Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/989249
understanding of costume which underscores every project she considers. In her most recent venture, she suggested to director Paul Thomas Anderson that he needed a photo book of his upcoming film about a British couture house in the 1950s. He invited her to document it. She says, "Because Paul is the auteur, they just let us do. I was the conduit for what he wanted." She hired British photographer Laura Hynd and set off to document the movie. Hynd shot with a medium for- mat camera, and despite the closed set, the duo was allowed greater access as the cast became increasingly comfortable. Officially, no photography was permitted while filming. But because of a desire to create some classic still images with- out having on-set photography, Anderson wrote in a scene where Hynd, on camera as a photographer, shoots portraits of couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and muse Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps). In the final edit, de Rakoff chose to create a book with an eye toward the film's female characters. "What I love most about Phantom Thread is it's such a female-centric movie. Initially, if it had just been up to me, it might have become a different book. But it was Paul who suggested, 'I really just want to see the people.' I responded by saying, 'Well, if you really just want to see the people, then we really should just be looking at the women and tell the story through their eyes.'" The resulting artifact looks at characters and garments without the intrusion of text. Both humanist and candid in feeling, the photographs have an immediacy in their implicit narrative. It is a testament to Bridge's virtuoso design for the period of 1954 that his fabricated world has the weight of reality. The women of The House of Woodcock capture our imagination with their vitality and possibility. The cast of characters is vast: from the sea of people at the ball at the Chelsea Arts Club on New Year's Eve: harlequins, fairies, and all manner of fancy dress true to the period to the deni- zens of the atelier—the petite mains, or seamstresses, with their tape measures and Cyril Woodcock (Lesley Manville) in her rigorously elegant charcoal uniform with pearls. The audience is mesmerized. Bridges says, "I think it shows the process from the toiles to the fittings, the suits with thread marks, actresses without makeup and lighting. I've always loved that aspect and I want people to see that element which goes into our work. Also, you really get to look at those dresses in a way that you don't see when they're flitting by, or half-lit in a close-up." De Rakoff calls it "lightning in a bottle. It was just the perfect project to do and the perfect group of people to do it with." The portrait painter Lucian Freud asked art to "astonish, disturb, seduce, and convince." De Rakoff and Hynd's book achieves that criteria with fearlessness and beauty. Photos: Laura Hynd