A Piece Of My Mind: Cruella Costume Designer Jenny Beavan

She might be a two-time Oscar winner (and 10-time nominee), but that didn’t stop Jenny Beavan feeling apprehensive when she got the call to helm the costumes on Cruella – Disney’s live-action origins story about the infamous 101 Dalmatians villain. In fact, she recalls feeling “terrified” by the prospect. Thankfully, her nerves withstood, and so began a fast-paced process to put together the wardrobe for the iconic love-to-hate villain, played with wicked perfection by Emma Stone. Vintage shows were scoured and accessories sourced from far and wide for the movie’s setting in 1970’s punk-rock London. The stakes were raised further still by the backstory: the film’s titular character is an aspiring fashion designer who comes up against her boss, Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). Cue high-fashion looks aplenty, with more than 200 outfits required for the main cast alone.

But Beavan is used to the industry’s fast pace and vast scale by now. She began working in theater as a set designer before being launched, almost by accident, into the world of costume and movies. A happy accident it turns out, as her illustrious career now spans more than five decades, as well as a huge breadth of styles, genres and characters. Her Oscar wins – awarded almost 30 years apart – celebrate her period costumes in A Room with a View (1985) and post-apocalyptic styling on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). “[That film] changed my career,” Beavan acknowledges. “Since Mad Max, I’ve done quite a variety of work – I’m not [confined to] 19th-century corsets [anymore]”, she says. Her credits include major cinematic moments like The King’s Speech, Gosford Park and Sense and Sensibility.

Here, Beavan shares a behind-the-scenes look at what went into designing the costumes for Cruella, and gives PORTER a piece of her mind…

My father was a cellist and my mother was an award-winning viola player. We didn’t have a television, so we were always making and doing. I was blessed with an overactive imagination.

It was Twelfth Night at the Aldwych Theatre, London, and I totally fell in love. From that moment on I tried to see as much theater as I could.

I used to skip classes to go to the theater – that’s how it all started. My parents were extraordinary; I remember saying that I wanted to miss physics and my mother saying, “Well, you don’t want to be a scientist, do you?”

[I was] working as a theater designer [at the time], but I was into sets and not that bothered about costume. [However,] they needed someone to go to her house and put together a wardrobe of clothes that she was going to take out to do a film in Rajasthan. On our second meeting, when we were getting on quite well, she asked me if I’d go, too. After that, I was offered work as a costume designer and that was it – I was launched into costume. It wasn’t really where I thought I would be, but it’s still storytelling – just with clothes and people rather than big sets on stages.

You begin to actually create that character on the person, with their ideas, their body language – that’s when the character really happens. Up until that moment, it’s either two-dimensional or a rack of clothes, really. We went out to LA to fit Emma Stone and we ended up doing it in her kitchen, with everything set up in the garage. It just flowed because she’s such fun and really got into it, and in about four hours we got this arc of the character and the way she dressed and the way it changed. You can see how [her look] starts as put-together vintage and goes into quite tailored. Emma Thompson, who I’ve known for a long time, is always glorious to work with, too – we had to fit about 35 different looks with her.