If you spot a woman trying to surreptitiously take a photo of you on the bus – you’d have to look interesting – there’s a fair chance it might be Jenny Beavan. “I am the biggest people-watcher ever,” says Beavan, the British costume director who is up for her fourth Oscar next month. She took a secret photo the other day, she says, of “a fabulous woman. I don’t know whether she was from a sect or something – she was wearing white and had the most extraordinary white hat on. She was amazing; she looked like a sort of strange clown. I snuck a photo.” Elements of it might make it into a film – “I might be doing something to do with ghosts” – but it will be squirrelled away in Beavan’s mind, even if she can’t find the actual photo now to show me. She sighs and puts her phone away.
We are sitting in her office at the back of her beautiful London house, where she has lived for more than 30 years. Beavan has a straightforward, no-nonsense manner, but she’s also incredibly warm, her grey curls bouncing around her face, so the effect isn’t austere but fun and surprisingly comforting. If you were a film star, you would think nothing of telling her all your secrets while she was dressing you. Does she get good gossip? “Oh yeah,” she says, with a glint of mischief. “It’s like the confessional. Thank God I’ve got a really pants memory and can’t remember a thing, because I do hear some fairly intimate stuff. I’ve been very good, I’ve never divulged.”
Beavan’s house is filled with collections and curios, though done with such an expert eye – she started as a theatre set designer – that it doesn’t look cluttered. Her office is lined with books (histories of Palestinian costume, Indian art, the fashion of the French Revolution, and on and on), as well as some of her awards, including her four Baftas. Where are the others? She looks a bit sheepish and says they’re elsewhere in the house, because there are so many.
She started in period costume: Beavan was Merchant Ivory’s go-to costume director, winning her first Oscar in 1987 for A Room With a View, and nominated over the next few years for films including Howards End, The Remains of the Day and Sense and Sensibility. She did the costumes for Gosford Park and The King’s Speech, then showed she didn’t just do period Englishness when in 2015 she did Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth film in the post-apocalyptic franchise; it brought her a second Academy Award. Cruella, the 70s-set origin story of Cruella de Vil, followed that.
This time she is nominated for Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, a charming film about Ada Harris (played by Lesley Manville), a cleaner who falls in love with a Christian Dior gown belonging to a client and sets her heart on getting her own. It is set in the 50s and the clothes are, of course, wonderful – you have to believe that a dress could be so exquisite, and made with such haute couture artistry, that Ada becomes obsessed with it – but even the floral tabards she wears while she’s cleaning are a thing of beauty. Beavan’s ideas come first from the script, then she throws herself into research, creating mood boards. “I never draw, I think it’s two-dimensional. I can’t draw anyhow.”
Beavan is in her early 70s now, and although she has enjoyed not working for the past few months, she is thinking about her next projects. “I’m not sure what I’d do every day if I didn’t work.” She grew up in London, where her mother and father were professional musicians – her father a cellist and her mother a viola player. Both had come from unconventional families. On her father’s side, her grandmother had been a pianist for silent cinema and liked to take her children off to communes, and her grandfather had been a founder member of the Cardiff Anarchist Society. Beavan’s mother, meanwhile, had been sent off to chamber music schools from the age of 12, “and was really into vegetarianism and homeopathy”. Beavan and her sister went to a school based on Froebel principles, which prioritised learning through play, “and ran around in bare feet, never had television. We had a wall in the sitting room which we could draw on. We were always making things out of cornflake packets, just really creative.”
It was a happy, bohemian childhood – not derailed, it seems, even by the death of her mother when Beavan was 14. A distant relation they called Aunt Pol came to live with them and brought her two children, and so it seemed as if her world expanded, not collapsed. “I think we just all sort of accepted it, and then Pol coming was wonderful,” says Beavan. “I’m terrible, I just accept things. It’s quite worrying sometimes.” Her mother’s death must have affected her, though? “I always feel it should but I can’t honestly think of any way it did,” she says. “I think we were much more stoical then.”
When Beavan was about 10, her grandfather took her to see Twelfth Night. “I just fell in love,” she says. “I didn’t know about all the backstage stuff at that point, I wasn’t certain I wanted to act, I just wanted to be part of that magical world.” She went to the Central School of Art and Design, learning from the theatre designer Ralph Koltai. “He never even considered film – that wasn’t a true art – and he also said I needn’t worry about the costumes, I could always get someone else to do them.”
She worked for the Royal Opera House, and others, “anyone who would have me”. In the 70s, a childhood friend, by now working in TV and commissioning a Merchant Ivory film, brought Beavan in to do the costumes. She had no plans to go into costume design full-time, but Merchant Ivory kept calling and she found she enjoyed it. Set-designer friends joke with her, “and say, ‘At least a chest of drawers doesn’t answer you back’. But I like the interaction with a real person.” It must be an intimate job. “Very, and it’s very nurturing. It’s more than just putting clothes on them: you are very much there as a sort of therapist, mother, all of which I enjoy thoroughly.”
