Ask a costume designer for style advice and you brace for a list of labels you can’t afford. Loulou Bontemps named two, quickly, then went back to talking about shoes, seams and patience.
She dresses The Gentlemen, a show men now watch with one eye on the plot and one on the tailoring. Her actual working method has more in common with a Saturday at the op shop than with anything happening on Bond Street.
Almost none of what follows costs money. A fair bit of it costs time, which is the part most men aren’t willing to spend.
1. Start at the floor.
Asked for three essentials, she went to shoes first and didn’t hesitate. “You can make an expensive outfit look so cheap if you’re wearing bad shoes.” Grubby, worn down or simply wrong, and everything above them stops counting.
2. Nothing off the peg fits, so buy the alterations with the garment.
“If you buy a suit off the peg, don’t expect it to fit you properly.” She treats tailoring as part of the purchase price rather than an optional extra afterwards, and that single habit is most of the gap between her cast and the rest of us.
3. A fifty pound ($80) suit plus a tailor beats a new cheap suit.
The suits men tell her on Instagram they couldn’t possibly afford were often fifty or a hundred and fifty pounds, then altered to fit. What she’s buying is cloth and cut, and she’d rather spend the money on making it sit properly than on a label.
4. Turn it inside out and read the seams.
The most useful thing she said all conversation. The seams tell you whether there’s fabric to let out, which tells you whether the piece is worth buying at all. Most men check the label and the price and nothing else.
5. Vintage is a habit, not a trip.
She and her buyers are in charity shops and vintage stores constantly, looking without needing anything, which is how the good pieces turn up. Her word for it is magpies. Patience is doing the work here, not taste.
6. Only about twenty percent of it needs to be special.
Eddie and Susie are the two best dressed people on television and four fifths of their wardrobe is bought, borrowed or found. Spend where it shows.
7. Never take the obvious option.
“It’s really important in costume not to do the obvious. That’s terribly boring.” She’s noticed actors reach for the obvious watch almost every time, and the obvious watch is the one worn by everyone else who reached for it.
8. Accessories are load-bearing, not finishing touches.
Watches, sunglasses, jewellery, bags, shoes. She uses them to carry story that never makes it into dialogue, which is a polite way of saying they’re doing more work than your jacket is.
9. Either wear it the way it was designed, or subvert it deliberately.
Sergio Tacchini on Nanny is tennis kit on a man who plays tennis. In season one the same brand was terrace uniform on a northern gangster who’d saved up for it as a kid. Both read as style because both are committed. Halfway is where men come unstuck.
10. The best thing you own is the thing you chose yourself.
The most copied eyewear in the show belongs to Ray Winstone, not to the costume department. She had beautiful alternatives ready and he wasn’t interested. “I can’t take responsibility for Ray being the true gangster that he is.”
