Putting costume into drama

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 14 years ago

Putting costume into drama

Fashion designer Trelise Cooper gives her theatrical tendencies free rein when she creates the outfits for an opera. By Janice Breen Burns, fashion editor.

IT'S a frigid morning in Melbourne and Trelise Cooper, darling of New Zealand fashion, lover of joyous colour, fat skirts and puffy blouses, extravagant frills and va-va-voom silhouettes, is clad in black, her corkscrew curls and foot-long pussybow the only pale relief from the top of her head, to the toes of her gravity-defying black stiletto bootlets. She often wears black, she says, but today it is particularly incongruous against the jewel-coloured silk costumes she designed for Handel's opera Xerxes.

As she totters back and forth, jerking brightly coloured costumes from the rack in a cluttered back room of Victorian Opera's rehearsal hall, you can see that even these widow weeds have a theatrical quality, a "Trelise-esque" flamboyance.

Her tailored black concert jacket kinks dramatically into her waist and a thickly pleated black frock coat underneath sags lavishly to her knees and swings elegantly as she walks. She is a picture of all that she has perfected in her long career as a fashion designer: the undulating, womanly cut and fit; the impeccable, fairy-stitched finish; the ideal proportions of smooth and rough texture; and the intuitive balance of fabric weight and kinetic potential.

Cooper says that when she was asked to design costumes for this joint Victorian Opera and New Zealand Opera production of Handel's gender-bending comedy, she was eager despite having to fit in the work between her regular collections. She sells her brands, including signature and diffusion lines, lingerie, children's wear and a recently released home-furnishing range, in 14 countries. "I was flattered to be asked. I'm an opera fan. I said if I did it, though, it had to be in essence everything that I love: the embellishment, the flamboyance, the colour and texture and layering and detail. They gave me free rein."

Advertisement

Free rein, that is, after one tiny potential glitch was dismissed. In 1738, George Frideric Handel set his oddball opera of cross-dressing lovers in Persia, circa 480BC. "It could have been all togas and wrapping," Cooper giggles. Since the opera was revived in Germany in the 1920s after 200 years in oblivion, its costumes have been approximately updated to Handel's era. That's all Cooper needed to know. She had already mustered a glorious mountain of raw materials: laces, silks and scraps of embroidery from the markets of France, and antique saris and exquisite gold embroidered trims sold on India's streets. Wherever an impossibly delicate and complex example of traditional embroidery or beading suited a costume, she arranged for it to be replicated by craftsmen in India.

Cooper fluffs out a spectacular charcoal pinstriped coachman's jacket edged in pink floral embroidery to illustrate the results of one epic effort for a single costume. "What would be the ultimate for me? If someone in the audience loved one of the costumes on stage so much, they said, ‘I have to have it'." She hints there have already been offers made on the jacket. Next she pulls out an extravagantly embroidered and padded coat with a high royal collar, train as long as any bride's, and of such vivid fuchsia pink silk it appears lit from within (pictured right). Next comes one of her main costumes, a slithering violet blue trail of silk satin. "This one is for Atalanta (to be sung by Jessica Aszodi)," Cooper says. "She's the vampish, jealous younger sister of the main love interest Romilda (played by Tiffany Speight and scheduled to wear the fuchsia silk) and I'm basing her on Dita Von Teese." Von Teese is the milky-skinned, wasp-waisted, raven-haired beauty who charmed the fashion world three years ago with her cartoonish revival of the 1950s-style burlesque arts. She's sensual more than sexy, a vampish caricature of an old-fashioned man trap. Against her own ribcage, Cooper holds up a corselette, thickly encrusted with flashing knuckle-sized "diamonds" to show how Atalanta's va-va-voom waistline, hips and bosom will be defined on the violet satin. "I want people to be engrossed in the gorgeousness."

For Xerxes, there are just 15 to 20 outfits for 11 characters, and with so few costume changes, Cooper says, her most difficult challenge is to keep audiences mesmerised by the same garments for long periods on stage. "I want enough detail so that you become increasingly conscious of more layers and more layers of detail and meaning the more you look and look at each costume," she says. "I want the whole experience - the music, the acting, the costumes, the set - to be as inspiring an experience as you can have."

Xerxes, a co-production with Victorian Opera and the NBR New Zealand Opera, opens with four performances, August 13-20, at the Melbourne Recital Centre. It will also be performed in Wellington and Auckland next year.

Most Viewed in Culture

Loading