Saturday November 26, 2005
Mussenden’s costume magic
The dress maketh the witch, and costume designer Isis Mussenden (below) slogged hard to ensure the dress was made right.
She fashioned Jadis the White Witch’s costume out of raw silk and wool in her workshop. The dress is dyed to show the witch’s emotions and gets progressively darker as she gets more consumed with herself.
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“There were 97 conceptual drawings the year before the film was done, and none of them really worked because we didn’t know the actress. Then Andrew cast amazing actors who fit the part, which was a gift for me. Tilda Swinton is almost 1.8m tall, and has alabaster skin, clean and amazing-looking. Perfect for the White Witch. All I had to do was make her taller.” They boosted her height with 8in and 4in boots.
In the battle scene, Jadis dons on a beautiful titanium chain mail, gored and cut open with 35,000 links on each skirt, under which sits a leather corset and a skirt to give it form. The chain mail was “done by men who do butcher aprons, and they thought we were crazy,” Mussenden related.
“It doesn’t weigh as much as you think, probably about 9kg. It sits on the waist so tight that she (Swinton) found it more comfortable than all of these dresses.”
Mussenden started her research in January last year, and only started manufacturing when the movie was cast in April. She worked with a team of 60 people, among them jewellers, leather workers, dyers, textile artists and milliners. The costume department is responsible for all the beautiful costumes in the movie.
When Mussenden first read the book in preparation for the movie, the strongest impression she had was the witch’s ice crown. That became the starting point of her designs.
“Andrew and I have very similar tastes – clean, simple lines and bolder statements. Once I got into it, it was great fun finding the right textiles,” she enthused.
For the children, Mussenden took pre-Raphaelite paintings as a point of inspiration, especially for their coronation gowns. “The children had a particular motif of their own, which a textile artist created for me,” she explained. For their coronation dress, she bought silk velvet from France, dyed, combed and printed it with glue and gold leaf.
As for the creatures in the witch’s army, which include goblins, cyclops and harpies, she kept it organic. “We used things like bark and even dried bones from dinner,” she recounted.
Did she have difficulty not referring to Lord of the Rings?
“I didn’t really see the show. We also have a lot more species. Even the people we hired had not worked on Lord of the Rings (her workshop was based in New Zealand during the tenure of filming).”
The biggest challenge Mussenden faced?
“Dressing the children because they were always growing. Any given dress had to be made 12 times,” she sighed. – By TAN LEE KUEN
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