Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz: Dressing the Part

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sat, 05/24/2008 10:12 AM | Profile

Every outfit in a film is a costume, and the costume designer must make them tell the right story, says César-winning wardrobe master Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz. Vuillermoz was in Jakarta for the French Film Festival in April to guide local designers through the central tenet of his craft – the clothes maketh the man. Imogen Badgery-Parker met the man who maketh the clothes.

Of all the sights in Jakarta’s Kota that catch Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz’s inquisitive eye, it’s the bright orange T-shirt of a man sleeping by a canal that stops him in his tracks – that, and the matching orange flip-flops parked beneath the man’s bench.

“You see,” Vuillermoz says in a stage whisper, his face lighting up, “that color – that’s art, that’s style. Even among the poor ....”

He chuckles and moves on, delighted by his find.

When it comes to noticing what people wear, costume designer Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz can’t help himself. He’s been dressing people – or rather, characters – in French cinema, theater and dance for more than 20 years. His playfulness, expertise and eye for the spectacular have resulted in a portfolio featuring everything from dancing prawns and cancan girls to 19^th century peasants and hard-boiled detectives.

He has wardrobe credits for more than 40 theater pieces and nearly 20 films, including Saint Cyr (The King’s Daughters; 2000), for which he won the César, the French equivalent of the Oscar in the United States, for best costume design. His recent film projects include the lavish period piece Jacquou le Croquant (Jacquou the Rebel; 2007), which earned him another César nomination, and Contre-enquête (Counterinvestigation; 2007), a complex contemporary detective film.

Although often overshadowed by the work of actors and directors, costume design, Vuillermoz explains, is integral to storytelling.

“As soon as the actor appears on screen, we have to know who he is, where he comes from, what he has done,” he says.

“This is what the costume must tell us – if it’s a rich person, a poor person, a worker, a bourgeois. If it’s someone depressed, someone cheerful, a prostitute, whatever – as soon as we see the person, before the actor even speaks, we have to know who that character is.”

Which means the costume designer’s first task is to know the characters inside out.

With his starting point the script and the director’s vision, Vuillermoz finds inspiration by immersing himself in the world of the story, whether hanging out with French police as for Contre-enquête, or studying 18^th and 19^th century European paintings as he did for Jacquou. He even drew on contemporary photographs of poor children.

“That helped me to work with the children in Jacquou – their attitudes, their faces – because poor children now, whether in Africa, Asia or elsewhere, I felt the poor children in 19^th century France would be much the same.”

He then creates his designs, working from the director’s storyboard to perfect the outfit for every character in each and every scene.

“The important thing is to know what the filmmakers want – whether to go in a historic direction, or to create something unique for the film. In the case of Jacquou, it was the latter. We were making all the costumes, so I created a special universe for the film.”

He played with periods, dressing aristocrats in white wigs and red heels, even though it was not the fashion of the time. And when historians complained – “Historians are pretty uptight, you know” – his defense was simple: artistic license.

“We want to convey an idea, and so we exaggerate it to convey it to the public. … The decisions we make, they’re political, artistic, dramaturgic.”

Nevertheless, he strives for authenticity. The aristocrats’ clothes were made in Paris from fabric for Indian saris – as used at the time – and the thick rough fabrics for the peasants in a Romanian factory. All the clothes were treated to appear used and dirty “and not as though you plucked them out of a closet for the film”.

The final account was impressive: Jacquou required 10 months of research, design and production, and more than 10,000 meters of fabric, resulting in 800 costumes, 200 hats and 500 pairs of shoes.

Which isn’t to say contemporary films don’t pose their own challenges.

“A period film is always more prestigious, more beautiful, more spectacular. You have the impression a lot of talent is required for a film like that. But with a contemporary film, it seems all you have to do is go to the shops and buy some clothes,” Vuillermoz says.

“It’s true that we do just buy them, but it is still a dramaturgic process – you still have to find the personality, the psychology, of every character.”

Vuillermoz may be gently softening into middle age, but it’s not hard to see the creative, mischievous little boy who made clothes for his friends’ dolls – and sold his creations back to them for a few francs.

He brings an irrepressible sense of playfulness and humor to all his observations, even those that upset him, from girls dressed like television characters – “I despair when I see them, I think, ooh la la, why is she wearing that? But they don’t care about good taste” – to the horror of plastic in historical films – “When I see films with plastic buttons, I get depressed” (his own are made from horn or wood).

Driven by his fascination with fabrics and a flair for drawing, Vuillermoz studied at ENSATT, a prestigious school of dramatic arts at la Rue Blanche, Paris, working as a tailor to support himself. The decisive moment in his career was working on the film adaptation of the Margaret Duras novel L’amant (The Lover; 1992), set in Vietnam in the 1920s.

He is working now on a baroque opera and contemplating a film set in prehistoric times, his eyes sparkling at the possibilities.

“I don’t like always to do the same thing. In France, they are kept quite separate. You do theater or cinema or dance, and so when they see someone like me who amuses himself across all of these, they say ooh la la, this one puts his feet everywhere.”

But the one place this designer doesn’t put his feet is in the world of fashion itself.

“I prefer to be a costume designer. I can create anyone, whether a street person, a waiter, a princess, a prostitute. I don’t like doing only beautiful clothes. Dressing a beautiful, stylish woman is easy.”

“But creating a true character, that’s difficult.”

Jean-Daniel Vuillermoz, Costume Designer, Select Filmography

2008     Les Insoumis (Crossfire)
2007     Contre-enquête (Counterinvestigation)
2007     Jacquou le Croquant (Jacquou the Rebel)
2002     Dina (I am Dina)
2001     Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf)
2000     La Chambre Obscure (The Dark Room)
2000     Saint Cyr (The King’s Daughters)
1999     Astérix Et Obélix Contre César (Asterix and Obelix versus Caesar)
1998     Les Miserables (The Unfortunates)
1994     La Reine Margot (Queen Margot)
1993     Un Crime (A Crime)
1992     Le Retour de Casanova (The Return of Casanova)
1992     L’Amant (The Lover)
1989     Comédie D'Été (Summer Interlude)
1989     Contre-enquête (Counterinvestigation)
1987     Chouans! (Chouans)