Celebrating Five Decades Of Award-Winning Costumes By Jenny Beavan

On July 31, 1998, right in the middle of summer vacation, Ever After was released in theaters. I was the target audience, or me and my circle of eighth grade girlfriends were. Every 12 or 13 year-old girl I knew personally was in awe. Especially the scene at the ball, where Drew Barrymore, Cinderella, dances with her prince in a dress with glittery wings. I remember pairs and packs of us watching the film in theaters multiple times before we were able to buy it on VHS or laserdisc, or whatever device our parents had at home. Even in Los Angeles, where I grew up, DVDs wouldn’t become the format of choice for a couple of years.

Jenny Beavan, OBE, RDI, the costume designer responsible for all that joy, is being honored with the 2025 Costume Designer’s Guild Career Achievement Honoree at this year’s Costume Designer Guild Awards (February 6, 2025). When I heard the news, Ever After was the first film I thought of. I told Beavan this, when we met on Zoom to talk about the many films and shows she has costumed over a career spanning half a century.

Beavan remembers filming in France; her own daughter was about 12 and would come out to visit on school holidays. “I’m still learning my craft now,” she modestly explained, “but I wasn’t nearly as experienced as I am now. I had an amazing supervisor, and I think it was pretty much her first job as a costume supervisor, Clare Spragge, and she brought a great crew.” Though most of the filming took place in Dordogne, France, named after the river which runs through it and famous for its prehistoric cave paintings, much of the Ever After’s crew was British. “It was cheaper to bring staff from England,” Beavan told me, “We had a great crew down in France, but they were all English. And we were in the slightly middle of nowhere. It was something that evolved. All the cast, I seem to remember, were fantastic and very helpful, and we had a great crew.”

Jane Law, Beavan’s long time friend, someone she’s regularly worked with, came to France to help. “She actually went to New Rainbow Textiles in Southall, which is one of my favorite shops, because it’s really in the basement. They have really refined, beautiful, beautiful fabrics. I was pretty sure I kind of knew what what there would be there, and she got the fabrics and put them together, and the wings were made by Naomi Cricher.” They only made two pairs, Beavan told me. “These days I’d have done at least five. But no, no, we made two, and they were piano wire covered in silk tulle. I mean, it could have punctured at any moment, and of course it had to, for the shot when she’s sitting with the broken wings, which I think is one of my favourite looks. because it just tells so much story.”

To me and my adolescent friends, and perhaps my readers will understand, the scene with the winged dress was perfect, a literal fairy tale fantasy brought to life on screen. “I’m very pleased to hear it,” Beavan said to me when I tried to explain how it felt to be barely a teenager out with friends to see that film. “I mean, one of the joys of the job is when you do give pleasure,” Beavan said. “People can use you either as a solace or an escape. You know, there’s a woman in Tokyo who said whenever she feels depressed, she watches A Room With A View. And I just thought that it is so great to know there’s something I’ve worked on that has helped people.”

Given her long list of awards, and seriously, Beavan (deservingly) has almost all of them, it might come as a surprise to learn that she really doesn’t care much about fashion. She did not expect to focus her creative energy on designing a character’s wardrobe. “I really, really wanted to be a set designer,” Beavan told me. “I absolutely loved that, creating a 3D world for actors to be in, to tell the story of a play. I went to College Central School of Art and Design, this was in the late sixties, before it joined up with Central Saint Martins. We had an incredible head of department, Ralph Coltai, who was a sculptor and an amazing set designer. And really, we all wanted to be set designers. I mean, we wanted to be little Ralph’s, really, and he always said to me famously, ‘Dalink, you’re quite good at set.’ He was sort of Hungarian German. ‘You’re quite good at sets. Don’t worry about the costume. You always get someone else to do them.’ And I mean, I took that literally. We were well taught.”

Clothing, costume, regalia, wardrobe, these words have official meanings, but they also come with personal connotations. As fascinated as I am personally by processes, how any number of designers faced with the same challenge can come up with innumerable solutions, I very much wanted to know Beavan’s personal definitions. “I think fashion is all about the clothes,” the designer told me. “When you look at models on the catwalk they all look the same. They’re all super thin. They all walk the same, and it’s all about the clothes they’re wearing. Costume design is all about the character they’re portraying, and the actual clothing is subservient to that. Although extremely important, a costume has to serve a purpose, whereas in fashion you don’t serve anyone except the look.” Appearances matter, perhaps in storytelling especially, but even the most beautiful outfit has to fit a character’s personality, a scene, an underlying message. “I mean, if it’s just there because it looks good, then it’s probably wrong” Beavan said. “And an audience, I think they notice it even if they don’t realize they’re noticing it. I think the more you can get it just plain right, the more the actor can just get on and tell the story, and nobody’s distracted.”

