Horror Costuming: Stoker
Saturday, October 10, 2020 at 2:50PM 
We carry part of our parents with us at all times. Whether through the body their genetics defined, or the mind molded and perchance scarred by their influence, their absence, their love, we are made in their image. Some might rejoice in that intrinsic truth, others resent it. Park Chan-wook's only English-language feature, Stoker, understands this with caustic assuredness. From its opening salvos, the script and images call attention to matters of blood and descendence, materializing the familial bonds through costume design…
India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) starts the film wearing her mother's blouse, her father's belt, and shoes from her uncle. She tells us this in voice-over narration while strange evocative images fill the screen. Bloody flowers and an open field, a skirt flowing in the wind and brown air framing the face of a pale girl. We're getting to know this person as a composite of fashion, a collage of outsider influences rather than an individual on their own right. Of course, that's the point. The prologue invokes the film's themes and its visual strategy, it sings them loud and clear so we can all hear and be ready for what's to come.
From there, we jump to a funeral. The Stoker patriarch has just died, leaving behind young India and her mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). Widow and orphan present themselves in deep mourning, their bodies two straight lines of black ink over the severe tableau of domestic tragedy. In the distance, a dissonant figure in inappropriate attire looms. He's handsome, well-dressed, but his ensemble features no trace of black. He's Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), the brother of the deceased.
If the names didn't already clue you in, screenwriter Wentworth Miller has devised, in Stoker, a vampiric reimagining of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. This is a tale of incoming adulthood, a twisted bildungsroman, whose monsters may not drink blood like "real" vampires but they're as otherworldly as Bram Stoker's voracious count. With Uncle Charlie come new desires, new needs, and wants suddenly awakened after lying dormant for 17 years. It's partially sexual, partially…something else. Something more destructive and violent.
Costume designers Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller, more commonly known as simply Kurt and Bart, worked with Park Chan-wook to create a world of sordid elegance in which Stoker's story may unravel. The Korean director, for his part, lingers on the pair's designs, fetishizing each garment with lustful fervor. The shoes, in particular, are central to the film, even in screenplay form. Every year on her birthday, India is presented with a new pair of black and white saddle shoes. They're the only shoes she wears and her outfits are all created with them as their central focus point.
Initially, she thinks they are a gift from her hunter father, but their provenance traces back to a hunter of a different kind. However, they are from Charlie, dear Uncle Charlie. Like Kurt and Bart, this mysterious man is something of a costume designer himself, building the character of his heir from the feet up. Appropriately, when the moment is right, he presents her with a new model – crocodile skin Christian Louboutin heels. A predator's hide to dress a predator.
As it was said, India's clothes seem to take their stylistic clues from the footwear, exposing the totemic power they represent. Every ensemble is delineated in rigid lines and retro styles - 1960s chic by way of Victorian austerity. The tailoring is a masterpiece, full of neat details like knife pleats or pin tucks forming geometric patterns over wool. They're also perfectly symmetrical, suggesting an exactitude that's as aesthetically pleasing as it is disturbing. Real people don't dress like that, not in our world.
Weirdly enough, people don't dress like that in Stoker's reality either. Oddball fashion is beautiful repression here, soft covers that obfuscate our vision of the monsters hiding within their silky folds, signals of strangeness that are exposed for all to see. Whenever India steps out of the house, there's a shocking contrast between her and the surrounding bodies. She seems out of place and out of time. Like a vampire, India's only at home inside the mausoleum where she slumbers.
The house gains a strange potency from the fashion of the people who live in it as if its confines create a bubble of madness, an odd, orderly sort of lunacy that makes domesticity be as curated as a Vogue editorial. Not only that, but the clothes themselves appear to dialogue with the building in conversations of color and texture. The green of India's sweater, the one she wears to school, is an echo of the house's walls, for example. Even outside, the ghost of that haunted place lives with India. Where she goes, that tormented aura of poisonous familial influence follows. It's a comfort blanket in the form of a soft designer sweater.
Speaking of sweaters, one can't talk about the clothes of Stoker, without paying plenty of homage at the altar of Uncle Charlie's mustard-colored Bottega Veneta.
The yellow sweater is unusual in its golden brightness, though its power doesn't live solely on the chromatic dissonance. The color seems childish in the controlled palette of the movie. In certain regards, Charlie's stuck in arrested development and his costume reflects the childish evils at the root of his bloodthirst. Yellow is also a cheery signal of violence in the twisted universe of Stoker, like the yellow pencil with which India stabs a classmate.
Such childishness is even more perverse when one considers the sensuality of Goode's Charlie. Even though Kidman and Wasikowska walk around in negligées, it's their costar's costuming that sexualizes the actor most shamelessly. Everything fits like a glove and the camera ogles him with abandon, lingering on his form with equal measures of fear and lust. He's a murderously handsome Stepford Husband, too perfect for comfort, so sharply WASP-y he's like a blade ready to draw blood.
In comparison to this sharp psycho killer and his budding protégée, Evelyn seems soft, fragile. She's a little bird who pecks at your hand as you encircle it with strong fingers that can crush the animal at any moment. Or perhaps she's a flower, a rare orchid gaining new life. The rot of death, the black mourning attire, quickly fades into lively lilacs and blushing pinks, the lustful maroon of rich wine and, finally, royal blue in the form of an Elie Saab original that was designed by the couturier in collaboration with Kurt and Bart.
From Evelyn, India gets a blouse of expected floweriness, a belt of the father, and the shoes gifted by her uncle. It's what she wears at the start and the end of Stoker, bookending the film in sartorial rhyme. Furthermore, it's not simply that these are symbols of India's lineage. They are her identity. India is her mother's passive-aggressive bereavement, her father's hunting strength, and her Uncle's psychotic control all mixed into one killer package. In Stoker, the clothes don't dress the person, the clothes are the person.
You can rent Stoker from several services, including Amazon and iTunes.
Reader Comments (2)
An incredible film and... why is Mia Wasikowska not a bigger star?
"A predator's hide to dress a predator" - this is an excellent piece (on a beautifully-designed film).