One of the biggest contenders of this year’s awards season (which kicked off last night with the newly rebranded Golden Globes) is a visually rich, high-concept twist on the classic coming-of-age tale: A naive woman with a sheltered worldview undergoes a journey of self-actualization against a candy-colored backdrop. Along the way, she leaves her insular environs to travel to new lands. She has new experiences, learns new things and meets new people who shape her, some for better, some for worse. She does all of this while wearing a trove of fabulous clothes. In the end, our heroine comes into her own, not as a constructed ideal of femininity, but as a real person. Along the way, there’s a Ryan Gosling-led song-and-dance number and fun for the whole family.
One of the other biggest contenders of this year’s awards season is a visually rich, high-concept twist on the classic coming-of-age tale: A naive woman with a sheltered worldview undergoes a journey of self-actualization against a candy-colored backdrop. Along the way, she leaves her insular environs to travel to new lands. She has new experiences, learns new things and meets new people who shape her, some for better, some for worse. She does all of this while wearing a trove of fabulous clothes. In the end, our heroine comes into her own, not as a constructed ideal of femininity, but as a real person. Along the way, there’s a boatload of sex and a Socialist political awakening.
Barbie and Poor Things took home multiple awards last night (Best Comedy and Best Actress in a Comedy for Poor Things; Best Song and the new, slightly opaque prize for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement for Barbie). Both are also two of the biggest fashion movies of the year – offering strong reminders about the power of clothes to help tell a story. The former is, of course, based on the biggest toy of the modern era. The latter has more obscure IP roots: Alasdair Gray’s strange, spicy, delightful 1992 novel, Poor Things. Adapted for the screen by writer Tony McNamara and directed by all-time-great Greek weirdo Yorgos Lanthimos, it’s the story of Bella Baxter, a young woman who embarks on her afore-referenced journey of self-discovery after being given a second chance at life (literally) by an avuncular mad scientist. In both Gray’s novel and Lanthimos’s film, Bella takes off on a world tour that includes an ill-fated cruise with a caddish lawyer, an eye-opening moment in Alexandria and a stint at a Paris brothel.
Gray’s novel is an offbeat one, both in content and in presentation. A modern, satirical homage to the epistolary gothic novel, the book features inset illustrations, a forward and appendix added by a purportedly real local historian, and passages printed in “handwritten” scrawl. [For the spoiler-averse, stop reading here.] The tale offers a twist on Mary Shelley’s classic literary reanimation masterpiece. This time, a young, freshly deceased-by-suicide pregnant woman is fished out of a Glasgow river. Doctor Godwin Baxter, a gifted but reclusive (and repulsive) surgeon, acquires her corpse, implants the brain of her unborn child into her skull and sets about the business of creating new life. Bella, as he christens his creation, develops at a rapid pace and soon seizes upon life’s grand banquet with a voracious appetite.
Though a few key alterations are made from page to screen, the movie keeps this potentially controversial method of reanimation intact. Surprisingly, there’s been a distinct lack of pearl-clutching over the story’s tawdry potential; it’s a sexual-awakening tale about a woman who, at the outset, has the mind of a child, rapid development or no. Perhaps it’s the overall and overt unreality of the world Lanthimos has created, with its saturated colors, theatrical sets and outlandish flying machines, that’s staved off controversy. Perhaps it’s the wise decision to keep Doctor Baxter’s motives more purely paternal onscreen. In the novel, he admits to Archibald McCandless, the medical student he takes under his wing, that he initially saw Bella as a potential romantic companion, which might have been too much of an ick-inducing element for the silver screen.
More important than grounds for possible online controversy, however, are the clothes. If you want to watch Emma Stone spit out food in a series of incredible outfits, Poor Things is your Citizen Kane. Costume designer Holly Waddington employs a sartorial vocabulary that perfectly melds with Lanthimos’s whole period-piece-meets-sci-fi vibe. She also brilliantly tracks just how much Bella’s ensembles change with her. Just as our pal Barbie goes from spike-heeled hot pink mule to casual Birk over the course of her journey, Bella starts out in some high-style, imaginative takes on childlike magpie chic. There are high-volume ruffles aplenty, knickers galore and one memorable ensemble with attached mittens in the style of a toddler’s snowsuit.
Once Bella shuffles off to Lisbon, things get a bit racier. The bloomers remain, but in airier, brighter fabrics, now accessorized with a pair of modish, mid-calf booties and some angular specs. It’s very Victorian Barbarella. In Paris, where Bella puts in her time at a brothel, her looks become more sophisticated and urbane.
Waddington’s work lends a fairytale air to the proceedings. The clothes are distinctly period in some ways and distinctly fantastical in others. They radiate notes of the great Nineties/early-Aughts outputs of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. Just as in those dizzyingly creative, grand collections, offbeat romance and specific references to historical tailoring spin into eccentricity. There’s a spiritual connection with those designers, too – these clothes feel conjured for a world existing at the heady precipice of dazed reality and full-bloom make-believe.
Ineffably pretty, they still retain something a little dangerous, menacing and gothic. Case in point: When Bella’s abusive husband from her former life interrupts her wedding to McCandless, Stone wears an ethereal but structured white number. In a recent New York Times piece, Waddington notes that she intended the dress’s “bands of tubing in delicate silk” to evoke the “idea of it being a cage.” Joy, beauty, sex and darkness, all wrapped up in one fashion fantasia.
Gray’s novel doesn’t offer quite as much in the way of frothy fashion inspiration as the film, though there is one big, clothing-related moment. Near the novel’s end, it is revealed that while married to the dastardly ex-husband who drove her into the river in the first place, Bella, then called Victoria Blessington, engaged in a decisive act of rebellion, defenestrating the pricey contents of her closet – “shoes, hats, gloves, stockings, corsets, dresses” – out into the street. These “violent actions before an appreciative audience must have filled [her] with a kind of ecstasy…They were probably the first decisive things she had ever done.” How you toss clothes around sends as powerful a message to the world as how you wear them (just ask Jay Gatsby).
Clothes, in fiction as in life, make for a potent narrative engine. As Bella grows more aware of the world, and what she wants for herself from it, her style grows with her, from the outlandish outfits of a child being dressed by a surly maid to the wardrobe selections of a self-defined woman – a strikingly relatable journey of dressing for a
sexy-Frankenstein yarn. A similar fashion transition – from wholesome bubblegum sexiness to grounded jeans and jacket – also announces itself in a tale about history’s most iconic doll as she evolves from sweet-glam plastic stiff to real woman (with a gynecologist to boot). In that sense, Barbie is indeed a thematic tether to Poor Things. Each tells a pop-feminist story of the power and importance of a young woman’s path to self-actualization, and each embraces fashion as a primary signifier. Whether the trip is one of Continental sexcapades or roller-blading jaunts through Venice Beach, well, you can look fabulous either way.