Meet Jenny Beaven : Still Making Waves With Another Oscar Win

What we see characters sport on-screen carries direct significance to how we interpret the overall story and costume designer Jenny Beavan has successfully crafted an exquisite brand around delivering some pretty awe-inspiring character costume creations! For over 40 years, the British designer established a name and brand for herself and her awesome creations, utilizing her love of a project and authentic expressions in characters. Her designs are crafted to reflect pivotal character arcs in the films or series she’s worked on! 

Hollywood wouldn’t be the same without luxurious fits to kill for! In every major flick and film that’s garnered massive attention, there are some stunning outfits we as fans just can’t get out of our heads! Anything from Mila Jovovich's portrayal of Leeloo in The Fifth Element(1997), stylized by the astounding Jean Paul Gaultier who engraved an iconic image with Leelo’s white cutout tunic and fiery orange overalls, inspired by an authentic story, surrealism, and ethereal futurist punk! 

Then there’s Neo(Keanu Reeves) and Morpheus’s(Laurence Fishburne) black leather trench coat gang look in the Wachowski sibling’s groundbreaking film The Matrix(1999). More recently, we’ve even seen costume designs that carry subtle and intentional looks like LaKeith Stanfield’s tweet coat and straw hat getup in Jordan Peele’s psychological mind twister, Get Out(2016); the outfit hawking to U.S. Reconstruction era Black imagery. 

The visual imagery we’re given as an audience becomes a resounding mental image, unshaken based on how powerful the character’s/scene’s expression stands! Beavan recently snatched an Oscar win for her work on Disney’s original Cruella(2021)! With some truly mindbending pieces such as Cruella’s gothic snitched trenchcoat to her baroque red gala gown, Beavan takes the director’s and producer’s visions and throws audiences into the immediate world of Cruella with each look! Utilizing high fashion tools such as Liberty Fabrics, Beaven weaved together masterpieces that will forever be remembered in expressing a more genuine grasp of the young Cruella. 

But this isn’t the first massive win for Beavan as she and John Bright won an Oscar previously for their collaboration in the thrilling Mad Max: Fury Road(2015). She’s also worked with a host of popular celebrities(The Sex Pistols, Emma Stone, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Downing Jr., etc) that have become forever associated with their notorious characters, pop culture moments, and so much more! Keeping up with the trending wave of neo-pop culture movements, Beavan has found her way in advocating for pay equity for costume designers and crew! 

Fashion in the entertainment industry can oftentimes be overlooked as less important to the movie/TV making process and productions, however, Beavan and her stunning works have something massive to say about that: 

''Clothes as clothes, I'm not too interested in. 

Clothes as storytellers, I'm very interested. 

That's the whole basis of it and that's what I really enjoy,'' 

the 70-year-old, whose career profile 

includes most Ivory-Merchant films as well as a host of others, 

including Brian De Palma's

''The Black Dahlia'', told PTI in a Zoom interview from London.”