If you haven't already seen the Beauty and the Beast remake, go go go! It's actually excellent and deserves every accolade it receives, especially for the costume design. If you've seen the movie, you probably would've noticed Belle's amazing outfits. But unlike other Hollywood films, the team making Emma Watson's costumes sourced all the materials sustainably. Yasss!
What's even more delightful is that Sinead O'Sullivan, originally from Kildare and the sister of comedian Aisling Bea, helped design the costumes for the film.
Over on Instagram, Sinead's business The Costume Directory has been posting about how the materials were sourced for Belle's outfits and it's seriously fascinating. They went to all the corners of the globe to find fair trade, ethical fabrics:
As Sinead said in her Insta post, she was an assistant designer to Jacqueline Durran for Beauty and the Beast, which had a costume team of almost 100 people.
The team tried to source ethical, fair-trade and sustainable fabrics wherever possible. For Belle's "red cape look" in particular "we decided to challenge ourselves to see how difficult it would be to create a costume that was head to toe fair-trade, organic and sustainable, but which didn’t compromise Jacqueline's design", she said.
"This specific costume required 12 different fabrics to make her cape, jacket, blouse, bodice, skirts and bloomers, with trims and ties, and we ensured that each element was certified organic and fair-trade. Our dyeing team took on the challenge of using natural and low impact dyes, and printing with traditional wood blocks, which the set carpenters helped make in the construction department, from redundant bits of the set.
"Some of the fabrics and trims used were vintage, including the cape which was made from hand-woven Scottish Jacob’s wool, that was then over-dyed using madder. The fabric for the jacket was made using a hand-woven linen found on E-bay, which was actually a lady in manchester’s school project from the 1960’s. The rest of the fabrics were sourced from fairtrade co-operatives in India and Nepal".
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She even posted a pic of two brothers from Western India who embroidered Belle's floral bodice:
This super intricate design was done by hand!
Here's another pic of it all in action:
BRB watching Beauty And The Beast again!
