Dress Up and Play

Happy Memorial Day!

Bust out the cute outfits- it's summertime!

Wizard of Oz illustration from I don't know who- found it in a magazine isn't it cute?

Life Week- Adrian

I'm having a Theme Week! To celebrate the conclusion of my first Graduate School semester (*phew*), I'm posting fantastic costume images from the new Life Image Database every day. If you don't already know, Life Magazine has put their entire database of images dating back to 17something on the web. Just type in "source:life" and then keywords into the search box on Google. It's a fantastic resource for any and every subject of study.

But of course here we are all about costumes: beautiful, grotesque, bizarre and hopefully very entertaining.

Today is Dresses by Adrian, the amazingly talented Designer who designed hundreds of movies in the early 20th Century, including Dorothy's dress in the Wizard of Oz. These are beautiful images of dresses, although I don't know whom or what they were designed for (probably just GlamorousNess).

Source:Life

SciFi's "Tinman"

Ugh... If I have to travel anymore....

Tonight I caught the first installment of the SciFi Channel's the TinMan, and I'm taping the second episode, which aired tonight, so I can watch that tomorrow. I'd really been looking forward to it, the trailer seemed really exciting. Like remember when there was that whole NBC trend that got into Gulliver's Travels, and Merlin, and Alice in Wonderland in the early 00's? I kinda thought it had that whole thing going for it. Anyway...

The costumes were designed by Mr. Angus Strathie, previous award winner as the co-costume designer (with Catherine Martin) for Moulin Rouge and the other Red Curtain films. My take on the Tinman thus far is that if you zoom out, it's great.... if you zoom in- as one who likes this kind of stuff does- it kind of had it's moments that made me wince just a teeny bit. I love love love the scarecrow, the aging jacket was fantastic. I'm not so into Azkadellia's character, who is a modeling on the wicked witch. Her costumes were a bit too leathery, dominatrix, Anime type for me. I'm not really a Leather, Dominatrix, Anime type of gal anyway. But I guess it works. And I have to concede that I'm sure this didn't have the budget that Moulin Rouge did, so there you go. But props to anyone who wants to take this one. Who could ever redesign one of the most famous costume design movies of all time? Quite a challenge.

DG (or Dorothy Gale) is wearing pants and a leather jacket. Okay... I didn't know how I felt about this at first. But the more I watched it, I just really want those pants.

I dunno. They're great costumes, but this whole vibe is just not my bag. The male characters were superb and there were these beautiful dresses on the little girl characters of both DG and Azkadellia. I'm just partial to the older aged type of things. So in other words I liked 90% of it.

If you go to the website they have this cool character breakdown under "compare to the book" in the Cast section. Some nice full shots of the characters in costume.

This guy really is one of the best costumes of all time.