As someone
who spends a substantially above-average amount of time looking at costumes,
it’s always fun to look back on movies made 10-20 years ago and see how the
clothes hold up. It’s surprising how
quickly things start to look dated (and I don’t necessarily mean in a “I can’t
believe a human thought this clearly hideous outfit looked good enough to
photograph” way). Think of Mean Girls or
Gossip Girl, both fairly recent
examples of costume design that are still fashionable but immediately
recognizable as mid-2000s. So it’s remarkable when a film manages to achieve a
sense of true timelessness, the way The
Virgin Suicides has.
A common criticism of Sofia Coppola’s
work is that her films are all about style over substance – but I would argue
that to some extent, the style IS the substance in her films. The emotional
resonance of The Virgin Suicides comes
from the dreamlike atmosphere as much as from the actual events of the story,
which unfold more like a series of loosely connected memories than a
traditionally structured narrative.
The soft,
ethereal colors and fabrics give the Lisbon girls a sense of other-worldliness
– most obviously Cecilia’s wedding dress, the only costume we see her in. Her
sisters’ clothes bear a striking similarity, particularly as the film
progresses and the girls become more and more isolated from reality.
