The scene in the movie “Moulin Rouge!” when Satine, played by actress Nicole Kidman, descends from the ceiling by a swing, is getting another take off-camera.
The scene will serve as the opener for “Hollywood Costume,” an exhibit displaying over 100 costumes at the Phoenix Art Museum starting on March 26 and running through July.
The fourth installment of the “Hollywood Costume” exhibit is designed to show the importance of the costumes in cinema storytelling. However, it has taken years of preparation to execute its first appearance in Phoenix.
London Beginnings
The exhibit started at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2012 and has traveled as a package to museums in Australia and Virginia, according to Casey Hagerty, the assistant fashion curator at the Phoenix Art Museum.
“It’s not a bunch of old dresses displayed on simple mannequins,” Hagerty said. “It’s a lot of action. It’s a lot of superheroes. It feels like a very theatrical production.”
Dennita Sewell, the fashion design curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, worked with Dr. Deborah Landis, the senior curator of “Hollywood Costume,” who wanted to bring it to Phoenix.
Landis’s work includes designing Michael Jackson’s red jacket in “Thriller” and the fedora from Indiana Jones.
Hagerty manages the internal communications to execute Landis and Sewell’s vision to life.
“When you walk in, everything resembles a soundstage,” Hagerty said. “It’s all black and dark and dimly lit. Music is throughout the whole exhibit, and there’s the talking with the actors and screens. It’s just technologically very stimulating.”
Architecture
The Phoenix Art Museum asked Richard Jensen, the principal architect at firm WORKSBUREAU, to help them enhance the original exhibit’s design.
“It’s a very complex show,” Jensen said. “It’s larger and has more moving parts than any show the museum has taken on before. So they knew they needed additional support to really pull it off.”
The exhibit is split into three scenes, and Jensen’s task was to reinterpret and embellish the London exhibit’s traditional gallery setup for the modern and open space in the Phoenix Art Museum. He said that while he did not have experience with exhibit design, the project was fairly similar to his traditional work.
A projector screen displaying the phrase “Now Showing,” movie posters and a red curtain are just a few of the elements leading up to the soundstage, where the costumes are displayed.
Visitors can see the face of the actor who wore the costume through a holographic projector mounted above the body of the mannequins.
“You see Audrey Hepburn sitting there above her costume in ‘My Fair Lady’…or Robert De Niro in ‘Raging Bull,’” Jensen said.
“There’s a lot of really great technology and videos that are running and informational panels and ways that sort of explain the role of the costume designer in the concept of developing the character,” she said.
Paper Wigs
Two months before the exhibit opened in London, Landis asked Amy Flurry and Nikki Nye of Paper-Cut-Project to create 17 paper wigs for some of the costumes.
“(The curators) were really trying to find a way to elevate the experience both for the viewer and pull together a complete composition,” Flurry said.
“Paper-Cut-Project” is a company in Atlanta that creates carefully crafted paper accessories for museums and designers such as Kate Spade and Cartier.
Once Flurry and Nye received photos of the costumes, they created sketches and sent them to Landis for approval.
They then worked on one wig at a time together, with one creating the foundation and the other building upon it to achieve the structure and shape of the wig.
“We have a mannequin head but that’s all we have,” Flurry said. “It is a challenge because you want to get it right, but you want to get it right in the eyes of the curator, who is really the composer in this scenario.”
Once the wigs were completed, they shipped them to London.
“What’s so remarkable to me are the conservators that build that installation, but they build it with travel in mind,” Flurry said. “Everywhere that this show has toured, they had luggage built for every component. The wigs aren’t delicate…They’re a sculpture.”
That’s a Wrap!
With the wigs, technology components and a number of specialists, the Phoenix Art Museum focused on putting the character in the spotlight.
“Everything kind of looks like it’s a ghost in a way,” Hagerty said. “Your focus is entirely on the costume. You’re not really thinking about the actor per say, you’re really able to just see that character even down to how the mannequin was styled in terms of movement and what their posture looks like.”
“There’s so much involvement by so many specialists to put on something like this,” Flurry said. “And if it’s a successful show, I don’t think the viewer will ever know that or feel it. They’ll just look at it, and they may not know what they are looking at, but it will keep them there.”
When visitors reach the ‘finale’ of the exhibit, Marilyn Monroe, dressed in her signature white dress from 1955’s “The Seven Year Itch,” wishes guests a simulated “goodbye.”
Contact the reporter at Tamara.Kraus@asu.edu