Like many, perhaps most, of the designers I have spoken with and written about, Beavan seems hesitant to take total credit for the wonderful work she has done over the years. She was quick to mention those who helped her early on, John Bright (Cosprop) in particular. “I mean he’s a legend,” the designer told me. “He should be Lord Bright, I mean he’s been made an OBE, but far too late. But lord or sir, honestly, his work is amazing, his work is stunning. His work with me was stunning and we’ve had such a good relationship.”

The story of how Beavan met Bright, it could (should?) be a film, it’s as inspiring and lovely as any of the eleven films the pair have collaborated on. After graduating, Beavan spent the 1970s working in London on various theatrical productions. By the end of the decade, and thanks to a childhood friend, the young designer began working for the much-lauded film company Merchant Ivory Productions, taking a role that sounds like an unpaid internship by 2025 standards. Back then, same as today, an internship with the right company, working with decent people, can lead to opportunities unavailable under any other circumstances.

In 1978, Beavan was dressing Dame Peggy Ashcroft for the television film, Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, and was soon tasked with assisting costume designer Judy Moorcroft on 1979s The Europeans. “I mean it’s just weird,” Bevan laughed as she told me the story. “I went out to India with Dame Peggy, to just be her companion really, and help on anything else. I did anything they needed. I crowd collected. I acted in the film because an actress couldn’t make it. But they thought I was a costume designer, basically because I’d help Peggy get her clothes together, and they then sort of put me into their family as a costume designer. It just happened. You know, life has a wonderful way of just leading you.”

Just a few years later, Merchant Ivory was producing an adaptation of Henry James’ 1886 novel, The Bostonians. When costume designer Judy Moorcroft left the production Beavan stepped in, and asked that John Bright co-design the costumes for the film with her. It was her first major period film, and Beavan insists that Bright was the person who made it all possible. “John really taught me a huge amount about not just period clothing, but just the interest and the refinement and the detail, and thanks to John, I started to tell stories with clothes. We still see loads of each other, and he’s one of my best friends, and I’ll consult him, he’s wonderful. The Bright Foundation, what he’s doing for children and the arts, and you know, he’s just a legend.”

Beavan is also a legend, even if she doesn’t seem exactly comfortable with that label. But an award from the Costume Designer’s Guild, that’s something special; it’s recognition from Beavan’s peers, the people who understand the challenges and triumphs specific to telling stories on film. Because I love hearing positive stories, I asked the designer how she felt about her career being acknowledged so publicly by other professional costume designers. “It feels good,” she told me, “because a lot of them are my peers, and I find that very, very heartening.”

Perhaps this is a good time to give my lovely readers an idea of the scope of what she has created over a +50 year long career in film and television. A Room With a View (1985), which is widely regarded as Helena Bonom Carter’s breakout film, won the Oscar for Best Costume Design, and Beavan would later win twice more, for Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, and for Cruella in 2021. She’s won four British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) for A Room With a View (1985), Gosford Park (2001), as well as winning for Fury Road (2015), and for Cruella (2021).

Beavan has two Primetime Emmys, for Emma (1997), and for Part Two of Return to Cranford (2010). She also has three Costume Designer’s Guild Awards (The King’s Speech – Excellence in Period Film, 2010; Fury Road– 2015, Excellence in Fantasy Film; and Cruella– 2021, Excellence in Period Film) along with a bevy of other awards, large and small, for work that spans the decades audiences have been blessed to watch the designer’s evolution over her illustrious career.

My regular readers will know I believe that costumes are a tool, both for the actors who wear them to (literally) step into someone else’s shoes, and for the audience, who learns from a character’s wardrobe the sort of details that would be ruined if articulated with dialogue or in exposition. “If you get it right,” Beavan explained to me, “you’re supporting the actor in telling their story, and I do it with clothes. You know the director will do it by directing The set will do it by giving them the background. Sometimes I have the luxury of making clothes. Sometimes I’m on very low budgets, which I still enjoy. Low budget films, they’re often very, very interesting. And you’re working from Cosprop stock, or whoever’s appropriate stock, and the actor puts the stuff on and then says, ‘now I know who I am.’ I mean, then you’re not only helping the actor, but the audience will completely get it. I’ve been watching a lot of podcasts,” she told me, “on iplayer, like Judi Dench talking about how she always feels better when she’s in full character and she isn’t herself. I just think that’s so interesting. I mean, I know that about her. But it’s always fascinating to hear an actor talk about how they work, how it is to become the character.”

