Tulle & Glitter

There are certain things about fashion that excite me in ways very few can understand. A delicate black lace cuff attached to an ivory silk sleeve, which is connected to the perfectly fitted blouse with the most elusive embellishments. Reading about Coleen Atwood and her work on The Tourist, or Catherine Martin and her work on The Great Gatsby …these people see more than the clothes you find at mall, online, in Knightsbridge, Beverly Hills, 5^th Avenue, or the Champs Elysees. They have access to wondrous archives and they read books and pay attention to the era, the tone, the environment, the temperature, and how the author describes what each character is wearing before encapsulating the undertones and creating or acquiring a collection specifically for each scene in a movie. I could spend hours not only staring at clothes and feeling the weight of each fabric, admiring the embroidery and beading, and touching texture after texture – but also reading interviews about the minds of the most talented people in the fashion industry. The ones who know how to turn literature into rich and stunning visuals, and craft the works of art that allow a film/blockbuster to become a master piece and a work of original art. Much like the Great Gatsby, which I watched over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed!

Catherine Martin is Baz Luhrman's wife and together they create the most breathtaking movies you would have ever seen.

Here are some excerpts of an interview with Catherine Martin that www.Fashionista.com was able to conduct. Full interview link at the bottom of the page.

So how does the actual process begin?


First of all, Baz always starts with the book, or whatever the source material is. So the first thing is to read the book, and to analyze what people are wearing, what Fitzgerald says they are wearing. And then you go like a detective, and you go to the Met library and you go to FIT and you look in books, and you go to libraries, and you look online, and you look on museum websites and you read as much as you possibly can. And you try and work out what the landscape of the clothes were, and what the references in the book actually mean. You know like, what’s a tricorn hat? Why is Daisy wearing one? You just start piecing all those references together and getting all the images, so you know what the landscape actually is.

How true to the era did you stay?


One of the other rules Baz made at the very beginning of the project was that, because the book is set in the summer of ’22, published in ’25, and foreshadows the crash of ’29, we were actually allowed to use the whole decade as a reference base. So that gave us a little bit more scope. But what you realize even by the early ’20s, just about any silhouette–from a bias cut, to a strapless, to a robe de style, had all been invented. One shouldered looks, beading, embroidering, harem pants, feathered skirts, halter necks, v-necks… all kinds of different silhouettes. We think of the ’20s as a shift, a beaded embroidered fringed shift. And in reality the silhouettes were incredibly varied and had all kinds of influences form folkloric to Arabic, Orientalism–every kind of influence that you can possibly imagine, including Egyptian by the time Tutankhamen’s tomb had been opened up. It was much more varied than even I, who knows something about it, even realized. In the costumes for the men, we erred on closer to the beginning of the decade because we went for a much slimmer silhouette. For the women it was later in the decade, when there was much more of a body-conscious silhouette.

In the production notes, Joel Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan, praises you for adding little details–in his case a Skull and Bones lining in his suit, a reference to the character’s Yale days–to help actors get more into character. Are there any other details like that, that you felt were important to add, even if they’re not immediately obvious to the viewer?


For Daisy’s clothes I got a vast majority from a fantastic lace company called Solstiss. They’re French and they’ve been around since the late 19th century. They have an enormous archive, they do work for all the big fashion houses–Chanel, Alexander McQueen when he was still alive–you name it. And I think that what was fantastic about having that resource is that I could really get that kinetic–whether it was the floral tassels on the purple dress, or the fluttery skirt made of organza petals on the dress that you first see Daisy in.

To read the full article click here -> www.fashionista.com/catherinemartin