Saturday, November 8, 2014

Why That Outfit: Margot Tenenbaum’s Bad Girl Prep in 'The Royal Tenenbaums’




A few outfits stick with us long after the closing credits. In a new recurring collection, Why That Outfit, ELLE. com explores the psychological underpinnings (and on-set backstories) behind some of film and television's most inexplicably iconic looks.

Whether or not she was snipping off the tip of the right index finger on her child pink cashmere gloves or smoking cigarettes on top of the toilet clad in nothing but the flesh-colored negligée, there was something so aspirationally unhinged about Margot Tenenbaum. As well as her clothes, which were anachronistic, moneyed, and age-agnostic, were so spot-on which it’s no wonder that 12 years after the release of the Wes Anderson traditional, droves of grown women shrug on their grandma’s mink and line their own eyes with kohl each Halloween. Here, we chat with costume designer Karen Patch (who also worked with Anderson on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore) about how exactly she went about dressing one of the most complicatedly messy women in cinema historical past.


"You don't even know how numerous selfies I get on Halloween of various people dressed up like Richie and Margot. Some look great; some are not so good. But I always say it's great. Because the Royal Tenenbaums, I've had other directors say to me, 'I want this particular to be something that will be worn on Halloween. '

Margot Helen Tenenbaum may be the adopted, chain-smoking, literary genius daughter, who also won a Braverman offer at age 11. She is missing a finger and wears a wooden prosthetic. She has a distant, unavailable father who introduces her as "my followed daughter. " She has relationships with her adopted brother Richie, a family friend, Eli, and of course her husband, Raleigh. I had a lot to work with! When you know the history from the character, it forms an image in your mind right away. Wes Anderson said that he desired as much as possible to be designed and built exclusively for the movie. He actually stated, 'Don't shop anything-make everything. '


That's an important directive because handmade pieces look different-you know a person won’t be able to find those things on the rack somewhere. That's something we attempted to do in the first two films, we did together Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, but we had such small budgets that I could only make specific items. Like for Rushmore, I did the green velvet suit, and I did his blazer, which had to be very specific. But we had a bigger budget for Tenenbaums and a a bit more time. The other part of it was that we agreed that Wes would stay accessible to me, because I didn't have enough time or money to make any errors. Several nights a week, he would come down to my office and we would go more than everything while we were in prep.

The idea of Margot came together because I had observed an old Peter Sellers' film, called The World of Henry Orient, in which the young woman wears a mink coat to run around New York.


I needed to put Margot in the same look when she was a child, and have the girl carry that through into adult life. She kind of knows who she actually is at a pretty young age. So then Wes and I talked about a sort of trench design. He drew a little line drawing, translated his notes into Italian, and i also sent the sketch to Fendi. I asked them if they would build this particular coat for me and they did! We had it on loan for six months, plus they made one for the little Margot, too. I wanted a certain lapel and I desired it to have a tie-waist. There were other specifics, too. They sent me pelts and I went through all the caramel colors. It was the same thing with her dresses. People believe Lacoste made Margot's dresses, but Lacoste didn't make striped dresses in this style at the time-they only made solids. So I asked them if they might just send me fabrics so that I could pick out the stripes I wanted to make the gowns with. But I had to get their approval because Wes really wanted to use the actual Lacoste alligator logo.


Margot's look was contradictory, which definitely caused it to be more interesting. She was dressed in conservative pieces, but she was rebellious like a person: she never smiled; she wore heavy makeup; she chain-smoked; the girl was sexually promiscuous.. I think those contradictions-the fact that she was wearing exactly what looked like her mother's clothes, or something kind of country-club conservative-made her fretting. I like to put unlikely things together-it certainly makes things more interesting.


She also wore Bass loafers, which were very typical of that some the country club kind of look. The Hermes bag could have been her mother's therefore i thought that was fitting. Plus, I couldn't find anything I liked much better. Who could, right?

I think Gwyneth, like everyone else at the fittings, was a small perplexed. 'Why is this so small for me? ' 'Why are my masturbator sleeves too short? ' Everything was cut a little small for that time. But when Gwyneth put on the loafers she said, 'Now I know who I am. ’"




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