There are occasions on film in where clothing is a character, like the Dior gown in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, which Beavan costumed to universal acclaim. “It was hilarious,” Beavan told me, “because I was taken on with the understanding that I was going to be working with Dior, and that Dior would be doing all the Dior bits of the film. I didn’t know anything much about Dior, I mean, I obviously knew about the New Look, I knew a little bit. But I knew nothing about his sister, who was in the resistance. I knew that he only ran the company for 10 years, and then died very unexpectedly.”

It was at the Christian Dior Archives in Paris when Beavan understood what needed to be made for the film, and who would be responsible for the making. “We were looking at stuff wearing white gloves, obviously with the most wonderful woman who’s called ‘Madame,’ who runs the archive in Paris, and has been with it, and has collected anything there is. But in the 1950s they didn’t keep anything. They did the collection, they sold it, they moved on. They did not keep pieces for an archive, so there’s very, very little from the fifties. We’re looking at it with white gloves, and I thought, well, we’re never going to be allowed to use any of this. So I wonder how this is going to work?”

Sitting in the archive’s library, Beavan told me about a procession of vintage pieces the maison thought she might like to see. “And then there was silence, and I thought, Oh, I better say something. So I said, Oh, this has really been the most amazing afternoon. Thank you so much, you know. Can’t believe what I’ve learned and how wonderful it is that we’re all going to be working together. Four horrified faces looked at me and went no. Ok, that wasn’t quite what I understood. But don’t worry, I said. I do know people who can make to your standards, and you know, what I’ve learned today is incredibly helpful. But then, for the benefit of two producers, with my director sitting on my left and just out of my eyeline, I said: it will be very expensive.”

The people Beavan called in, John Bright and Jane Law, were obviously up to making couture, and the infamous house was able to dig up five pieces from a collection of historic reproductions made in the 1990s. “They were black and white, which is great for filling in,” Beavan explained. “But Mrs. Harris was never going to want a black or white dress. Mrs. Harris liked a bit of color.”

For those of us who love fashion, watching 1950s Dior gown get destroyed, even knowing on some level that it was recreated 1950s Dior gown, that was the most painful part of watching Mrs. Harris. The lovely Leslie Manville, who plays the eponymous character, and the character who buys the doomed dress, wore it at a fitting longer than she did in screen. “I mean, we did it very economically,” Beavan said, “I think we used the dress from the fitting to make the burnt one. The funny thing was,” Beavan said with a small grin, “we couldn’t make the bloody thing burn. We did a little experiment on the back steps of our wardrobe space in Budapest, and what I thought would burn didn’t. What I didn’t think would burn did. We did burn enough, we worked it out. And we didn’t have a breakdown department. It was all Lauren Reyhani, my fabulous associate designer, who’s very clever with making and dying, and she’s very craft orientated and she’s very good. The dress was made so that it looks like it’s been burnt.”

I’m not sure that I could come up with a better anecdote than this story Beavan shared with me, to prove to anyone why the costumes matter. Storytelling on film requires world building, without it, suspension of disbelief can prove impossible for incredulous 21st century viewers, we may not always notice what we know, but part of our subconscious picks up on pristine wardrobe in a period film about the destitute. Uncomfortable, incongruent color choice can tilt perception of a character, nudge the audience towards bias.

When I look at the oeuvre of Jenny Beavan, I see how deftly she maneuvers potentially treacherous territory. Her work might be silent, but it always contributes its voice. I also see how the joy of working with people you love infects the work. It reminds me of the times when people I love have helped me make my own work better. It reminds me of the exhilarating, tightly twisting multi-vehicle death races through the desert in Mad Max. The people executing those physics-defying stunts, they can do more by working together. Working with people you can communicate your inner vision to, who hear you and who you have trained your self to listen to, there’s that whole chestnut about sums being more than their parts. In many ways, costume design could be viewed as problem solving, albeit a silent form of resolution. A dozen designers could easily come up with a dozen different solutions. For Beavan, everything starts with the words. Being obsessed with them myself, I convinced myself immediately that I understand how she feels.

“I get the script, and if I like it I then get a chance to meet the director,” the designer explained. “In that meeting I discover what his or her vision is of the piece, and whether we’ll get on. Of course I work with directors I worked with before, that’s easy. But often they’re new, which is fascinating. And then, having been offered the job, I start to break down the script. You take it and you’re basically making lists, and I tend to do that by hand. As I’m working through the script, at the same time I’m also looking up images. It’s all about the script. I still love a challenge. I mean, it’s terrifying. But I love a challenge.” It is easy to look at the dozens of films she has worked on and see how much she cares, how very much each detail matters.

“I love my career,” Jenny Beavan said to me. She meant these words, and those she spoke next. “I love the world I live in. I know there are drawbacks, but to be honest, I don’t know any other way of making my living that I would actively enjoy and still want to do.”

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