Costume designers have a saying: if the audience notices the clothes, something has gone wrong. The best film costume does its work silently, telling you who a character is — their money, their history, their mood — before they say a word.
Clothes as exposition
A frayed cuff, a coat that is slightly too big, a dress that is a decade out of date: these are details a costume designer chooses deliberately. They do the work that would otherwise need dialogue, and they do it faster.
When costume becomes fashion
Occasionally a film costume escapes the screen and changes what people wear. It almost never happens because the clothes were designed to be fashionable. It happens because they were so precisely right for a character that audiences wanted a little of that character for themselves.
