The set was in Budapest. The costumer and dressmaker were in London. The fashion house that had to give its stamp of approval before any of the costumes could appear on film was in Paris. And it was the spring of 2020. Borders were closed — as were fabric shops.
These were not, in other words, ideal conditions for making a movie about the magic of fashion.
But Jenny Beavan, the costume designer of “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” got to work, buying fabrics online — “which is not the way to buy fabric; you need to feel it, feel the weight and sculptural qualities,” she says — and FaceTiming with models in France as they tried on replica 1950s Christian Dior gowns at the label’s headquarters. “It was all lastminute.com, to be honest.”
You’d never know it from watching the final product, an acclaimed, visually sumptuous dramedy about a widowed English cleaning lady in the 1950s who has a chance encounter with a Dior gown and embarks on a whirlwind adventure to acquire one. “Mrs. Harris,” based on a 1958 Paul Gallico novel, makes the case that painstakingly made-to-measure French haute couture can inspire, impassion and empower. But the convincingly glamorous styles on-screen were in fact a bit of a magic trick, made on a modest budget and through resourceful sleight-of-hand amid a global logistics catastrophe. The feat has earned Beavan, 72, her 12th Oscar nomination, and a win would be her fourth.
As Beavan is quick to point out, “All the films in contention this year would have had to cope with” a lot of complications from the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m by no means the only one.” Modest? Yes. But that’s also the magic of Jenny Beavan — a humble, practical approach that makes the task at hand seem suddenly very simple.
Beavan, born and raised in London, started her career working in set design. But in the late 1970s, a friend introduced her to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who often made films set in Edwardian England. “They thought I was a costume designer, so they then started to employ me,” Beavan remembers. “Stuff happened organically. I never decided anything in my life.” But in 1987, she won her first Academy Award alongside her friend and frequent collaborator John Bright, for “A Room With a View.” Beavan won again in 2016 for “Mad Max: Fury Road” and in 2022 for “Cruella.”
“Mrs. Harris” director Anthony Fabian says, “I thought, ‘Anyone who can do E.M. Forster and Mad Max is definitely the girl for me.’”
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“Mrs. Harris” would have presented a daunting challenge for any costume designer, even without the pandemic. Although the idea was to convey the splendor of 1950s Christian Dior on-screen, especially through one particular scene involving Mrs. Harris’s attendance at a fashion show, the very real and very much still-existent fashion house could only provide limited help with costuming. Beavan learned quickly that “In those days, [Christian] Dior would do his collection, they would make it, they would sell it and they’d move on. They didn’t see the need to keep pieces,” she says. “They have a few, and they have a few accessories. But it’s very little — and you would never be allowed to wear it.” (The company did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)
Dior did lend Beavan five replicas of ’50s Dior outfits made in the ’90s, as well as other materials — like a catalogue with notes, fabric samples and sketches. All five outfits, however, were black and white, “which meant that Mrs. Harris, being a woman who enjoys a bit of color … would not have been attracted to them,” Beavan says. A fashion show, too, tends to have far more than just five looks. So the rest of it would have to be re-created from sketches and photographs — or created entirely from Beavan’s imagination.
Beavan called on her friend Bright and his costume company Cosprop to help with the dressmaking. He and Beavan watched footage from a 1957 Dior show — the same year the label’s namesake died — in addition to looking at photographs from the same era to get a sense of how a Dior gown moved through space: “It moves away from the body, but it’s still part of the body. It’s a very gentle movement, but that’s because the material is so fine,” he says. “We wouldn’t have known that if we hadn’t seen the video.”
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Three pieces of faux-haute couture from “Mrs. Harris,” Beavan explains, are original Jenny Beavans passing for Diors (with the label’s stamp of approval, of course): the “Venus,” a dark jade-colored ball gown with a jewel-encrusted bodice; the “Temptation,” a deep-burgundy ensemble consisting of a lightly twinkling sleeveless dress with a full skirt and a smart taffeta bolero jacket of the same color; and the “Ravissant,” the glittering, soft-pink strapless number with floral appliqués that first catches Mrs. Harris’s eye when she sees it in a snobby housecleaning client’s wardrobe.
