OVER the past week more than 38m people have watched the hilarious moment when Jenny Beavan walked past the director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and a host of bow-tied Hollywood grandees on the way to collect her Academy award for best costume design for Max Max: Fury Road. As she strode towards the stage there was a collective, aghast double-take and schoolboy sniggers at the frizzy-haired woman from Peckham, south London.
Beaven, 65, who “doesn’t do frocks” turned up to the most glamorous event of the year in a fake-leather biker jacket, trousers and “sensible” boots. Fresh from being called a “ bag lady” at the Baftas by Stephen Fry (which also caused a furore) she was unapologetic about her choice: “The Academy didn’t say anything about a strict dress code. I think it may have said to wear black tie, but nothing about whether you must wear heels, not like in Cannes where apparently any woman who walks down the red carpet has to wear heels. I was furious about that. I mean, come on, it’s crazy.”
The get-up certainly shocked the men sitting next to the aisle who had, till then, heard nothing but the swish of silk and chiffon. A number of very funny (and false) theories about why they looked so shocked — particularly Iñarritu, who won the Oscar for best director for The Revenant — have been doing the rounds, including the notion that the jewelled skull on the back of Beavan’s jacket was modelled on Iñarritu’s dead grandmother.
More seriously, the accusation has flown around that applause for Beavan was discourteously lukewarm and perhaps even non- existent from Iñarritu. The director is furious, saying the suggestion was “mean-spirited and false”.
He insists he did clap for Beavan as she walked onto the stage where she was presented with her award by Cate Blanchett.
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Beavan was sanguine. “People don’t have to clap for you, they don’t have to like the work,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t clap the whole time [during the ceremony] — your hands get tired. ”
“I’m short, I’m fat. I really would have looked ridiculous at the Oscars in a gown
This may be the first time Beavan’s name has come to most people’s attention but inside the business she is revered. This is her second Oscar: she won one for the Merchant Ivory production A Room with a View in 1987 and has been nominated an additional eight times.
Three weeks ago she won a Bafta for her Mad Max designs followed by an award from the Costume Designers Guild. If you love cinema you will be familiar with her work: she has created costumes for a number of big films including The Remains of the Day, Gosford Park, The King’s Speech, Sense and Sensibility and Sherlock Holmes.
She was born in postwar London into an artistic family. Her father was a cellist, her mother a violinist. She was married to the theatre manager and producer Ian Albery, who has run both London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse. Their daughter, Caitlin Albery Beavan, is a producer.
In the 1970s Beavan worked on set designs in London productions, then took an unpaid job designing clothes for an early Merchant Ivory film, Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures. That was the start of a long relationship with the company. She has also collaborated with the designer John Bright, who recognised her talent early on. She developed her style “just listening to him and learning from him, learning the history and politics of the clothing”.
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Most of her work has been on period pieces. Authenticity is essential. In The King’s Speech, Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, George VI’s speech therapist, was given a “working wardrobe” of four suits.
At the time the story is set, Beavan once explained, even members of the royal family didn’t have extensive wardrobes. “This whole thing now of having masses of clothing is completely modern . In those days you had a pretty regimented amount. You looked after them, you brushed them, or your servant or your wife brushed them, and they lasted for years.”
Mad Max, directed by George Miller, was a different matter, an “incredible chance to bring what was in George’s mind to life, which was just visually bonkers”.
Beavan had to reimagine a violent dystopian world after a nuclear holocaust. She designed some pieces from scratch and had access to costumes made previously (Fury Road is the fourth in the Mad Max series). “Even more importantly, we had all the junk they’d collected. Old car parts, old cutlery. So I got from Australia something like 200 boxes of junk,” she said recently.
“Old goggles, old bits of ammunition . . . we found materials, like vellum, which I’ve never worked with before. It’s disgusting, it’s raw leather, really, but it made marvellous masks.”
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As for whether her own costume was a failure, Beavan has taken it all in good part. “I am British with a slightly rebellious character; I always have been,” she said after the ceremony. “I’m short, I’m fat. I really would look ridiculous in a gown. What I was actually wearing at the Oscars was sort of an homage to Mad Max — a kind of biker outfit.
“I thought: if I can’t beat them, or if I can’t sort of join them, then why not try doing something a little bit fun.”