Esteemed British costume designer Janty Yates has collaborated on 14 films with director Ridley Scott and won an Oscar for her work on Gladiator. She spent nine months in Rome designing House of Gucci. Yates sighs wistfully when she describes being invited to the Gucci archives in Florence. Multiple Gucci ensembles could strain the budget of a film, but the archive kindly shipped a handful of looks to Los Angeles where Yates’ assistant fit them on Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga also has a large fashion collection of her own, including vintage Gucci pieces. They amassed a vast closet for her. The movie covers a 20-year timeframe, with two or three looks established per day of shooting. By the end of the production, Yates developed over 74 outfits for Lady Gaga.
I was tending bar in a jazz club the night Saturday Night debuted. The next day all my friends, many of whom were musicians or into nightlife and clubbing, were raving about it. That show changed late-night television forever. You wouldn’t think of Saturday Night as anthropological, yet it’s a study of history as much as it is creating a show. It captures a slice of New York, the characters, and honors the chaos surrounding the inception.
In an unsettling anthem to female empowerment, actor, singer, and fashion arbiter Zoë Kravitz is spreading her wings in her directorial debut, Blink Twice. Cowritten by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, this dark psychological thriller is about the treatment of women by the rich and powerful. Best friends Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) are waitresses who decide to “party crash” tech billionaire Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) charity event gala. Dressed in chic bright red and royal blue cocktail dresses, they catch King’s attention and he invites them to join him and friends on his private island for a few days. Frida teasingly asks partygoer Rich (Kyle MacLachlan) to “blink twice if I’m in danger.”
At the beginning of the period of samurai culture in Japan that would influence everything from animation to spaghetti westerns, a lone Englishman aboard a derelict Dutch privateer ship landed in Izu and became enmeshed in the intrigue that would usher in the Edo Shogunate. The real-life Tokugawa engaged in a deadly game of wits for a kingdom without a crown in a court without a throne. In 1979 James Clavell published a fictionalized version of that historical period with names changed and a 1980s miniseries adaptation of his novel captured a global audience and garnered the highest Nielsen rating to date for NBC.