The Ravissant was perhaps the most important illusion to pull off. It had to both look convincingly like a Christian Dior and credibly pique a 1957 character’s — and a 2022 audience’s — interest in Christian Dior, without actually being Christian Dior. Plus, Beavan says, it had to be believable that the snooty client had chosen it and bought it, and “it also had to be believable that Mrs. Harris would just go ‘Wow.’” And it had to be floral: “We know Mrs. Harris likes floral, because she’s wearing double floral at that moment she discovers it.”
The real Dior “would have hand-sequined, hand-appliqued, hand-whatevered. And it would have cost, even in those days, probably 10,000 pounds,” Beavan explains. “And it would have taken months.” With neither the time nor the budget for such an undertaking, Beavan and Bright began experimenting and found that the best way to achieve Ravissant’s delicate but luxe look was to layer an inexpensive colored fabric under “an embroidered, appliquéd net. And then we put quite a strong mauve behind it, which is lovely, iridescent, and then we added extra glitter on top.”
Fabian, the director, says he wanted the Ravissant to have “that fairy-tale, magical quality.” And when he saw the fashion-show gowns, he knew he’d hired the right designer. “That’s the genius of Jenny, that she’s able to make those decisions: What should be authentic Dior, and then what needs to be enhanced to help tell the story better.”
Beavan’s collaborators marvel at her knack for finding inspired yet practical ways to use clothing to enhance the believability of storytelling. To hear Beavan tell it, though, is like hearing someone explain that she simply decided to go to the grocery store before starting to cook dinner: She always starts the creative process by thinking about what the characters need rather than what might look best. Superhero uniforms, for example, sometimes seem to be designed with aesthetics in mind rather than function, Beavan says. In “Fury Road,” by contrast, “We were trying to make sure that everything was there for a purpose. So the weird masks, like Rictus and Immortan Joe wear, were actually about breathing tubes, and Rictus’s weird backpack is oxygen,” Beavan says. “They happen to have decorated them weird, and there’s certainly a wackiness about them. But it’s all about keeping them alive.”
Beavan’s character-driven approach to costuming proved miraculous for the cast of “Mrs. Harris.” “My costume fittings with Jenny were the single most influential thing for me in creating her character,” wrote Lesley Manville, who played the title character, in a statement to The Washington Post.
“Of course Jenny is used to telling a story through costume — that’s what she does so brilliantly. But for me, her thoughts about Ada as a postwar ‘make do and mend’ woman, who genuinely liked clothes but didn’t have the money and was quite adept with a needle and thread herself, was like character gold dust for me,” Manville wrote. “She has no ego as a designer. She wants what is best for the character, for the color palette of the set and, most crucially, for the story. She’s a rare genius.”
Of course, Beavan may be unfussy, but she’s devoted to the craft. Caitlin Albery Beavan, a film producer and Beavan’s daughter, says she traveled with her mother to gigs all over the globe when she was a small child, attending school in India, Prague and Paris and sitting under costume rails on film sets playing solitaire. (Eventually, she grew miserable and asked her mother to stop moving around so much, which she did.)
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Today, Albery Beavan often applies her mother’s wisdom. “She makes everything possible and achievable. ‘Bite-sized chunks’ is her big phrase,” Albery Beavan says.
Beavan’s humility tends to stay with those who know her, and it’s gotten her jobs but has probably cost one or two along the way. “I remember once being asked to do a film by a very nice American director who said, ‘So how are you going to put your stamp on it?’” Beavan muses. “And I thought, Put my stamp on it? I said, ‘I don’t want my stamp on it.’ I’m sure I have a style,” but “it’s rather naturalistic.”
“Mrs. Harris goes to Christian Dior. She talks about Christian Dior. We’re in the house of Christian Dior,” Beavan adds with a laugh. “So why would you want Jenny Beavan?”
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