The Artist is a film that was released in 2011 but is made as an old black and white film. Costume designer for the film, Mark Bridges, had to think about elements of design that he had not had to consider before.
Mark Bridges is an American costume designer, born and raised in Niagara Falls, New York. He received a master’s of fine arts degree in costume design from the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 1987.
He has also designed the costumes for the films, Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter and Blow.
As the film is in black and white, Bridges had to think about how each of the costumes would look in this colour tone. He experimented with many different colours and materials to see what shade of grey they would give off.
One of the costumes that he made was an off shade of orange and the colours didn’t necessarily look nice. But when the filming was changed to black and white, the tones were so complementary of each other and it worked.
Bridges won five awards for costume design from this film.
