IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH FASHION

Marit Allen Interviewed by Alistair O’Neill

C1046/13

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NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page

Ref. No.: C1046/13/01-8

Collection title: Oral History of British Fashion

Interviewee’s surname: Allen Title: Ms

Interviewee’s forenames: Marit Sex: Female

Occupation: Film Costume Designer Date of birth:

Mother’s occupation: Hotelier Father’s occupation: Hotelier

Date(s) of recording: 09.08.2005, 06.09.2005, 21.09.2005, 06.10.2005

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, London SW6

Name of interviewer: Alistair O’Neill

Type of recorder: Marantz CP430

Total no. of tapes: 8 Type of tape: D60

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: © The British Library Board

Interviewer’s comments:

Marit Allen Page 1 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

Can I just ask you what you had for breakfast this morning?

Yes, you can. I had wheatflakes, blueberries and raspberries.

Yes.

With some special new milk that contains fatty acids, called Omega milk.

And what are the benefits of that?

It is so that you don’t have to eat so much fish to get the benefits of the equivalent of fish oil.

I understand. And did you have it on your balcony?

No I didn’t, I had it in the kitchen but I should have had it on the balcony. I think we’ll have lunch on the balcony.

Oh right, okay. I seem to be, yes that’ll be perfect. Now I seem to have – I’m just checking – that seems fine, I seem to be up and you seem to be a little bit down, so I’m just going to try and adjust this again.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but one’s own voice sounds so peculiar when recorded.

I’m…

D’you not find this?

I’m fairly used to it, because it’s just through teaching I don’t seem to mind, but I think if you’re not regularly used to it, it does sound rather strange.

Marit Allen Page 2 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

It sounds so peculiar.

Now I just seem to have gone too loud on my own now, so I’m just bringing it down. Now that seems fine for me.

Okay, how does that seem for me?

I think it seems fine for you too.

Good.

Terribly fiddly, these buttons. This is, it’s a Marantz system and the very strange and slightly old-fashioned way the National Sound Archive believe that this technology is better and it’s more archival than CDs.

Ah, interesting.

This is actually audio tape.

They will transfer them all eventually?

Yes.

On to something smaller.

Now I just need to turn this down a bit.

My partner is a sound engineer.

Oh really?

So he’s totally into equipment and he’s just had to completely revamp all his equipment because movie makers now are getting so highly technical that they’re going, they’re Marit Allen Page 3 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] jumping ten-year leaps between movies even, you know, so that the sound requirements are so incredibly varied and…

And does he work in film particularly, as a sound engineer?

Yeah he does, yes.

My twin brother works in BBC Sound Archive. He trained as a sound engineer, but he’s archive based now, which is quite nice.

Yes, well he knows all about this equipment, yes.

More than I do, I’m a bit of a novice I think. [laughs] Okay right, I think that’s fine.

Good.

Okay, interviewing Marit Allen, Tuesday the ninth of August 2005. Marit, can I ask you where you were born and when?

I was born in 1941 underneath a staircase in little nursing home in Appleton, which was then in Lancashire and now is in Cheshire. And I was born under the staircase because there was an air raid at the time. My poor mother had a pretty rough ride I think and she didn’t think much of me when I arrived, so I’m told, or so she told me. Yes. She denied the fact that I was her baby, she said, ‘That can’t be my baby, she’s far too ugly’. [laughs] My nose was squished against my face and I had a purple V on my forehead, she said. And so she said there had to be some mistake, but that in fact was where I was born and we became the very best of friends lifelong afterwards.

And what did your father think of it?

My father, I don’t even know if he was around, because he was in Africa during World War Two, in North Africa, so I don’t know if he was very close by when I was born, I Marit Allen Page 4 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] don’t think so. And my mother and I struggled along together for the first four years till he came back.

Right. What’s your earliest memory?

I suppose my earliest memory is of gas masks and looking for small mice in the cellar and kittens, if possible. Anything that had a heartbeat and was down in the basement of the house that we lived in. So I suppose that was a distraction, it was a sort of – I remember Bing Crosby’s boys, I remember my mother calling him Uncle Bing and being very attached to the songs that Bing Crosby sang. Early – those were my nursery rhymes I think, because my mother was Norwegian and so she didn’t know any English nursery rhymes and she hadn’t taught me Norwegian yet, so she used to sing songs of the day for me, so I grew up with a ridiculous sort of, a whole catalogue of pop songs that she used to like in the early 1940s and they were mostly nonsense rhymes and sort of onomatopoeic things, things that she found entertaining about English. Those are the first things I remember I suppose. I remember also, I remember news bulletins. I remember my parents listening, with desperate seriousness, to the news bulletins as they came in, of the war and being told to be quiet and having to, not understanding exactly why, but having this overall feeling of darkness and lights flashing and radio bulletins.

So how was it that your Norwegian mother found herself in England in the early forties?

