Interview
Michael O'Connor
by Sarah Barnett
He’s dressed witches, wizards and African autocrats, the Marquis de Sade, and Gilbert and Sullivan. UK costume designer Michael O’Connor began his career as a “dresser” at the Old Vic and has since worked on the Harry Potter films, The Last King of Scotland, Quills and Topsy-Turvy. His latest creations for The Duchess, in which Keira Knightley plays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (the many-times-great-aunt of Lady Di), are already gaining Oscar buzz.
The frocks are a big drawcard for the film, but at the same time, you don’t want them to be the only thing worth watching – was that a hard line to walk? One of the most difficult things was trying to restrain oneself. You can be quite tempted, with Keira playing what, in inverted commas, is a “fashion icon”, to really overdo it, because she’s one of these actresses who can take a hell of a lot of colour and a hell of a lot of decoration, because she’s terribly elegant. But Saul [Dibb, director] said at moments you can be quite flashy, but at other moments what we need is an intimate story. And it was quite clear to me that that was what the story was really, this sort of tragic marriage.
Did you take any creative licence? There was some quite extreme decoration going on with animals in people’s hair – birds and stuff – so the licence was to just pare it down slightly. And there was quite a “fat” fashion, where it’s quite rounded. And that sort of thing on a frame of Keira’s size … They’re quite open, these dresses, and they’re quite low-cut: you’d never have believed that this was the shape of the woman under the dress when you could see so much of her face and her neck.
The Duchess of Devonshire was a “fashion icon” as you say, so it’s- interesting that she should set these trends, such as the enormous wigs that were so cumbersome and painful to wear. Well, why does Gwyneth Paltrow – and Keira’s the same – why when they appear on the red carpet are they wearing six-inch heels? It looks fantastic and it’s only for a few hours, but that’s what fashion is, isn’t it? It’s not really a comfortable thing.
The looks are totally different, but we’re still suffering for fashion. I think that in a way it’s a kind of empowerment thing, it’s a way to get noticed. Take Liz Hurley’s safety-pin dress – in the end someone becomes known for something they wore and not necessarily for something they did. And as Georgiana remarks to the Duke, “We [women] have our dresses and our hats and you have your politics.” But they were quite vain as well, those men, and they were painstakingly altering their clothes to make different shapes – fuller calves, padding their thighs, padding their britches and stuff like that – it was all going on as I think it does today.
Without the padded britches, maybe – do people still use clothes to make a statement? People in public life do that. Politicians do not, when they know they’re going to appear in public, just put on the first thing that comes to them. If people look a bit shabby when they’re not supposed to, it’s picked up on and goes worldwide. Even if a politician decides to take a tie off, that’s saying something to people by not wearing a tie.
And the media is endlessly fascinated by the sartorial choices candidates make. It’s bizarre – just look at Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, McCain’s wife. The other day I saw a picture of Helen Clark and someone said, this has been retouched, it’s on her campaign literature. Even I see that and I’ve got no interest in that kind of thing.
It seems like you couldn’t get a more different movie from The Duchess than The Last King of Scotland, but if you wanted to draw a long bow, you could say Idi Amin was just as invested in his appearance as Georgiana. I managed to speak to some journalists who used to travel with him in the 70s. They said they would take internal flights with Idi and he’d get on the plane in one outfit and then go to the toilet and within minutes would come out in a pink cowboy suit with matching Stetson. It was a show – look at me!
Which tells you just about everything you need to know about him, really – clearly genocidal. That does seem to be a theme of dictators. In the Middle East, Korea, they do have this penchant for dressing up in some kind of way.
