Interview

When Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited was made into an 11-part British miniseries in 1981, a cult quickly surrounded the program. In it, a very young Jeremy Irons played Charles Ryder, a University of Oxford innocent who befriends the eccentric, wickedly louche, teddy bear–toting aristocrat Sebastian Flyte (played by Anthony Andrews). Charles goes to stay at Flyte’s family home, Brideshead, falls in love with Sebastian’s sister Julia (played by Diana Quick), and ends up embroiled in all of the drunken, scandalous, socioeconomic messes that apparently befell fey, rich British youths in the ’20s. Even today, that serial continues to be referenced by fashion designers (all those winter tweeds and waistcoats) and adored by Anglophiles. So when Julian Jarrold took on the hubristic task of directing a new Brideshead (in feature-length form), he turned to costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh (EE-mer nee Veil-DOWN-ig) to dress the hot young actors filling the legendary parts—Matthew Goode as Charles, Ben Whishaw as Sebastian, and Hayley Atwell as Julia. The Irish costumer previously teamed up with Jarrold on 2007’s Becoming Jane, and has also worked with directors like Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan. Instead of copying the ’80s take on the sartorial styles of the ’20s for Brideshead, Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh followed her own impulses, creating vintage costumes by hand (the women’s clothes were done in Paris; the men’s in London) with surprising strokes of bright color and contrasting textures to achieve an ultimate English look. Who better than Burberry designer Christopher Bailey, who has himself revolutionized classic British aesthetics in recent years, to talk to Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh about how she restyled Brideshead for 2008?

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CHRISTOPHER BAILEY: Where did you shoot Brideshead Revisited?

EIMER NÍ MHAOLDOMHNAIGH: We shot in Yorkshire, England, for the first few weeks.

CB: Oh, my goodness, that’s where I’m from! Where?

ENM: We were in Castle Howard. That’s where they did the original Brideshead.

CB: How long were you on location there?

ENM: For five weeks. Then we went to Oxford, Venice, and Morocco. It was my first time in Venice. I thought it was going to be really hot—we were there in August, but it was lovely. There is so much shade from the buildings since the streets are so narrow. By that point, everybody in the cast was happy because we were on the homeward stretch.

CB: How did you first get involved with doing costumes for films?

ENM: I studied fashion, but I always really loved film and was really interested in it. So I just started knocking on doors and phoning costume designers, saying, “Please, can I have a job?”