He Wore Blue Velvet
The movie: “Austin Powers in Goldmember”
The costume designer: Deena Appel, who created the costumes for the first two “Austin Powers” movies as well as “Meet the Parents” and “Alaska.”
Blue velvet: Introducing a third movie installment to a successful franchise means leaving a few things intact so that moviegoers can pick up where they left off. That includes Austin Powers’ (Mike Myers) now-familiar fitted blue velvet suit and lacy jabot shirt. In the current film, Austin, still stylistically stuck in the 1960s, time travels from the present time to 1975 to search for clues to find his kidnapped father, Nigel Powers (Michael Caine), and old partner Foxxy Cleopatra (Beyonce Knowles). The only problem was that several versions of the suit were needed this time—for Tom Cruise’s cameo, for Mini Me (Verne J. Troyer), for an opening action stunt sequence, and for both Myers’ stunt and photo doubles. But the original vintage cotton Appel purchased at International Silks and Woolens was long gone, and finding replacement velvet the exact shade of turquoise blue (“I have an aversion to royal blue”) was a challenge. Appel looked at swatch cards with hundreds of velvets. “Modern cottons don’t have the same sheen, life and luster as the originals. My favorite blue was illusive,” she bemoaned of the shade she originally chose to complement Austin’s “Shaguar,” a Jaguar XKE painted with the Union Jack. Finally, her assistant tracked down a supplier in Canada, with typical minimum orders in the vicinity of 500 yards, which happened to have only 60 yards of what Appel swears was the very same velvet as the original. She needed 50 yards.
It’s not the throwaway culture: Appel keeps leftover fabric from all her movies in her garage. Seven yards of the original blue velvet was just enough to make Mini Me’s suit.
Suitable sources: If you wonder why Austin’s suits seem so outrageous, it’s because when they’re not made from hard-to-find velvets—such as the sherbet striped worn with an orange blazer—they’re primarily fashioned from upholstery fabrics, some vintage, some new. No stone goes unturned to seek them out, or the dotted or striped shirting fabrics. Appel sees fabric suppliers in New York and Los Angeles as well as vintage collectors and dealers. Appel’s personal favorite suit is a burnt-orange herringbone number. “It’s a really nasty beige upholstery fabric we sent to three different dyers to get just the right orange.”
Quoted: To give Foxxy her, well, foxy look, Appel says she couldn’t literally regurgitate the ’70s. For inspiration she looked at ’70s Blaxploitation movies “Foxy Brown” and “Cleopatra Jones.” “The reality was waistlines were up and over the belly button and hemlines were down to the knee. To our eyes now, that would not be sexy. Now you just don’t want to remember that’s the way it was.” Instead, Foxxy wears many bra tops and jackets cut off at the bra line with low-waisted skirts and trousers.
Stretching it: If you take a ’70s silhouette and make it in a fabric with a little stretch it fits and looks 100 times better, Appel says. Other fabrics Appel preferred to ’70s staples such as double knits (“very hard to work with”) and silk jersey (“too clingy”) were leather, suede and denim.
Trivia: Austin’s tried-and-true black slip-on Beatle boots are starting to get old, literally. For the initial movie, Appel got hold of a single pair of boots from a rental house. For the second installment, she had a copy made and used the new boots along with the originals, which the production company eventually bought. But before “Goldmember” was shot, New Line auctioned the second pair online. So for the current film, Austin had only his original pair of old boots to wear. Why couldn’t Appel have another pair made? With all the costumes that had to be made, including those for almost all primary extras and dancers, there wasn’t any money left in her budget. “No matter how much money you have, it really gets spread thin,” she explains. —Betty Goodwin
