How a Costume Becomes a Character

The rack in Adeola Bankole's studio holds seven versions of the same coat. They are not samples. They are arguments. "In the first one he looks like a professor," she says, moving down the row. "In the third he looks like a professor who has lost a case. In the sixth he looks like a man who has stopped taking calls. The script told me all of that. The coat has to confess it."

Bankole came to film from theatre, where costumes survive for years and failure is public. "In the theatre, the audience is ten metres away. Fabric has to have opinions at ten metres. In film, the camera comes closer than the actor's own mother. Everything gets caught."

The physics of a character

She talks about costume the way engineers talk about bridges: load, movement, weather. A hemline is not decoration. "A long coat slows a walk by almost half a second per step. If your character is being chased, the coat changes the physics of the scene. I have to know what the scene needs before I choose the fabric."

The actor does not wear the costume. The costume wears the actor's patience, balance, temperature, and temper, and gives back a person.

For the flood drama she is currently finishing, half the exteriors were shot in real rain, which ruled out most of her first choices. "Wool drinks. Cotton dies. We ended up building the coat from oiled canvas, and it was so heavy that the actor walked differently, and the director looked at the monitor and said, that is the character. The budget person looked at the invoice and said, that is the budget."

What the audience never sees

The showiest work in a film is often invisible by design. Bankole's proudest construction, she says, is a suit with no visible seams in a film about a returning soldier. "He is a man who has been put back together wrong. The suit is tailored so cleanly that it looks like it was not made by human hands. That is creepy, and it is perfect, and nobody has ever mentioned it in a review. That is how you know it worked."

She teaches two days a month now, mostly to talk students out of beauty. "They arrive wanting to design looks. I tell them: looks are for magazines. You are designing behaviour. If you cannot say what the garment does to the body, you have not designed anything yet. You have decorated."

The flood drama, titled High Water, opens in festivals next spring.