"You’d Think They’d be Falling Off > 자유게시판

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This article contains spoilers for the season one finale https://brandscarlett.com/ of Poker Face.

The season finale of Poker Face, the Peacock detective show from Knives Out and Glass Onion director Rian Johnson that stars Natasha Lyonne and is loosely inspired by Columbo, marked a departure from the rest of the series: in terms of fashion, at least. Lyonne’s reluctant guerrilla detective, Charlie Cale, is mostly known for her unkempt rocker style consisting of distressed denim, band tees, and leather jackets. Because Charlie is on the run from her old boss’ (Adrien Brody) henchman Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), each episode takes place in a different state, so Charlie picks up items of clothing as she goes.

In the season finale, Charlie’s past - read: Cliff - has finally caught up with her, and she finds herself back at the mercy of the head honcho, casino mobster Sterling Frost Sr. (Ron Perlman). Frost Sr. gifts her with a sequin dress so she can fit in with her Atlantic City surroundings. But not just any sequin dress: It’s a hot pink and green floral Dolce & Gabbana dress, which allows Charlie to blend in with a bachelorette party as she makes a stealthy getaway. To the naked eye, the practicality ends there when Charlie has to crawl through a basement window into her estranged sister’s home and, at the climax of the episode, jump off a boat in said dress!

According to Poker Face costume designer Trayce Gigi Field, who has also worked on Dead to Me, A League of Their Own, and Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar, this dress was in fact chosen for its practicality: The body-con mini allowed Lyonne to focus on her body’s movements during the stunts, the long sleeves helped protect Lyonne’s arms in the crawling scenes, the sequins popped in the water, and the heavy fabric was surprisingly durable throughout - this is Dolce, after all (although Field says about four versions of the dress were needed). Nothing could be done about the 100-degree heat during shooting, though, except Lyonne changing into lightweight shorts and a T-shirt between takes.

"One of the things that’s important to me as a costume designer is that you never want the actor to be thinking about the clothes that they’re wearing," Field tells Shondaland. "You want them to embody the clothes that they’re wearing. Natasha wore that dress, but she wasn’t thinking about the dress."

Ultimately, like Charlie’s grungier duds, this dress became a second skin to the character in this episode. "The thing about Natasha is that she wears clothes so well," Field says. Though it’s not explicit in the script, given what we’ve come to learn about Charlie, the sequin dress could be seen to be a commentary on what has become a trope for women in action scenes that they must be outfitted in the most illogical garments.

"It’s very interesting that men usually get to run around in a suit or jeans and a T-shirt, and women end up in a jumpsuit, or a cute little dress, or shorts. It’s so impractical!" Field says.

Hearing Field talk about the striking color scheme of the dress immediately drew my mind to The Lost City, last year’s Sandra Bullock starrer about a romance novelist who is taken hostage in the jungle. Bullock’s character, Loretta, wears a pink sequin getup - perhaps the most impractical dress to rule all impractical dresses - which doesn’t begin its existence as a dress at all but is instead a jumpsuit that gradually disintegrates along the way, becoming a plot point that leads her pursuers to her. The Lost City costume designer Marlene Stewart says the genesis for the jumpsuit came from Bullock’s love for the garment and was inspired by some fuchsia orchids in the background of an early Zoom meeting.

"When you’re immersed in the jungle, what is it that’s going to stand out?" Stewart tells Shondaland. "The opposite of green is red - not that we were going to do a red jumpsuit - but you go there first in the color wheel to create a contrast. What color would you go to to make a big statement?" Though Bullock’s jumpsuit was made especially for The Lost City, and there was "a clothesline of sequins" consisting of 18 versions, Stewart ran into similar observations about the material as Field had on Poker Face.

"Believe it or not, it’s very hard to distress sequins," Stewart says. "You’d think they’d be falling off. Not like some of the sequin fabrics that are very delicate, this was pretty sturdy, and it wound up being a little bit heavy, like chain mail. We had to work pretty hard, cutting it up and aging it. Surprisingly, it held up a lot better than I thought it would, and we had to work at it to make it look bad."

Stewart has worked on many different projects in many different genres throughout her 40-plus-year career: everything from Madonna’s "Material Girl" and "Like a Prayer" videos to Top Gun: Maverick to Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday. So, she’s seen it all. Why does she think female characters in action films are often put into precarious positions wearing the most quixotic outfits? "The humor comes in the female leads being able to address the tongue-in-cheek underlying statement about women’s attire: ‘I can do this despite it all,’" she reasons.

And that certainly seems like the ethos behind the latest movie Stewart has lent her costume design skills to, the Apple TV+ rom-com turned action caper Ghosted, in which Chris Evans’ character believes he’s met the perfect woman, played by Ana de Armas, who ghosts him … because she’s a CIA agent on a mission. And also because he’s a walking red flag. But I digress.

In Ghosted’s climax, de Armas’ character, Sadie, has to save the day in a black - actually eggplant, Stewart tells Shondaland, but "sometimes with digital, it’s hard to see" - cutout gown. How much double-sided tape was needed for that to stay in place?!

"Not as much as you might think!" Stewart says. In fact, it was mostly a lot of tension, pulling the different panels of the dress to ensure it would stay on de Armas’ body throughout the stunts. "It’s a lot of precision, detailing, and testing of fabrics to see how they react and how things move," Stewart says, going on to talk about her approach to costume design in such films as True Lies, starring Jamie Lee Curtis in what Stewart calls "the original action dress - which is horrifyingly ugly!"

She explains, "That was way back in the ’90s. That was the first action dress that I did with [James] Cameron, and it had to be able to move in all sorts of ways for stunts with pads and whatever. The costume designers have to figure it all out!"

Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris.