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The epic fashions of 'Australia'
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As I sit in Caffe Trieste on New Montgomery sipping on my latte, I glance at my cell phone every five minutes in anticipation for my scheduled phone interview with Academy Award-winning costume designer, Catherine Martin. She has dazzled the silver screen with storytelling fashions in all of Baz Luhrmann’s films: Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! (for which she won the Oscar) and now she makes us marvel at her creations for Luhrmann’s new sweeping epic Australia.
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Kidman carries a fancy parasol and wear a pretentiously pretty outfit before she docks and sets foot on Australia
She is no stranger to extravagant and conceptual costumes, but with Australia, Martin was dealt a different card. With a more subdued color palette of Earth tones, she strays away from cabaret flair, but still manages to stun us with rugged Aussie cowboy charm and late 1930s femininity a la cinched waists and parasols.
Just when I am about to order my second latte, my phone buzzes.
“Hello, this is Dino,” I answer in a professional tone.
A moderator says, “Hi Dino-Ray, I have Catherine Martin on the line, are you ready for your interview?”
“Yes,” I say, hoping she won’t notice the annoyingly hip coffee shop lounge music playing in the background.
“Hi Dino-Ray,” says Martin in a friendly Australian accent that makes me smile. “Do you prefer Dino? Or Dino-Ray?”
“Dino is perfectly fine,” I was trying not to talk in an Australian accent like her to sound cool. I love accents. One day I am going to pick one and stick with it.
Thus begins my conversation with the Academy Award winner – and that’s not something someone could say everyday.
Long before Martin was costuming Luhrmann’s larger-than-life films, Martin says she was a rebel costume designer not knowing what to do with her life. She was volunteering at various theater companies and collaborating with different people on projects. But then one day, she switched on the radio and she heard an opportunity that may have brought her career as a costume designer to the next level.
“I heard an ad on the radio,” remembers Martin. “They were having auditions for young designers for a local play. So I tried out and got it.”
The local play led to other opportunities and she eventually found herself at Australia’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art, which has produced some of Hollywood’s top notch talent including Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Hugo Weaving and Baz Luhrmann - who would eventually become her main partner in cinema (and husband).
Luhrmann heard of Martin’s work and they teamed up for a theater production of La Boheme, which opened in San Francisco and eventually went to Broadway. One thing led to another and their collaborative efforts in theater spilled over into film starting with Strictly Ballroom.
“(During Strictly Ballroom) I began to discover film and loved it. I spent most of my time trying not to get fired,” laughs Martin.
Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman get a little dirty-chic in Australia
Their latest endeavor, Australia shows that their collaboration has lost no steam. Even though the costumes aren’t as ornate and avant garde as some of the ones we’ve seen in Luhrmann’s past films, the process or accomplishing this “Down Under” epic of love, loss and loyalty set around the time of World War II was anything but simple.
“We started very early on,” explains Martin. “Baz is intensely visual. We had a meeting and he acted out the movie for us and we were given assignments.”
Martin’s assignment? Besides being the production designer, she had to describe the characters through historically savvy costumes.
From Lady Sarah Ashley's (Nicole Kidman) severely pristine dresses in the beginning to the more ranch lady look she has later on in the film, Martin did her homework and did it well. She examined photos taken in the late ‘30s, devoured info from a website called “Picture Australia,” dug through diaries during the time, searched national archives and even interviewed indigenous people in the area where Faraway Downs (a major locale of the film) was set.
“All of the costumes had a backbone of research,” says Martin. “The film is basically a story set to a historical background.”
The ruggedly (very ruggedly) handsome Jackman is a man's man - an Aussie man's man to be exact
If Australia’s history is accurate, then the land of kangaroos was hoppin’ with top notch fashion with Kidman having the most fun. Her costumes brilliantly told the story of an uppity woman who inherits a floundering ranch and eventually is brought down to Earth by a man named Drover (Hugh Jackman) – and even his tattered neckerchiefs, grimy henleys and fitted trousers (don't worry, he does slip into a dapper suit for about 20 minutes of the movie) have this sartorial appeal that had me wanting to go out and wrangle a herd of cattle in style.
Martin says that nearly everything was made from scratch. On top of that, they were mixed with vintage pieces that were altered in order to add texture.
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Kidman dons a cheongsam
But out of everything in the film, it is the red cheongsam with a sexy keyhole that Kidman wears during a major ball scene in the city of Darwin that steals the show. The traditional Chinese dress is glamorous with old Hollywood appeal – but Martin tells me that even the dress has its own untold backstory in the film; further proving the meticulous research that goes into the costuming.
“Darwin’s Chinatown was very important,” says Martin. “It was close to Indonesia so they were in touch with Asia. For the cheongsam, Baz and I came up with the idea that the character of Sing Song (Wah Yuen) had a cousin in the city’s Chinatown that made dresses in 48 hours – which was common back then. Since Lady Sarah Ashley lost most of her clothes before that scene, we thought it would be a good story for the dress.”
That little wink-wink, nudge-nudge to the history of the area gives Martin’s costuming of Australia more depth and is testimony to her ethos of fashion in film.
“Fashion and film run in a circular motion,” says Martin. “Film can influence the runway and the runway can influence film –there is this constant exchange.”
Her eclectic taste in fashionable movies is very quirky, yet it makes sense. Whether it is the high-end luxury of Sex and the City or the comical costumes of Blades of Glory, Martin looks at the costumes in the movie less in terms of fashion and more on whether or not they have a sense of storytelling accomplishment.”
“I appreciate all fashion in movies,” says Martin. “Clothes are clothes and actors make the story – and the costumes have to support that story.”
This theory is probably why she has an Academy Award sitting on her shelf.
Australia is out in theaters Wednesday Nov. 26.
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