Costume Designer Patricia Norris: The Frock Flicks Guide

Patricia Norris (1931-2015) probably flies under the radar when it comes to frock flicks, even though she preferred working on historical costume movies and TV shows. She told the New York Times of films with contemporary costumes: “They’re very boring to me. I’m not a shopper. I can’t do a modern movie unless it’s sort of twisted.” While most of her designs were historical, they weren’t flashy — she seemed to specialize in gritty, lived-in garb found in Westerns or worn by characters without a lot of money. She joked that this was why she earned six Oscar nominations for Best Costume but never won: “If you look at who belongs to the academy, they’re going to vote for the sequins. I’m up against too many sequins.”

Yeah, we love the sequins here at Frock Flicks, but we gotta respect a costume designer who does her research and spent her whole life bringing up the level of verisimilitude onscreen for such a wide variety of characters. Starting through her work with director David Lynch, Norris also became a production designer, and she is the only person to receive Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Costume Designers Guild and the Art Directors Guild. Let’s take a look at the breadth of Patrica Norris’ work!

 

 

Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971)

 

 

Zandy’s Bride (1974)

 

 

The Master Gunfighter (1975)

 

 

Peeper (1975)

 

 

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

 

 

Days of Heaven (1978)

 

 

Movie Movie (1978)

 

 

Heart Beat (1980)

 

 

The Elephant Man (1980)

This was the beginning of Patricia Norris’ long collaboration with director David Lynch, who said of her in IndieWire:

“She’s got a tremendous talent for costumes. She’s got exquisite taste. She always gets the job done. It’s a magical thing when she dresses an actor and helps them to set the character. The clothes fit the characters perfectly on ‘Elephant Man.’ It was a period piece, and we had to fit the era and of course they did — the different classes of people. She makes the character no matter what. She’s done pretty much every film since then.”

 

 

History of the World: Part I (1981)

 

 

Victor/Victoria (1982)

 

 

Frances (1982)

 

 

Racing With the Moon (1984)

 

 

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1984)

 

 

Johnny Dangerously (1984)

 

 

Mesmerized (1985)

 

 

Sunset (1988)

 

 

Return to Lonesome Dove (1993)

 

 

The Journey of August King (1995)

 

 

Old Man (1997)

 

 

The Hi-Lo Country (1998)

 

 

The Singing Detective (2003)

 

 

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

 

 

The Immigrant (2013)

Talking to The Film Experience, Patricia Norris explained that, while it looks like these characters are wearing black:

“Actually no one is always in black. There are dark greens and dark browns. I think what you find is usually in that period with the immigrants they were going to wear their one good whatever. And men’s suits were always black and grey. So you have a kind of — the lady in the pink dress is not going to look right. The period really dictates the colors.”

 

 

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Norris told The Cut about her research for this film:

“I found out there wasn’t any. It’s before cameras, so you have to read a lot, and most books, you’ll get maybe a couple of pages of things that become interesting to you visually. There were etchings done in the period, but they don’t tell you a lot, because I think they’re done by people who have never been to the South. It was always the happy slave with his lunch lying under a tree. You just really have to find out where people came from and how they got their clothes, which were all hand-me-downs, and the slave owners were responsible for these people and clothing them. The women’s clothes had to be earlier, so they looked like they were cast off from the owners.”

In Vanity Fair, Norris said: “I had a workroom in Louisiana and very good stitchers — as you can see on the bodice of their designs. That fabric came from London for them, and we found a lot of the shoes for men and women in Italy.”

She also described the empire-waist dresses worn by Lupita Nyong’o’s character as hand-me-downs: “Her clothes were probably 10 or 15 years older than what they were wearing on the plantation.”

In The Cut, Patricia Norris also described the level of detail she and her team went to for distressing the costumes:

“We were on, like, five different plantations, and we were trying to age things down so they looked like they belonged there, and the soils down there go from dark to light. We would grab soil before we got there, so when you were aging people and dressing them, they sort of matched.”

 

What historical costumes designed by Patricia Norris have you noticed?