Well, she came over to England as a student, she actually got a scholarship to go to Oxford from northern Norway, she studied in Trondheim, and a friend of her father’s thought that it was better that she should study economics so she went to a college of economics in Manchester, and there she met my father and she married him in Norway on an Atlantic island in a wind storm in June, I suppose 1938, and then she came to live with him in England and then the war happened. And then she was cut off from her family for the years of the war. And I just found documentation of my grandfather’s letters to her, trying desperately to reach her during the war. And they had to write via Portugal, they had a connection with Portugal who could somehow get letters over to Norway and I think they probably heard from each other four or five times during the whole course of the war. And so she was young and pretty and vivacious and crazy about dancing and she was stuck in a Marit Allen Page 5 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] small town in Lancashire, trying to keep a business together and a child together while my dad went off to North Africa, so she had a tough time.

So do you have any early memories of your grandparents from the maternal side, of the time?

Well yes, when I was four and my father came back, my parents didn’t recognise each other and they’d lost any sense of the relationship they had. So they sent me off to my grandmother’s, and they sent me off probably at about Easter time in the year my dad came back and came and picked me up in September and when they picked me up I couldn’t speak any English any more and I was completely immersed in my whole family in Norway and my cousins and my grandparents, I loved them dearly, and it was very much the perfect oasis for a child, because everything was there, even though they’d been through the war and been occupied, they had butter and bread and cheese and milk and all the things that we didn’t have, you know. And it was a huge family and lots of children, which I didn’t, I wasn’t surrounded by any children at all as I was growing up in England. So it was hugely happy and embracing for me to be part of a big rambunctious family and my grandparents were very solid and very comforting and very settled and very sort of stoic, so it was my happiest time actually, was when I was there.

And had they always lived in the same house?

Yes. They had a winter house and a summerhouse, as most people do in Norway. You know, it’s a totally proletarian country and everybody has everything they want or they need; there’s no such thing as poverty. And my grandparents were very well off and they had the first car in the neighbourhood, and the second, and the third. And they were the people who had oranges in their basement and life was very comfortable for them. Yeah.

So whereabouts in Norway were the two houses?

They lived in Kristiansund, north, in the winter months and they moved to Sunndal, where I’ve just been, in the summer months and they built a summerhouse there. And so, if I went early in the year I’d go to meet them in Kristiansund where they lived on a little Marit Allen Page 6 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] island in the Atlantic and my grandfather had a timber factory there. So I used to play in the sawdust and the smell of the sawdust was just so amazing and it was such fun to be able to play in the timber stacks and make houses and dens and things. And watch the logs sweeping down the fjord and coming in to nestle amongst the islands, it was great, wonderful. Looking for crabs under the stones, it was a wonderful childhood.

Could you say something about the landscape of Norway and I suppose how it might have been different to that of an English landscape.

Oh completely. I mean the landscape is just breathtaking and the landscape becomes a part of everything that you do and see in Norway. And the mountains are so huge and I remember the green is so green because of all the rain, the water is everywhere. Everywhere you look there’s water. Even on the land and in the mountains, in the mountains there’s still water, amazing reflective ponds and lakes with just water lilies on top and trout underneath. And the smell of the pine, the smell of the moss, the tiny little alpine flowers that grow – they’re not alpine of course – Norwegian flowers that grow, coming through the moss. And our summerhouse was up a hill on the way up a mountain, overlooking a huge salmon river in a vast open valley, and as a child, walking up this path through the pine trees with the amazing rocks beside the path gleaming with water that dripped and tiny, tiny flowers, imagining it was like troll country and you could imagine the smallest and biggest trolls hiding in the rocks and under the moss and between the flowers and mushrooms and things.

And did anybody teach you particularly, to see these things?

My mother taught me to see all these things. She was totally connected to nature, she was a really good linguist, she was a really good dancer, she was totally irrelevant – irreverent, sorry, irreverent – she had a very strong mind of her own, totally unconventional. And she taught me to love nature, without a doubt. And I remember when I was a child asking her why she didn’t go to church, when we were on our Sunday morning walks in the forest in Cheshire, she said, ‘Marit, this is my church’. And I understood and now I understand even better that she was totally connected to nature and she gave that to me and it’s the best thing she could possibly have done. Marit Allen Page 7 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

And was that also passed down to her from her own mother?

Well I don’t think so, her mother was much more domestic and tranquil. She was still under the yoke I suppose, of convention and Victoriana and the convention of family more than anything else. And cooking and managing her households and keeping everything really nice and calm and she was much more of a domestic woman than my mother, my mother really kicked up her heels.

Right. And did your mother gain anything from her father – what did he bring to her?

She, my mother, from her father learned charm. She learned that she could get absolutely anything out of her very, very severe looking and serious minded father by being flirtatious and adorable, and she learned how to manipulate him at a very young age and she carried that on through her relationship with my father and I think that watching her do that taught me a lot about women’s ways, about the way that you can actually, not manipulate because I can’t do that, but cajole and charm other people.

