Loved the Fashion in Breaking Dawn? MTV Chats Up the Costume Designer!

Nov 29th, 2011 | By | Category: Featured Articles, Movie News

MTV Style has a fantastic, yes fantastic, interview with Michael Wilkinson, the costume designer for parts 1 and 2 of Breaking Dawn. I find interviews like this fascinating because once again we’re getting a whole new perspective on the movie-making process. And this one just happens to involve lots and lots of gorgeous (designer) clothing.

MTV Style: How familiar are you with Twilight as a whole?
Michael Wilkinson: You have to have been living under a rock not be the least bit familiar with these books, they’re so much a part of the public psyche of pop culture. You can know about them through mere absorption. That was part of the appeal of working on this for me—being involved with something that’s such an important franchise for so many people.

Right, but did you read the books?
Yes, I read them all! We tried to do as much preparation as possible. We wanted to be respectful and reverent to the source material. As a costume designer, it was fantastic because there are so many details. It’s such a blessing that Stephenie enjoys describing her characters, so there was lots of material for us to cue off of.

The most critical element with this movie is, of course, the wedding (*spoiler alert* though, ed note: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT TWICE ALREADY?), and this was misleading in the previews but there’s a dream sequence wedding and a real wedding. How did you delineate the two dresses from each other?
The script gave us a great opportunity to get inside Bella’s thoughts about the impending wedding. There’s a nightmare wedding and her perfect wedding. For the nightmare, we chose something that was a version of the dress that she would hate to wear. Something that’s uncomfortable and a dress Bella would be embarrassed in. It was stiff and had a boned bodice that showed a lot of bare skin which she’d be horrified by because she’s a bit of a tomboy.

They continue on by going character by character and talking about how much thought went into the creation of their costumes. Alice was turned in the ’20s? Then of course her costuming has to be influenced by the roaring 20s! Read the rest at MTV Style!

For a non-audio/video interview, it is very entertaining, is it not? 😉 Alrighty, so it’s question time: what was your favorite outfit in Breaking Dawn Part 1?

Via: @Twilight

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One Comment to “Loved the Fashion in Breaking Dawn? MTV Chats Up the Costume Designer!”

  1. Jessica says:

    I love them all… they fit the book descriptions but were still fun and unique!

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