Can actors be difficult? “I like most of them enormously,” she says. “Yes, a few are tricky and normally it’s nerves. I think because I am very down-to-earth, we normally get on well. Also I listen to them, it’s teamwork, it’s not just me saying: ‘That’s what you should wear’, it’s about their response to the character.” How does she deal with difficult ones? “Don’t show a chink. It’s particularly two women I’m thinking of, and I’m not going to name them, but you just say: ‘OK, let’s see how we can solve this.’ You hold your nerve, and you’re fine.” Directors are the same. “Again, [the difficult ones are] normally quite inexperienced, and feel they have to make their mark.” And the costume department is an easy target. “Everybody wears clothes, so everyone can have an opinion.”
It was “really tricky times”, she says, to be a young woman working in film in the 80s and 90s. “It was the days of the unions when it was like a mafia, and particularly in wardrobe, there were a lot of men. They didn’t like young female designers, and I wasn’t allowed to be called a designer because I wasn’t in whatever union, so I had an absolute loathing of unions because they made my life really difficult. Completely different now, and I think the unions are more useful.”
It was a feeling of constantly being belittled, “just making me feel inadequate”, rather than sexual harassment. “There were always other people far more attractive, who probably did have problems,” she says. She worked with Harvey Weinstein. “He was so uninterested in me. I remember my agent saying: ‘Harvey, this is Jenny’ and he went: ‘Huh’ and walked off. Great. I had no problem.” She says she didn’t hear of anything going on with Weinstein, but does remember working on one film and having to refit a new female actor, one that Weinstein wanted. “I have no idea what that relationship was,” she adds.
For a while, Beavan largely kept her head down and kept working: she was a single mother to her daughter, Caitlin, often taking her and their nanny away with her when she was on a job. “It was great. It was also tough, but I couldn’t have stopped,” she says. In recent years, as her power has grown (and her mortgage decreased), Beavan has become more political. “At my age and career, I have no fear about speaking out. What’s going to happen? Disney aren’t going to employ me again? So?” She has publicised the pay gap between wardrobe and other film departments. Does she think that’s rooted in sexism, because costume is largely female-dominated? “I think that’s absolutely part of it,” she says. “I have a good agent but I’m pretty sure production designers get pretty much twice what I get.”
The commercial possibilities for films are heavily based around the characters’ looks, for which the costume director is largely responsible (think of all the kids’ costumes you can buy, for instance, or the fashion tie-ins). But costume directors, and their team, don’t get a cut. “Costume is the one thing that is going to make money, and I think it’s outrageous,” says Beavan. “It’s also the sheer disrespect that we put our lives and soul in, working lunatic hours to give them these looks, and then they own it. I don’t think that’s right.” One US fashion company created a collection based on Cruella, “this disgusting range of clothes, vaguely red, white and black. I didn’t even know. I thought that was rude, and boy did I tell them.”
It is the general dismissal of her craft, and the people who work in it, that enrages her. “I don’t think they did it maliciously. I don’t think they even thought about it. Total disrespect. They have no idea what we do to make those actors go on set feeling confident, right, not even thinking about what they’re wearing. They just think it’s all about fashion.” She says that last word witheringly.
Does she take much notice of fashion? “I absolutely couldn’t be less interested,” she says with a laugh. “I hate labels. I’m interested in people, not clothes.” She did become fascinated by Dior, but she was drawn to the history of the house and people who worked there, rather than the clothes.
She gives very little thought to what she wears. “Only to be comfortable and clean,” she says. When she won her Oscar for Mad Max, she collected it wearing boots and a Marks & Spencer faux leather jacket, and it caused a sensation. There was something defiant in her ordinariness: it said a lot that people were not used to seeing a normal-looking, older woman being celebrated, and that even at Beavan’s level of success, she was still being judged by the standards of 25-year-old movie stars. “That’s completely ridiculous,” she says. “It’s fine. I don’t mind people looking at me and thinking what they like. I’m not normally on stage.”
She doesn’t like wearing dresses, she says. “But also, I thought: I’ll have a bit of fun.” She had added biker touches in honour of Mad Max, and when she collected her Oscar for Cruella, she bought a cheap jacket (“I wanted to give money to Ukraine, not spend money on me”) then, having recently joined the Costume Designers Guild, scrawled their slogans calling for equal pay on her white shirt. “It was fun to wear. And it was comfortable, that’s the main thing.” None of it is vanity, all of it tells a story. But will she wear a Dior dress next? That wouldn’t be fun enough – she went to the Baftas the other night, where she was nominated again, dressed as a (very chic) cleaning lady, accessorising with a feather duster.
