Clothes That Don't Make the Cut

I will preface this article by stating I am not a costume designer, or have ever worked in any costume or wardrobe duties as of now. I am also not a professional academic or journalist.

My information has been gathered from what costume designers, directors, etc have either told me personally or said in interviews; some of it has been from poring over costume auction listings and collections.

What spurred me to write this? Well, partly for myself as a reminder of my own policies, partly for readers to understand why I've not covered a film/TV series on here or, if I have ignored a costume from a work I have covered on here anyway. If the role you're looking for isn't on an article, this will tell you *why* I skipped it.

The costume is bought clothes.

Bought clothes are never included, end of. This archive is about the art of costume design - in short, clothes that were designed and constructed for a production. The clothes in Hackers or Twin Peaks may have been great looks, but the fact they were bought means these films will not be covered.

Movies set in fairly recent decades, such as the 1970s or later, also typically have bought costumes, albeit from vintage clothing shops, thrift stores and flea markets. Ergo, these sort of productions also will not be covered.

This policy extends to bought clothes that were altered for a production; whether it was dyed a different colour, cut to be shorter, distressed to appear more ragged, had patches or studs sewn on, etc. Hence, films such as The Warriors, Mad Max 2 or The Lost Boys, despite their iconic looks, will not be covered.

And, for good measure, costumes that were duplicates of a bought garment, such as The Shining's production-made duplicates of Jack Nicholson's red jacket, or Highlander's imitation overcoats for Christopher Lambert's fight scenes, also will not be covered, due to imitating a bought garment.

The costume is wardrobe stock.

You can't go shopping for medieval, Georgian, Victorian, 1930s, etc fashion, and extras will NOT have costumes individually made custom-made for them, for the sake of budget - and the designer's sanity!

This is why all costume houses such as Western Costume Company, Angels Costumes or Costumi D'Arte, have racks of garments, some dating back decades that will have them used for extras and minor roles.

Some of these stock costumes are reuses from older production, some are pre-made stock garments made by the costume house. The bulk of 20th century clothing in costume houses will be vintage items.

This means that extras and bit-part roles in most film/TV historical productions are not covered, as they are always just wearing wardrobe stock, and did not have their costumes made to order by the designer.

Quite often, you can spot the same garments being reused in different productions - sometimes a main player's costume in one film will be reused in a brief scene, or an an extra, in another. The blog Recycled Movie Costumes is a wonderful resource in that regard.

(Note: Historical 'epics' such as Cleopatra, The Last Emperor, or Apocalypto, or futuristic/fantastical 'epics' like David Lynch's Dune or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, *did* have even the extra's costumes bespoke-made for the production. Such extravagant productions are the exception, not the rule.)

The costume is a military uniform.

In contemporary productions, almost always, uniforms of any sort - military, police, medical, food service, etc - are bought clothes, kept in stock by the costume house that purchased them.

However, for historical war films such as Charge of the Light Brigade, Zulu, or Saving Private Ryan, the historical uniforms will have to be made in bulk at a costume house.

Other historical productions, such as The Mission, The Last Emperor or Raiders of the Lost Ark, while not strictly war films, still required historical military uniforms to be made alongside the other cast members' costumes, often at the very same costume house.

Certain contemporary productions, like Firefox, Red Dawn, or The Hunt for Red October, required cast members to wear Soviet uniforms, which were impossible to procure during the Cold War. Ergo, costume houses made the communist uniforms for these productions.

Historical uniform costumes are almost always never covered as they are based on historical references and ergo not an example of designing. The bulk of period productions will just have their uniformed roles in costumes rented from wardrobe stock, not custom-made for the production.

The costume is not really the costume department's work.

Here we're getting a little nitpicky, but essentially if the 'costume' is something that was not designed by the costume designer, but by special effects artists and propmakers, OR was primarily handled by the aforementioned SFX artists and propmakers.

A good example would be the superhero suits in films such as Batman & Robin or Jingle All The Way - even though they may have had some input from the costume designer, they were instead handled by special effects houses, not by costume house.

Usually, these sort of 'specialty costumes' are not handled by the costume designer, especially in more recent decades, and they are often the most well-known costumes of a film production. Everyone knows what the Star Wars stormtroopers or the Tim Burton Batman's titular superhero looks like.

This policy also extends to costumes that consisted of bought clothes worn with masks, helmets etc that were fabricated by propmakers, such as the killers costumes in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween and Friday the 13th, or the combat uniforms in Star Wars, Blake's 7, and Robocop.

The costume is from a 2000s/2010s production.

A matter of taste but by and large I am not fond of the costumes of most 2000s, 2010s, 2020s etc productions, especially those in futuristic or fantastical settings.

While some period productions of the 2000s and 2010s have had very impressive costume design, they are already well-known and I would prefer to focus on older and overlooked productions.

What few exceptions for 2000s films I have included on here, I have only let slide as their costumes were by veteran designers who still added their own flair.

There will never be articles on ths blog about Cruella, Barbie, Wicked, Poor Things, any 2000s/2010s superhero or scifi movie, etc. Please don't ask me to cover them.