didn't already know, and therefore he needed an eccentric costume. Que Atwood to come up with an outfit only she could. She added all the tiny details that no one expects but everyone notices, and it suits Hatter down to the ground. It helps that she has worked with Depp before in many films, as you will see below if you read the interview extract, so she knows exactly what will work and what won't. I can't give a more detailed description than the one Atwood gives herself on this video, so for the Hatter watch here.

Atwood talks about her work with Tom Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and specifically about the Hatter's, Alice's and the Red Queen's costumes. I love the detail in which she talks about how the team created Hatter's jacket, with multiple layers of silk and burning off some to create the worn affect. She did an interview with www.movieline.com, a part of which I have below.

You've worked with Johnny Depp many times now.
I have ... Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow ... Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland ...

It must be a treat to design for an actor who can disappear so seamlessly inside his characters.
He really is a chameleon, and he takes on the character in the clothes. They don't ever look like costumes on him; they look real, and that really helps my job

Your partnership with Tim Burton -- how did the two of you first come together?

I was recommended to him on Edward Scissorhands by a production designer ... who I'd work with prior to that. ... We clicked in our own way, and we've managed to have a long run together and still enjoy working together.

Do you conceive of the costumes together through sketches? I know he frequently begins on paper.

There's something that he captures that is kind of the soul of the character on paper, and there's often costume elements, but we're not married to that at all. With the Mad Hatter ... he really doesn't give me a drawing and say, "This is what I want." I think it's because he knows the other people working with him are artists, so he gets very excited and enthusiastic when we show him what we have.

How did the new 3-D technology he used in Alice in Wonderland affect your designs?
I did a lot of the computer animated costumes -- I knew what the animated world was going to be, and I knew a bit about 3-D anyway, and so I sort of tried to make stuff that you could play with in 3-D... We ended up physically making a lot of the other stuff and it would later end up being animated. It really helped Tim to see things as physical costumes first, and it gave the animators a lot of help as far as depth and texture and things like that.

Are you ever tempted to, or maybe you do, design your own clothes?
You know, it's strange. Like, I've designed my Oscar dresses and my people have made them for me, but my own clothes per se that I wear? No -- but I do a lot of fitting. Like I'll buy something and completely recut it. I'm so used to thinking that my clothes are fairly neutral, it's other people's clothes I like to design.

To read the entire article, please click here.

 Thank you so much for reading, I hope you loved it! More to come soon; I have three posts in the works at the moment, one on the Hunger Games (having just finished the books), one on The Duchess and finally a post on The Young Victoria.

After these are finished, I'll try to keep up-to-date with the new releases in the box office, Les Miserables being one.