‘I still have Daniel Craig’s swimming trunks’: confessions of a Hollywood costume designer
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If, as they say, clothes maketh the man, then it is Lindy Hemming who has fashioned many of cinema’s most indelible characters. The Welsh costume designer has dressed everyone from 007 to Paddington Bear, Batman to Wonder Woman, Lucius Malfoy to Lara Croft.
She won her Oscar in 2000 for Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, featuring costumes whose handmade idiosyncrasy is seen once again in her latest production, Wonka, the prequel to Gene Wilder’s 1971 movie musical.
The zany chocolatier, played by Timothée Chalamet, says that his candy-stripe trousers came “from a mailman in Minsk”. But, for Hemming, each item of clothing has a backstory that extends far beyond any detail in the script.
She tells me the lining of the maroon velvet coat “was printed on raw silk and dyed to look like something that came from Morocco. He’s got a piece of knitwear which was hand-knitted – that’s something that probably came from his mother. He has picked things up eclectically from all over the place, including the top hat, which belonged to an old magician somewhere.”
She describes director Paul King – with whom she worked on both Paddington films – as “the colour master”, the “most colour-oriented person that I’ve ever worked with or will ever work with, I should think. So nearly everything that everyone wears has been put through a colour of some sort, appropriate to their character. And nearly everything has got a visible texture.”
Hemming sourced the fabrics from wool merchants and had them sent to her “marvellous dye room”, including the velvet for Wonka’s coats “so that it’s got an extra depth and you can see on the camera how sometimes it looks quite shabby and then, other times, it sort of burns the screen”.
The 75-year-old presided over three portable buildings at Hertfordshire’s Leavesden studios, which she filled with photos and newspaper cuttings showing 1930s “unusual fashion” and “eccentric characters”. “You’ve got Willy Wonka originating on a barge, so we looked at all sorts of bargey people. I was imagining anywhere from Ireland to the Baltic.” Her cutters, tailors, printers, knitters and hat makers produced up to 10 sets of each outfit to withstand the battering from the characters’ various on-screen exploits. It has all paid off. The mere sight of villains Bleacher and Mrs Scrubbit in their nightwear raises a laugh from the audience at my preview, before actors Tom Davis and Olivia Colman even open their mouths.
It may all seem a lifetime away from her first job, as an orthopaedic nurse in Oswestry, Shropshire. But Hemming gives a chuckle of recognition when I ask if there are any transferable skills.
“There are! The best thing of all is that when you’re a nurse, you have to touch people, calm them down, buoy them up. It was a really good training, mostly in saying, ‘Take your jumper off’ – not having any inhibitions about them suddenly being naked in front of you or having to measure them intimately.”
While putting on productions for the patients, the other amateur performers “all said to me, ‘You’re so bossy, you should go to Rada and be a stage manager’”. With a generous grant, that is precisely what she did, before she learnt “there was a thing called costume design”.
However, Hemming, who now lives in the mountains of Tuscany, had begun analysing people’s dress much earlier. As a young child, she sat with her brother Martin under her parents’ Carmarthenshire market stall. “We used to discuss people’s legs and shoes and stockings.”
I ask what she can tell about me from my outfit. “I think it’s very neutral for coming to see somebody,” she says. So bland, in fact, that she observes “it actually matches” the beige furnishings of the five-star central London hotel suite “rather well”. Before I can feel too wounded, Hemming explains she is “more interested in your face and your eyes than I am ever in your clothes, actually. Or how you move, what your silhouette is, where you come from, by your name.”
Hemming – who worked on five 007 films from Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye to Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale – thinks James Bond looks best in blue. It was she who picked his skimpy La Perla trunks for what she calls his “Ursula Andress moment” and, during a fitting with producer Barbara Broccoli, made the final decision. “After much enjoyment with Barbara and him, we fixed on them. Nobody told him what he had to wear, but I think both of us were quite persuasive.” La Perla gave Hemming one of the pairs to take home as a souvenir; she also maintains a library of swatches of every fabric she has ever used.
Bond was her Golden Ticket into the premier league of fashion houses. The doors to Gucci, Armani and Versace swung open. “And you’d be received with utter credibility. Once when I was in Bond Street, in one of the menswear shops I always went to, they put on Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger. And I thought, this has gone too far now!”
Next year, she marks 40 years since her first feature film, Richard Eyre’s Loose Connections. More recently, she has made her name with superhero movies, including Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, though she “didn’t know very much about Batman, at all” when she got the call.
She was at the heart of a social media kerfuffle in 2017 when her costumes for the Amazons in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman were compared with the much more scanty version by Michael Wilkinson that followed in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. She concedes that having a female duo made a difference in that Jenkins was “highly conscious of it being an example for young girls – wanting the women to be strong and brave like the men.
“I approached it as if it was sportswear meets armour, made with the fabrics available to them where they lived on Themyscira. Everything I do, I try to make it have a reality to it, and no woman in a war-like situation would expose her breasts.” That said, she has no time for “mindless nonsense” and “flash-in-the pan internet spats”.
Hemming – who so dreams of working on a “political western” that she has started writing her own script – honed her craft through the improvisational methods of Mike Leigh, working on every one of his films from 1983’s TV movie Meantime to 1993’s Naked. She also costumed the original production of Abigail’s Party (though it still grates that union rules meant the BBC failed to credit her for the TV version).
What marks both Leigh and King out as distinctly British directors is “that the whole essence of everything is character. They are the ones that understand something about humanity. It’s why you’ll cry when you watch Paddington,” she says, becoming emotional. “I’ll cry now! It is because you are watching a bear, but actually the bear is telling you every human emotion and he’s telling you about what’s going on in society. And Willy Wonka in his other iterations maybe is not quite as rounded a human being, with a story, like: learn to read, look after people, be kind. All those simple messages – that’s what makes people love those characters.”
The productions may have got bigger, but she insists her approach has changed little since she was scrabbling around charity shops to work within the tiny budget of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
“It’s not to do with how much money you’ve got as to whether things look good,” she says. “In fact, I think it might be an inverse ratio.”
Wonka is in cinemas now
