Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1057451
32 The Costume Designer Fall 2018 SALVADOR PEREZ B. ÅKERLUND The citrine shock that is the color yellow dominates the screen. Characters clad in yellow are distinctive and unforgettable. Memorable examples have included Mona May's vivacious plaid suit for Alicia Silverstone as Cher in Clueless and the splendid chrome yellow damask gown for the iconclastic Queen Elizabeth from Alexandra Byrne in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Ha Nguyen's startling zoot suit for Jim Carey in The Mask, and Catherine Marie Thomas' iconic tracksuit for Uma Thurman's avenging bride in Kill Bill further that theme. B. Åkerlund credits her frequent collaborator and hus- band Jonas Åkerlund for initially suggesting yellow for the extraordinary gown Beyoncé wore in her Lemonade music video. The Cavalli dress was selected during shoot- ing before Åkerlund knew the album's title. "Yellow is the color of happiness," she enthuses. "It is not what you wear on a depressed day. I felt yellow was sort of a dead color in fashion—nobody was using it. But, it's a secret color that I sneak into projects. We hadn't had a big yellow moment on anything we had been working on." Åkerlund searched the globe, assembling an army of pieces both new and vintage, and initially began shooting with a green version. "But it wasn't quite right," she says. The resulting mustard yellow images seared onto screens and into the collective consciousness. Åkerlund explains, "To me, yellow is the one color that always can do no wrong." Purple is an extraordinary color. In the ancient world, the dye was culled from Mediterranean sea snails. It was expensive to extract and dazzling to behold. Purple is the color of royalty and contemplation. It was not until the British chemist William Henry Perkins happened upon a syn- thetic version while seeking a cure for malaria, that the color could be manufactured otherwise. The vivid shade ignited Victorian fashion hysteria after Queen Victoria famously wore a purple gown in 1862. In M. Night Shyamalan's film Unbreakable, Joanna Johnston slices the sophisticated, slen- der suits of Samuel L. Jackson (Mr. Glass) in facets of purple and violet to betray his distorted worldview. In Mad Men, Janie Bryant chose a striking purple blouse, skirt, and vest for Christina Hendricks to represent her new job position and to suggest masculinity, without losing sight of her femininity. For Salvador Perez, his affinity for purple began in grade school, where he embraced unconventionality with complete disregard for classmates' opinions. "It's funny because purple is my go-to color from a design standpoint," he remarks. While Perez is known for his unabashed use of color for The Mindy Project, he only dressed Mindy in the hue on occasion. But, a glance back into his career reveals the color reverberating. "The majority of my bridal parties are shades of purple—lav- ender, plum, and eggplant," he says. "My very first movie I designed was Soul Food and the bridesmaids were in purple and iridescent gold taffeta with purple trim. I think that colors convey a story and purple expresses elegance and royalty. It's a very grand color." ANE CRABTREE Red summons passion and blood, it is also the color of danger. In ancient times, the pigment's intense energy could only be created through mining cinnabar, a highly toxic naturally occurring mercuric sulfide or the maceration of a South American insect, the cochineal. This scarcity created value which paintings by Tinteretto and Titian of clergy and nobles clad in red attest to. On screen, red is never an acci- dent. In Outlander, Terry Dresbach gave Caitriona Balfe an eighteenth-century gown, which defied baroque sensibilities in a sculptural scarlet winking at her modern origins. Marilyn Vance sheathed Julia Roberts in crimson for a pivotal scene in Pretty Woman to capture sensual elegance and transfor- mation. Eiko Ishioka gave Bram Stoker's Dracula a suit of armor whose delineated musculature symbolized his blood lust. In the King and I, Irene Sharaff conjured exoticism with a red silk suit for Yul Brenner. Adrian's ruby slippers for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz are literally magic. "In The Handmaid's Tale, red is sacred—a life force in a world that has been drained of color," muses Ane Crabtree. "It's the color of fertility, of women, and menses. It's a glar- ing clarion call in a world that is concrete and very indus- trial and gray." Crabtree used red sparingly in the series, reserving it only for the handmaids and their emblematic, columnar uniforms with ethereal white wing bonnets. She continues, "It's sort of a love and a hate with the color red. The handmaids are hated because of their fertility by the wives and by other members of society. Red is like a caution- ary color that evokes emotion and passion, and sometimes costs you your life."