Oscar-nominated 12 times for Best Costume Design, Colleen Atwood won her first of four statuettes for Rob Marshall’s “Chicago,” written by Bill Condon. Two decades later, Atwood has again collaborated with director Condon on “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a kaleidoscopic fantasia based on the 1993 Broadway musical starring Chita Rivera, which itself was based on a 1976 novel by Manuel Puig and a 1985 Oscar-winning movie.
The film is structured as a conversation between two cellmates in an Argentine prison, as one describes his favorite musical film, seen in fantasy scenes starring Jennifer Lopez.
“It’s such a great love letter to 1940s and ’50s MGM musicals,” said Atwood, whose job was designing the outfits for the movie-within-a-movie. Her co-designer, Christine Cantella, worked on the prison wardrobes.
“I’d never met Jennifer previous to working on this,” Atwood told TheWrap. “It was phenomenal. Her work ethic and her talent are beyond compare. She really puts in the hours. You don’t become Jennifer Lopez without doing some heavy lifting.”
And though she’s not a household name like her lead actress, Atwood’s work is instantly recognizable all over the world. Her 13-film work with Tim Burton has yielded iconic costumes in “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “Alice in Wonderland.” She also won the only Oscar ever awarded to the Harry Potter franchise (for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”).
She even designed the creeptastic brown hockey mask worn by Anthony Hopkins in “The Silence of the Lambs” and just this year entered the zeitgeist again with the plaid bathrobe donned by Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another,” which was haute couture this past Halloween.
“My tribute to JCPenney,” she said. “It cracks me up how many people love that.”
Here she takes us through the four most complex and dynamic costumes worn by Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
50-LB. GOLD DRESS
“It was very heavy,” Atwood said of this shimmering gold gown made with glass beads that added to its overall weight. “Usually these dresses are made with plastic beads or sequins, but I love how the glass beads reflect light. There’s nothing like it.”
Much of the poundage was dispersed through the corset so that Lopez’s arms and legs were free to dance. “What really helped was the fact that Jennifer knows how to wear clothes. She has worn a heavy dress before in her life. Initially, this dress had a train, which was pretty amazing, but we cut the train when we realized Jennifer had to dance backward in the dress. She was moving great, but we were worried about someone else stepping on her glass dress.”
DETACHABLE GREEN DRESS
Inspired by a Cyd Charisse outfit from “Singin’ in the Rain,” this green dress was designed to allow the sleeves and skirt to be removed from Lopez as she was dancing.
“That’s tricky even on a good day,” Atwood said. “I had the jacket split down the center back so that dancers could pull the two sleeves and it would pop off. And I had the skirt made in two pieces, front and back. I looked at some old photos of strippers back in the day, and I knew that it had to be designed so that in a three-step number, ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ she’d suddenly be in the little top and everything else would be taken away.”
WHITE SUIT
The white suit and matching fedora were made famous by Chita Rivera in the Broadway musical. Atwood’s playfully risqué interpretation of the outfit removed an entire piece of wardrobe.
“For this costume, we started with full pants,” she said. “Then we tried it with shorts. Then we finally just went with the jacket and the hat. It serves as a homage to Chita, the OG, and also our way to go full Fosse with one of the outfits. It’s a real dancer’s costume because it’s all about the legs.”
THE SPIDER WOMAN
Lopez’s goth appearance as the film’s title character offers the most striking allusion to Atwood’s career-long work with Tim Burton. “We do love our black, me and Tim,” she said.
“For this, I was thinking about the way that animals in a dark environment sometimes glow. I used fabric made with a plastic-coated thread from a textile artist in the U.K. But even in the best of light, the black sheen of the spider could matte out. I wanted it to really glow, so I put silver behind it to help with bouncing off the light.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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