Pathway: Costumes in Orlando by Andrea Paul

clothes changing with the decades

Shedding outer male "layer" ... still the same on the inside

"Swinton/Orlando as female - these photos demonstrate the part that costume plays in indicating both Orlando's gender and the time period. As Woolf herself points out, a satisfactory metal image of visual reality can be constructed by just a few, carefully chosen written words, but a visual image requires full explanation. The film viewer has time to gaze at and take pleasure in a scene, much of which may be left unspecified in writing. Equally, literature is able to convey meaning in ways that the visual image cannot, and so a filmmaker must find other ways to signify equivalent ideas."

"Swinton/Orlando as male - Potter recognised the importance of Orlando's effective androgyny; the character/actor had to be believable as both genders but more specifically, the audience had to be able to relate to the character on a purely human level in a way which transcended the status of Orlando's physical gender. This transition was something Woolf was able to impliment fairly seamlessly because the visual indications of gender are not (or at least certainly do not NEED to be) repeatedly confirmed in a literary work, but Potter's Orlando is always physically visible to the audience and so Swinton's performance and her costume were of vital importance in delivering the concepts surrounding gender in the film."

attention to visual detail and feeling of the clothes

"Wears the clothes of a young Elizabethan man"

Describing he scene of getting dressed as a women: DISCOVERING

Getting dressed as a woman, observing herself in the mirror

Haphazardly putting on clothes as a male in comparison to scene with the corsette

Androgynous trousers after turning female

Costumes by scenes continued

Costumes: Frozen River Scenes continued

Costumes: Frozen River Scenes

Costumes by loaction continued

Costumes by Location

Androgynous in the end

clip: moving in this is restricted and difficult

Tilda as male

Tilda Swinton as a man

Costumes by location

Costumes scenes 1-36

Submissively adopted restricting women's clothing

"an imagined essence... from each period and blowing it up" "restricting the color palette in each era" (in terms of design and costuming

Orlando as a man

Androgyny in costumes

This page of Sally Potter's notes doesn't focus on the idea of gender specifically, but it does demonstrate why she thought Orlando the novel had the potential to transfer well to the screen. Because it 'tells through images which distill and condense a wealth of information'. Potter felt that Woolf's book was already almost cinematic in the way it portrayed meaningful, poetic images.