Sandy Powell: a cut above the rest

One of only two Brits to win an Oscar was Sandy Powell, costume designer, for The Young Victoria. And it’s her third

There were only two British winners at the Oscars. One was Ray Beckett, a sound editor on The Hurt Locker, the other was Sandy Powell, one of the most esteemed costume designers working in film. As Carey Mulligan and Colin Firth sparkled as valiantly as possible in defeat, the lesser known Powell won for the sumptuous period threads of The Young Victoria. Not for her a dreary sheath in “nude” or silver to parade. To accept the award she took to the podium in something of many colours and typically unique, a glittery black beret wedged to the side of her head. Like many of the designs that have made her name, “period with a twist” probably best summed it up.

Powell’s acceptance speech was brief but sharp, dedicating “this one” (she already has two Oscars, one for Shakespeare in Love, 1998, and the another for The Aviator, 2004) “to the costume designers that don’t do movies about dead monarchs or glittery musicals. The designers that do the contemporary films and the low-budget ones actually don’t get as recognised as they should do, and they work as hard. So this is for you, but I’m gonna take it home tonight.”

She thanked her mother “who taught me everything I knew, right from the very beginning”, and Annie Hadley, one of the finest costume cutters in the business and a longtime collaborator, who died in January.

Powell studied theatre design at Central St Martins School of Art, but left halfway through the course to design in fringe theatre, before moving into film. “There’s no point in qualifications, as in certificates,” she once told this paper, “but it’s essential to understand the cut and construction of clothes and so it’s useful to have some cutting and sewing abilities.”

Besides the Oscar haul, she has received nine Bafta nominations, winning in 1999 for Velvet Goldmine and this year for The Young Victoria. “The most important aspect is to create characters; make them believable to the audience,” she says. For The Young Victoria, she added, “I was lucky enough to see and touch some of Queen Victoria’s clothes, including her wedding dress.”

Her clothes were first seen in the films of Derek Jarman — Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II, Wittgenstein — on budgets that were below shoestring, but still the costumes were exquisitely imagined, punky and modern.

“Edgy” is a word often ascribed to fashion that feels cool, or daring. Powell has “edginess” without even trying. In 1993 she designed for outfits for Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, helping to gull the audience into believing that the lead character was female. From there she deftly leapt between eras and genres. She designed for butch epics such as Rob Roy and Michael Collins, as well as the camp, extravagant gothic of Interview with the Vampire, the day-glo glam-rock inferno of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine and the perky wartime duds of Mrs Henderson Presents.

“Working with the actors is a crucial part of costume design,” Powell says. “Quite often they have researched and thought about their character more than you, and can therefore contribute a lot to how a costume evolves . . . The best thing about the job is researching and getting to know different periods. Sometimes it takes until the end of the job to understand fully a period and at that point I’m ready to do it all again, but better.”

Powell delights in being a chameleon: she doesn’t have one look, or period. She has done mainstream costume drama — The Wings of the Dove, The Other Boleyn Girl (inspired by a Tate exhibition of Holbein’s work) and The Young Victoria — but her innate adventurousness is also suited to cutting-edge directors.

Her working relationship with Martin Scorsese began on Gangs of New York; The Aviator and Shutter Island followed. Next they’ll do Silence, a drama about Jesuit priests set in the 17th century, and the biopic Sinatra.

It isn’t glamorous, she says. Often it’s boring. “Costume designers have to be resourceful and be able to think on their feet, without wasting a minute, as anything that holds up shooting is liable to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.” And then there are the egos, sudden changes of direction. “Eighty per cent of the job is psychology,” Powell says, “and only about 20 per cent art.”

Tim Teeman, The Times 09-03-2010