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Retno Ratih Damayanti: Dressing for Success
Soekarno (Photo courtesy of Dapur Film MVP Pictures)Fusing imagination with meticulous research, designer Retno Ratih Damayanti has established the perfect formula for creating award-winning costumes
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Soekarno (Photo courtesy of Dapur Film MVP Pictures)
Fusing imagination with meticulous research, designer Retno Ratih Damayanti has established the perfect formula for creating award-winning costumes.
She may not have gone to fashion school, nor is she accustomed to drawing sketches, but costume designer Retno Ratih Damayanti certainly possesses the vision to deliver award-winning film costumes.
Retno ' three time winner of an Indonesian Film Festival (FFI) Citra award ' has enabled directors and actors to successfully reenact the looks of a series of important Indonesian figures, from the country's founding father Sukarno, first native Indonesian bishop Soegija, to Indonesia's third president, BJ Habibie.
She has used any and all available sources ' from books and photographic documentation to the closets of Habibie and his wife ' to deliver factual outfits.
Retno designed the costumes for the film Habibie & Ainun, the Hanung Bramantyo-directed drama that follows the romance of Habibie and his late wife, Ainun Habibie.
'We learned to call Habibie Eyang [grandfather]. One of the times we went to Eyang's home, he said to me, 'Come on, I'll show you my clothes',' Retno recalled.
'For me, it was a startling moment. He allowed me to go to his bedroom and browse through both his and Bu Ainun's closets. He also handed me the number of his tailor'.
The opportunity to explore Habibie's closet and her later discussion with his tailor helped her to grasp the couple's taste in fashion.
'They are very conscious of fashion, they understand fashion. Perhaps, it is because they lived in Europe ' an environment that fostered an awareness to dress well,' she said. 'They are also very neat. There should not be any wrinkles in their clothes'.
Retno and her small costume design team conducted extensive research on appropriate fashion styles from the 1940s to 2010, the period of time featured within the film.
The costumes she designed for Habibie & Ainun earned Retno her first Citra award in 2013. In the years that followed her first award, Retno proceeded to win Citra awards for her costume design in the biopic Soekarno in 2014 and Guru Bangsa: Tjokroaminoto (The Nation's Teacher: Tjokroaminoto) in 2015.
For Soekarno, her team provided four trucks full of costumes. Some of the costumes were put through a rigorous aging process while her team also took the time to distress 3,000 white shirts to make them look dirty and weathered.
'A scene in Soekarno involved around 2,000 actors and extras. We tinted all of their long white socks brown because bright white doesn't look good on camera'.
In Tjokroaminoto, Retno dressed actors in batik wraparound and batik head wraps rather than using batik skirts and blangkon hats.
The costume application was time-consuming as her 10 person team were expected to individually wrap each actor with the batik garments, but Retno, determined to keep the film as true to Indonesia's pre-independence period as possible, did not mind the hard work.
'I don't want to use blangkon because people did not wear blangkon back then,' she explained. 'Authenticity is important for me. I dress actors the way people dressed in the period. I believe it makes a difference'.
Retno does not always have the luxury of browsing through the closets of the figures she is attempting to replicate in her costume design ' most of the time, she relies on books and the internet.
'Finding data in Indonesia is a headache,' she remarked, lamenting the lack of documentation on fashion styles in the country.
On many an occasion, she has found the much-needed data in foreign-published books and photo documentation in the collections of KITLV (the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies).
'Designing costume is a combination of research and imagination. I conduct research to discover the general look of a certain period and employ my imagination to create the costumes'.
Retno also worked on the historical movies Soegija and Sang Pencerah (The Enlightener), the biopic of Ahmad Dahlan, the founder of Muslim organization Muhammadiyah.
She enjoys more freedom when designing for films that have been based on fictional figures, such as the family drama Garuda di Dadaku (Garuda on My Chest), romantic comedy Get Married and the upcoming Aach... Aku Jatuh Cinta! (Ugh'¦I Fell In Love), a love drama set in 1970s.
Before designing costumers, Retno, who was born in Yogyakarta on April 19, 1972, was a movie buff.
As a child, Retno, whose father worked as a high school teacher and her late mother was a nurse at Dr. Sardjito Hospital in Yogyakarta, would spend her nights in front of the TV watching various kinds of films ' including the surrealist films of David Lynch.
Her interest in fashion grew in her teenage years. Retno majored in French Literature at Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in 1991, in hopes that she could study fashion in Paris one day.
During her studies, she became actively involved with Teater Garasi, where she designed costumes and occasionally directed plays. It was at the theater where she met noted filmmaker Garin Nugroho and Hanung, who later became her close collaborators.
Before she had completed her undergraduate thesis at UGM, Yogyakarta's Indonesia Arts Institute (ISI) hired Retno to teach costume design and makeup to undergraduate students.
She landed her first film project in 2006 when Garin asked her to design the costumes for Opera Jawa (Javanese Opera).
'I was nervous because I had limited experience in film. I eventually took the job because Garin said that he trusted me,' the mother of one said.
As she could not sketch, Retno used to give verbal direction to her tailors regarding the costume styles that she desired.
'I can't draw at all. I don't know much about stitching either,' she said. 'I have three assistants with a background in fashion at the moment. I convey my costume concepts and the film's color mood and they produce the sketches'.
Constant evaluation is a crucial part of her job. Before taking on a new project, Retno and her team watch the previous films that they have worked on and try to spot any mistakes that they may have made.
'It is important not to feel satisfied with our work. We should learn from our mistakes to prevent repeating them in the future. Like in Soekarno, many said that the clothes looked new and clean,' she said.
Retno opened her archive on Tjokroaminoto as her team began to prepare to produce the costume designs for Kartini ' a biopic based on national heroine from Java, RA Kartini, starring Dian Sastrowardoyo.
'We evaluated our work for Tjokroaminoto because Kartini is set in a similar period,' she said.
Retno often finds herself being offered simultaneous film projects, a situation she expressed, not with pride but with concern.
'There are very few costume designers in Indonesia. There are a number of people interested in this line of work but they lack knowledge,' she said.
In an attempt to share her knowledge, Retno is planning to launch a book on costume design for film and to hold a costume exhibition sometime this year.
'I had trouble gathering data about costume and so I would like to document and share what I have learned through a book and an exhibition'.
