The Power of Costuming

When one sees a dancer, the first thing they look at is the dancer's make-up (if applicable) and their outfit. Immediately afterwards of course, you notice the lithe movements, but the first thing to stick in your mind is still the appearance of the dancer's costume and make-up. When you watch Star Wars, you immediately know that the sinister guy with black armor is the bad guy, even before he chokes Captain Antilles to death.

The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy based off the books of J.R.R. Tolkein. Throughout the trilogy, one can gather the different societies and stations in life the characters are from. For example, Legolas has long, flowing hair and, although rugged, his outfit definitely hints at his life before the quest: an elvish prince of Mirkwood.

Aragorn, a character initially introduced to us as Strider, is heir to the throne of Gondor, but he doesn't want the throne because he fears making the same mistakes in his kingship as his forebear. When we see Aragorn, his clothing looks dirty and worn. He definitely does not seem the part of a king. When one of the Fellowship dies - Boromir of Gondor - Aragorn takes his bracers and wears those. It's as if he reclaims a little bit of his heritage in that scene. As time continues, he acquires armor for the battle of Helms Deep, and by the time the battle of the Black Gate comes around in Return of the King, he has accepted his heritage. He rides into the battle wearing the full armor of a king of Gondor. His outfit symbolizes his internal transformation from a lowly ranger who makes a bit of difference to the individual people he meets, to his rightful place as one of the greatest kings of Gondor, where he helps to build peace for all the people of Middle-Earth.

There are even examples in my own experience in which costuming is important. During my filming of Torn, we had to make our actress look dead in a scene, and had to make do with the fact that she cut her hair in the middle of the shooting process. It ended up being not as good as we hoped, but I learned a bit about makeup and such. More impressively, ONW Roar was a project most of our entire school participated in. We applied make up to hundreds of students at a time to look like animals, and used that for the artsy idea of the project. The sheer amounts of makeup applied was almost overwhelming, but turned out rather well.

Overall, costuming may be one of the most important aspects of a movie, because it is the part that the audience recognizes and can end up being a symbolization of transformation. To leave you with a question, what costume do you think was the most well done in any movie you have seen? Does it symbolize any sort of transformation like Aragorn, and if so, what changes?