Costumes for Disney’s live action version of “Cinderella” were designed by Sandy Powell, a three-time Oscar winner (Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator, and The Young Victoria).
Powell on re-creating the iconic blue dress from the original film:
“I knew I didn’t want to do pink. I just didn’t want to do a big pink dress,” she says. “I then went through every other color and then I thought well it could be white, but, no it can’t be that because we have a wedding scene to do later and that really should really be the light colored dress. After that I kind of got a bit stuck on thinking green would be wrong, yellow would be wrong, red would be wrong. I came back to blue because it actually is the most attractive color and it just seemed appropriate. Then of course it went back to the fact that the original one is blue. And then once I’ve come to that conclusion I realized there’s no way in the world I could have made it any color other than blue because it just is. Cinderella’s ball gown is blue. And I think there would have been like millions of little girls around the world like horribly disappointed or telling me I’ve done it wrong.”
Powell on the legendary transformation scene:
“I was thinking about how the transformation scene would happen, even though it’s a visual effect,” Powell explains. “What would make sense and if there was some decoration what would it be? And I kind of thought of flowers, then I thought, ‘I don’t want to do flowers.’ And then I thought about how Cinderella is one with nature, her friends are the creatures and it would be quite nice if the creatures helped make that dress as it were. So, I just had this notion of the butterfly landing on her and then turning into the decoration. And then afterwards they would fly away. And that sort of ended up happening really. The butterflies purely were for decoration, but I kind of wanted to show how it got to be there.”
