Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/933080
70 The Costume Designer Winter 2018 SCRAPBOOK The glittering, undulating Costume Designers Guild Awards statuette, originally minted by the jeweler Bvlgari, has become a coveted and celebrated symbol in its own right. When asked about his inspiration, David LeVey says he was influenced by the gilded Hollywood films of the forties and fifties. LeVey sought to marry the aesthetics of the 19th-century sculptor Canova to the surrealism of Dali by way of Technicolor, and to use his lifelong fascination with billowing fabric, perfectly expressed in this image from the Gene Kelly–Cyd Charisse dance sequence from Singin' in the Rain. "The statuette is meant to evoke two things above all," explains LeVey, "that a Costume Designer's work both reveals and conceals the mystery of a character, and that Costume Design is an art of volume and movement, of light and shadow, as well as colour, texture, and silhouette. I suppose the image of amorphous fabric floating down and resolving into the human form suggested Costume Design to me, an act of creation as much as of appropriation. To represent us in a single sculptural image, therefore, something timelessly classical yet fantastical and mysterious; the ethereal and the earthy conjoined. I really—we all really—wanted it to have a striking presence." The Costume Designers Guild Statuette Designed by David LeVey