OBSERVE

EMMA is a new movie for a new day.  I am living in 2020 and 1815 has never looked so modern and so fresh.  The skies are blue, the light is clear and bright, the grass is green and every room interior Emma walks through is bathed in a different and more beautiful pastel than the last.  

The clothes, though, let’s talk about those.  Let’s stay on color.  To be bathed in the sumptuous, joyful color of the Regency period - even for two hours - is to be revived.  The color that remains with me is the glorious saffron yellow you see in the photo here.  Emma wears it early in the story and it immediately warms you to her and brightens your spirit.  The first time you catch a glimpse of her handsome fren-imy Knightley, he is also wearing a coat of the same color, visually establishing their connection to one another.  

While the clothes for both the women and the men can not be called simple by any stretch of the imagination, you come away from the movie with a sense that each outfit, each room, had a reason, had balance, had a clear point of view.  The colors, even the neutrals, were saturated to just the right depth.  If you want to see what a rich pastel palette can look like, watch this movie with your color book in your lap. Be ready to hit pause every 30 seconds on your second watching so you can run to the screen and match your swatch.  

That, perhaps is the biggest gift this movie brings to us all.  Instead of opening in a theatre last weekend on the big screen, EMMA opened in my living room on my TV screen.  What that means is that I had 72 hours with it rather than just 2.  And I also had pause and rewind and flat out STOP.  So I could choose any moment, any outfit, any room. As many times as I wanted to linger there I could and I did, drinking in the beauty and the energy of the color.  

INTERPRET

I’ve been reading The History of Costume by Carl Kohler to understand the styles of 1815 England.  EMMA by Jane Austen, a novel which has lately been interpreted into a movie and is now being seen streamed in all of its radiant glory, is set in this time period and I want some context as to why she is wearing what she is wearing.  

The page I came across first was startling and immediately relatable to our times.  In a comment about men’s dress from 1790 - 1820 it said, “When the Revolution had banished all differences of rank and made men attach greater importance to comfort in dress even gentlemen of high rank frequently wore the redingote in preference to the dress coat, giving it the nickname of pauvre diable.”

The spencer is the style of short jacket that Emma wears throughout the movie and it is a version of the redingote.  It is a style of  jacket that was “borrowed from the boys” for the simple reason that the gauzy, extremely lightweight cotton dresses that were in style were no match for the cold winters and drafty interiors of Regency England.  The long sleeves and buttoned up chest and neck were at least something to add a layer of warmth.  

Thinking about what seems like a radical departure in the way we dress these last few years in our own times, it’s interesting to consider if we are mid-revolution or post-revolution?  With the rapid rise of athleisure and adoption of street wear styles taking the world by storm, we are deciding en masse that we want to be comfortable more than we want to be “in style” and have rejected many of the strictures that tailored or non-flexible fabrics impose on our lives.  

ACTIVATE

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new exhibition that just opened on May 7 called “About Time: Fashion and Duration.”…or was supposed to…or will. In any case, it looks at the concept of time, especially as it relates to the clothes we wear.  

“Fashion is indelibly connected to time,” Mr. Bolton said. “It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times.” And it is, like most industries, currently having an existential crisis centered on the entire question of time.”

The exhibition features clothing from 160 pieces of women’s fashion from the last 150 years,  compares styles from wildly different eras that have compellingly similar styling.  That echoes the interesting comparisons I saw when watching this newest film iteration of EMMA.  

From the color to the silhouettes to the details such as smocking and ruffles and delicate, high necklines, what is historically correct in the movie can now be found almost line for line in stores like Forever 21, Freepeople and Anthropologie to name just a few.  

What’s old is new once again - time is a fluid concept.