Alright y'all! Sit down cause were about to talk about something! And that something is Belle, and her costume design.
I’ve been seeing a ton of hate going around about the “accuracy” of Belle’s costumes in the recent live remake of Beauty and the Beast. So I’m gonna have a little tete a tete with you and try and work some things out.
Firstly: I have heard a lot about how Emma Watson had a “huge” say in the creative decisions on her costumes and I want to address that. As well as address everyones incessant whining about how she doesn’t wear stays/corsets.
Here we go: So I’m a costume designer and deal with people requesting things all day long. The point of the costume designer is to make everyone happy with how the character looks. That’s the simple version, but it is. And a huge part of designing is listening to the actors and getting to know how they feel about the character. If the actor feels strongly about what shoes their character would wear, you listen. If the director has a strong opinion on the color of a shirt, you listen. A huge part of being a technical designer on something (specially costumes) is about creating a balance between multiple different visions, that come from multiple different people. Because clothing is the biggest indicator to anyone seeing you, what kind of person you are. So coming from my costume design background, it is not always right to just go fully period and make it happen.
My most recent costume designs were supposed to be 1860-1890s Western American clothing. Now when you google the 1860s you find corsets and huge hoop skirts, but my characters where women of little money, no maids, and worked on farms. If I asked you to put on a corset, a hoop skirt, with no help from anyone else, and then go work in a field would that make sense? My point to all of this is, we know what the documented styles were for a time period, but usually finding information on the more common pedestrian styles is infinitely harder. One of the biggest things that helped me (but was something I never looked into) was using the Metropolitan Museum of Arts’ online archive to view clothing from that time period, and see what clothing people were wearing that weren’t middle or upper class.
So all of this leads up to me saying this; and many people are going to get very angry at me for it. In no way did not having stays/corsets, panniers, and hoops change the overall period and style of this film. Belle is a country girl with no maid, who works with her hands and has very little money. Having the constraints of stays (which are difficult to put on correctly even with help, let alone without) and hoops would not make any logistical sense for her character. Now for the Silly Girls, yes! They are obviously of more means then Belle and have the help of each other to get into full on garb everyday, and it almost seems (in the new film) like the silly girls are supposed to be the daughter of the town seamstress, which is a reason why they have such fine clothing in such a small town. And by evidence of the last scene where Belle’s dress has very obvious stays (even if they were just built into the bodice itself) she would have had stays in more of her outfits after she married the Prince because she would have had the means and a maid to help her, and no longer had to dress in a practical manner.
Moral of this story is: Fashion over Function in the 18th century was a very big thing, and still is today. So sometimes being “fully true” to a time period, isn’t always what you want. Thank you and goodnight.
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