Fifth element costume how to#

While Leeloo’s clothing has stood the test of time, Jovovich notes that her eternal desire to do good also lives on. And Luc and Jean Paul talked about this bandage idea, and Jean Paul was like, ‘Genius! I love it.’” When people get wounded, like, they just put bandages to cover the necessary bits. “So you have to have as little as possible, but for the sake of modesty, you have to cover up…. “Being in a hospital, they put a robe on you that is open in the back so they can reach in and put injections and tubes,” says Jovovich. The bandage idea was inspired by hospital gowns and wound care. First, she’s naked in a DNA-slicing machine, then she’s wearing the iconic bodysuit.

Fifth element costume how to#

“I knew that this character was beyond unique and she was something that had never been seen before.”Īs for the costumes, The Fifth Element team had to think of how to clothe Jovovich during her birth scene. This was really a dream come true,” says Jovovich.

However, when she ran into the director one hazy morning at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, he asked her to film a screen test, and she got the role. Nothing came of her first casting with Besson. In a new video with Vogue, Jovovich recalls how she transformed into Leeloo. The most famous piece by far is a barely there white bandage bodysuit, which has inspired Halloween costumes for decades. The flame-tressed humanoid is tasked with saving the planet and has quite the wardrobe-all designed by Jean Paul Gaultier-to go along with it. Black, white, blood red, and many theatrical clothing variations all contribute to the disconcerting atmosphere of the film.In 1997, the science-fiction film The Fifth Element by Luc Besson was released-and the character Leeloo, played by 19-year-old Milla Jovovich, was born. In 1989, the British director Peter Greenaway called on Jean Paul Gaultier to design the costumes for his film, a technical challenge for the designer, who had to design an outfit adapted to the colors of each theatre where the characters pass through. Helen Mirren in an ultra sexy cage dress inspired by Victorian crinolines is an image engraved in the memory of cinema.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989 Vogue looks back at his most memorable collaborations with the 7th art. So great was his success in cinema that in 2012, Jean-Paul Gaultier was invited as a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival, a first for a designer since Japanese costume designer Eiko Ishioka in 1996. This was proven in 2009, when he dressed Lara Stone as Brigitte Bardot, in reference to Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris, or revisited Humphrey Bogart's trench-coat as a sexy bodysuit. An adventure that began in 1989 with Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and continued throughout his career, during which he regularly collaborated with Pedro Almodóvar, dressed the biggest film stars on the red carpets, and drew on the Hollywood imagination to nurture increasingly whimsical collections. When he opened his fashion house at the end of the 1970s, it was only a matter of time before the world of cinema called on his services. And with good reason it is indeed cinema that planted the seed of fashion in the designer's mind, notably Jacques Becker's Falbalas (Paris Frills), one of his favorite films, in which a couturier seduces his client. ' Cinema always made him dream, and that's what launched him into the world of fashion,' Thierry Maxime Loriot, curator of the exhibition Le monde de la Mode de Jean Paul Gaultier, de la rue aux étoiles, presented in 2015 at the Grand Palais, told France Inter.