A pair of wide culottes, a thin black choker, and a boxy utility jacket: from Akira Kurosawa to Quentin Tarantino, Mae Losasso talks about the on-screen styles that have shaped her aesthetic – and her attitude to femininity.
I grew up watching a lot of films. My first real aspiration in life was to be a director, like my father. With him, I was watching Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Welles, before I was ten. I guess he thought that it would all go in on some level – and he was right.
As a teenager, I worked on some of his sets. By this point, my dream of making films had evaporated; I had been dazzled by the bright lights of the fashion industry and I wanted, more than anything, to be a staff writer at Elle Magazine. So I worked as an assistant in the wardrobe department, repairing clothes, dressing the talent, keeping an eye on continuity. It felt like a tawdry stand-in for the real deal – the catwalks and the glossies – but it was closest I could get.
1st June 1967: Clint Eastwood finds himself at the mercy of three gun-toting gals upon his arrival at London Airport to promote his latest film. (Photo by Central Press)
These days, my work has little to do with film – and even less to do with fashion – but I occasionally still work with my dad, as a wardrobe advisor on some of his films. There’s something about dressing for the screen that is so much more captivating than fast fashion and sleek shoots. The clothes you put in front of the camera have to work so much harder: they have to speak through the lens, they have to chime with the set design, and, most of all, they have to capture something of whichever character they adorn.
Sure, they’re an aesthetic component of a film, but they’re never dispensable or ornamental. A film’s wardrobe is practical, essential, sometimes integral to the plot, and, when done well, utterly memorable. Which is why film, over the centuries, has always been a wellspring of inspiration for personal wardrobes around the world.
Episode I: Cowboys and Samurai
The screen-wardrobes that have shaped my own aesthetic have tended to be boyish – I’m rarely seduced by a pretty frock – a fact that must come from my young exposure to early cinema, where women tended to be either glamorous objects, or else largely absent. (Nicholas Ray’s 1954 film, Johnny Guitar, bucked the trend, featuring Joan Crawford as Vienna, a strong-willed saloon-owner. As one character says of the character: “Never seen a woman who was more of a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.” The film was released to unfavourable reviews, and largely forgotten until the twenty-first century. Go figure.)
The styles I adopted must have been the external manifestations of the gender roles I internalised: when I watched the Westerns or action films or thrillers of vintage cinema, the strong and interesting roles went to the men. Why wouldn’t I want to wield a massive sword, like Seiji Miyaguchi’s character in the Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (whose super-wide, cotton culottes – practical, casual, effortlessly cool – remain a cornerstone of my wardrobe)?
Why wouldn’t I want to smoke cigarettes rolled in brown paper and wander, coolly, through the desert, a poncho over my shoulder, like Clint Eastwood’s nameless hero in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western trilogy (Eastwood’s black choker is another piece that snuck its way into my wardrobe some years back)?
Anyone aspiring to the female characters in those films must have the bar of their aspiration set pretty low: they’re little more than cardboard cut-out romance figures and screeching damsels in distress, who waft onto the screen for a few moments, deliver their wooden lines, and waft off again in their blousy dresses.
Granted, the girls in Kurosawa’s film have cropped hair and wear boyish peasant clothes – but only because their brutish fathers forcibly lopped off their long locks, in a desperate bid to stop the virile samurai from getting their grubby mitts all over the virginal village maidens. It’s hardly a win for women.
Episode II: Space Princess
Mainstream cinema trundled along in more or less the same vein until, in 1977, an American director, inspired by the films of both Kurosawa and Leone, decided to make a western-of-sorts set in space. The director was George Lucas; the film, of course, was Star Wars. Harrison Ford as Han Solo would, obviously, go on to provide young-me with another style reference: when done well, the little sleeveless jacket shrugged over the loose shirt can be the epitome of effortless androgyny; get it wrong, though, and it could end up less Western and more West Country (think: long-suffering farmer from a Thomas Hardy novel. It’s a fine line).
But Star Wars did something that the earlier action films hadn’t: it put a woman in a lead role. Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia shoots a gun and mouths off to Han Solo. Ok, so the boys have to save her, but she doesn’t fall swooningly into their arms – and she doesn’t fall in love (yet). Bar Crawford in Johnny Guitar, she’s not like any of the women we’ve seen in action movies before.
