FIFTH ELEMENT OUTFITS SERIES

For a thousand costumes, he may have even done 5,000 sketches before narrowing it down” It’s an incredible amount of work people don’t even know about. “Gaultier did more than a thousand costumes… So a thousand costumes is like 10 collections but all for one movie. Thierry-Maxime Loriot, curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Gaultier retrospective observed that:

In the DVD extras, Besson notes the designers’ extraordinary attention to detail – Gaultier oversaw all the large crowd shots, adjusting the costumes of up to 300 extras before they went on set. According to the designer: “I spoke with Luc about what is futuristic, and we decided that there could be elements of today… Everything is possible”. Whilst comic artist Jean-Claude Mézières conceived the film’s visual aesthetic, Gaultier’s designs tie all the elements together.

FIFTH ELEMENT OUTFITS SERIES

Too often science fiction overlooks costume in favour of set, scenery and special effects, but Besson allowed costume designer Jean Paul Gaultier unleash his imagination in a series of hyper ostentatious garments that took inspiration from the designer’s haute couture collections. By subverting almost every known sci-fi cliché and introducing a sense of fun into the genre, Besson created a cult classic that’s often imitated much referenced.Īn exercise in creativity, The Fifth Element refuses to acquiesce to visual tropes. The Fifth Element was released in 1997, almost 15 years after Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, and whilst there was contention about Besson’s inspiration (French cartoonist Moebius unsuccessfully sued Besson for stealing ideas from one his fantasy comics) it’s a film that had absorbed the director since he was a teenager. That said, if you’re willing to overlook the clunky plot and think of it as a visual spectacle, you won’t be disappointed.Ĭomparisons with Blade Runner are not unfounded, but only in the sense that both have a distinctive look, and draw inspiration from similar sources: namely Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As Roger Ebert rightly observes, The Fifth Element feels long at 127 minutes: the director obviously resisted temptations to cut his set pieces. The presence of a host of Hollywood stars – including Bruce Willis and Gary Oldman – obviously helped Besson secure a budget of more than $90million and it shows in the visuals. Early on, it’s obvious that the film dispenses with plot to focus on outlandish visuals that take the audience on a wild ride through time and space with each conceit more fantastic than the last. That’s to say, you either like it or you don’t, it’s not a film that encourages sit-on-the-fence neutrality. The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s futurist sci-fi offering, is Marmite.

Fifth element outfits