Interview: fashion in the flick

Milena Canonero is the most famous costume designer: she has won three Oscar in movies such as Marie Antoniette, Barry Lyndon and Chariots of fire. Here is the Cannonero's interview about is latest film as costume designer in The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson.
Here is the interview from "Vanity Fair":

“Working with Wes is always different because he takes me to different places and different characters and situations, but however different they may be, he creates a world of his own that is very specific to him,” she says. “The more I work for him the more I see he is crystalizing his cinematic style to go with it. One has to immerse oneself into it, his world, which at first seems so light, but has many layers. Some people may not get his movies, but I do and I love them.” However, the work of Zweig (writer of The Grand Budapest Hotel book) wasn’t necessarily handy in realizing the costumes, says Canonero. “It was useful not really for the costumes, but for the atmosphere and the surroundings of Wes’s story that Zweig, an Austrian disillusioned writer, was an inspiration for me.” 

To capture the fictional, candy-colored Eastern European Republic of Zubrowka in between World War I and World War II, Canonero took a holistic approach. 

“We had meetings and also exchanges of ideas and references not just for the costumes themselves, but the total look of the principal characters from head to toe,” she says. Photographers like Man Ray and George Hurrell, and painters like Gustav Klimt, Kees van Dongen, Tamara de Lempicka, and George Grosz served as inspiration points. “One also is stimulated by looking not only at the real people of that time, but also at other images and literature that are unrelated to the period and the setting of the story,” she says. “The look of each actor has to have its raison d’être.” For instance, Tilda Swinton’s Madame D.’s 1930s Klimt-esque coat and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling's Prada leather trench were distingushable pieces for their characters (Prada also happened to design the 21-piece luggage set for Madame D. and Ralph Fiennes’s Monsieur Gustave.) For Gustave that translated to the color of his uniforms. “It gave a nice twist to liveries that would have otherwise been rather predictable,” she says. “Ralph is not only a great actor, but also a director, and he is also extremely particular and detail-oriented like Wes and me. A triumvirate that needs to be satisfied.”