Actor and director Orson Welles, with large sideburns and a cigar, arriving at Orly Airport, Paris, September 26th 1949. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
But, hold your fire. Because, before we get too starry eyed about the progressive gender politics of George Lucas, let’s take a quick look at what Leia’s wearing: flowing, white robes, long hair twisted into delicate buns – is it just me or is she dressed like a Medieval princess from a vintage Ladybird book? She’s feminine, she’s glamorous, she’s even sexy in Return of the Jedi, where we see her lounging at Jaba’s feet (or foot?) in a metal bikini. I know this is meant to be Jaba’s perversion, but still, you just couldn’t resist it, could you George. You had to sexualise your strong female lead, and then drop her, swooning, into the masculine arms of Han. How could you?
Episode III: Alien Warrior
The first action film to really revolutionise the female wardrobe was Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). In fact, it was the first film to address a lot of things about a woman on screen – and it would also be the last, for years to come. In a revolutionary turn, Ripley’s gender remains totally irrelevant to the movie’s plot, in a way that few other films have managed to achieve, before or since. So she’s a woman – who cares! She can still wear overalls, kill aliens, and be the last (wo)man standing.
But then along James Cameron, who put the world to rights. He did make a feature of Ripley’s gender: he made her maternal and romantic, adding in two other female figures who’s masculinity is so over-performed, I can only assume its an attempt to reassure viewers that Ripley’s a heteronormative woman. Cameron realigned the gender imbalance in film – thank God! – and things remained the same for decades. I don’t mean that there weren’t interesting female roles after that – cinema has been exploring gender norms since its inception – but it would be a long time before we would see a strong female character whose gender didn’t even need to be mentioned.
Take the super-heroines of today’s Marvel franchise: where Ripley’s look was channeling the local plumber, their tight latex suits have an undeniably BDSM flavour. Or look at Suicide Squad, DC’s answer to the supergroup, in which Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn wanders around with her hair in cute bunches, a varsity top, and little panties. At least the BDSM outfits look like they were made for adult women: isn’t Robbie’s wardrobe teetering on the edge of an old man’s schoolgirl fantasy?
The more you delve into screen wardrobes, the less surprising it is that girls have been taking tips from the boys. What are these outfits really saying about how we see women in society? That if they’re strong, they’re also sexual deviants or totally bonkers. If I saw a woman with green hair and a baseball bat wearing only pants, I don’t think I’d emulate her style – I’d call the police.
Episode IV: The Femme Fatale Strikes Back
But, pause. Rewind. I’m getting ahead of myself. Because, before all of the superhero reboots of the 00s, we had the 90s. And something huge happened in the 90s that would change the face of cinema forever: Quentin Tarantino appeared on the scene. Tarantino’s films mixed martial arts and blaxploitation films (both of which had a long tradition of representing kick-ass gals) with comic strips, pulp fiction, and a heavy dose of cartoonish violence. The films were unlike anything cinema had seen before – and so were the women in them.
Tarantino’s women are no Scott-style Ripleys: not only does he make gender a key part of the plot (think Death Proof), he also depicts highly sexualised, almost noir-esque, female characters. And if Tarantino gives to feminism with one hand, he takes with the other: for every Jackie Brown you’ll find a film that heaps gratuitous violence on its female figures (the grizzly denouement of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a good example, a film that features precisely 0 strong females characters).
It’s this postmodern sensibility – this amoral, apolitical, anything-goes attitude – that defines Tarantino’s films and makes them, for want of a better word, cool. Forget didactic messages, Tarantino’s filmmaking runs on style: the close of up a needle touching vinyl, the grooves of a 60s Dusty Springfield track, and a wardrobe to die for. How many women have found themselves sporting a crisp white shirt and black cigarette pants after watching Pulp Fiction?
It’s sexy, but it’s boyish too. Its the effortless, untucked cool that characterised Clint Eastwood’s wardrobe in Leone’s films – but its also got a whiff of the femme fatale. Or take Mélanie Laurent’s character, Shoshanna, in Inglorious Basterds: sure, she’s wearing a glamorous red dress in the film’s finale, but it’s the boxy utility jacket, baggy trousers, and soft peaked hat that we remember, as she sits in a Parisian cafe reading a translation of Leslie Charteris. And she’s got balls. After all the macho hurdy-gurdy of Brad Pitt and his Basterds, it’s Shoshanna who successfully burns Hitler and his entourage in a cinematic hell of her own making.
Actor and director Orson Welles and Lea Padovani on a sightseeing tour following the film festival in Venice, August 23rd 1948. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
I wasn’t allowed to watch Tarantino’s films until I was older. If my formative years had been spent internalising the styles of on-screen action heroes (“clothes for climbing trees in,” as my dad would say), my teenage wardrobe was shaped by my discovery of Tarantino. As role models, Tarantino’s women might be problematic, but they’re a damn sight better than either the screeching damsels of times past or the latex kink heroines of today – and they’ve given cinema a female wardrobe that really is worth emulating.