Could you describe your maternal grandfather to me?

He was, my grandfather’s name was Jon Grimsmo and he had, he ran this, owned and ran this timber factory and employed maybe three hundred men or so. He lived on a small Atlantic island, he ran his own post office and he was very distinguished within the community. He was tall, he was bearded, he had dark brown hair and he had an elegance about him, he smoked a pipe. And he – so I always remember the smell of the pipe smoke around him – and my earliest memory I suppose of him, in particular with me, was bandaging my finger when I cut it when I was trying to help my grandmother peel carrots, and feeling totally confident in anything that he did and said. So he must have been a very authoritarian figure I think, but he still had a certain amount of affection. And he was severe and he was serious, but he wasn’t frightening at all.

Was he particularly religious?

Marit Allen Page 8 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

I never knew that. I think my grandmother was more religious than he was. They both came from huge families, absolutely huge. He came from a family of nine boys and one girl and my grandmother came from several, and all my relatives still in Norway, they all had at that time of course, vast families. So I think my grandmother and her sisters were very religious, but I don’t remember my grandfather being religious.

And was the affluence equally shared by both their families?

Yes, it was, they were very comfortable. But they were also very aware of the fact that they – each of my grandfather’s brothers actually, they dominated the area that they came from. One ran the woollen mill in Tingvoll, which was the source of all the blankets and all the wool that was distributed in that area. Another one ran the main shop in Kristiansund, which was a very respected store, which was like a department store. At least another one of his brothers ran another timber factory in another area, in Sunna [ph] where we had the summerhouse. Another one had huge farms, and they were all very – very established I should say. But they were also very aware of the fact that their great grandfather was a very poor farm labourer and that it was due to his diligence and hard work and imagination that they were all comfortably off. So they weren’t grand, no Norwegians are grand, they just had a good time, they had a good life. And it was a comfortable feeling, yes, it was great.

Could you describe your maternal grandmother?

Her name was Gjertrud Grimsmo and she was a homely woman. She was round, she adored cooking and she had very, very long grey hair, which I would watch sometimes as she was braiding it, she would sleep in a braid which went down past her waist, and I would watch her in the morning re-plaiting it and winding it around, the plait into a bun at the back and putting her hairpins in. And she spent her time divided between visiting relatives and having coffee and cakes and arranging her various domestic chores and cooking very comforting and wonderful tasting food, and crocheting. She crocheted for all her grandchildren, she crocheted all the time, except on Sundays, she wouldn’t lift a finger on Sundays. No crochet, no card games on Sundays. So on Sundays we listened to the Marit Allen Page 9 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] weather forecast a lot, in Norwegian [laughs] and visited people, we were allowed to do that.

So what did she make in crochet?

She made everything, from the smallest sort of antimacassars and little things to put over the top of cheese dishes and underneath coffee pots and to pick up hot things and beautiful bedspreads. She crocheted a bedspread for all her grandchildren. And embroidery. She taught me how to embroider, how to crochet and how to knit and those are things that I’ve used all my life. I’ve used them in film work; I’ve had to embroider things and thanked her for the day that she sat me down and patiently taught me how to embroider.

And did your mother learn those particular craft skills?

Oh yes, my mother could do them all, but she wasn’t as dedicated as my grandmother. It was a good thing she taught me them. And how to dance. I’ve used that many a good time.

And you mentioned earlier that you cut your finger trying to help her peel carrots – did she also teach you how to cook?

Yes, I used to watch her, yes, absolutely, yes. She wouldn’t actually let me join in, but she’d let me watch her.

So, you mentioned that you went to visit your maternal grandparents when you were around four…

That’s right.

…and how long did you stay there for?

Well I stayed there for, I should say, six months, nearly six months and when I came back to England I couldn’t speak English any more. I’d completely lost my English. Marit Allen Page 10 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

That’s quite something in such a short period of time.

Yeah. And I went back to school and couldn’t understand – a little kindergarten school – I couldn’t understand why no-one could understand me, because they were the same people, it was the same school and it was the same place and the same place, and they couldn’t understand a word I said. My mother had to come in and interpret for me.

It seems that your maternal grandparents’ life in a way had quite an impact upon you.

That’s right.

Was it the same for your other set of grandparents?

I didn’t have another set of grandparents. I mean I think that Norway totally seeped through me, that there I identified and I must say that their folklore and their heritage and their tradition of painting and craft and building, their buildings and the colours of the houses within the landscape, had a profound effect on everything that I’ve done ever since. And the idea of actually being rooted in nature, of the simple, elementary essentials, what matters, what is significant and a sort of a firm base in reality – those are things that I’ve held very precious, I mean I’ve held very dear to and it didn’t matter where I was thereafter or any kind of sophisticated setting that I found myself in afterwards, or any kind of work, I’ve always tried to base it on a really firm grounding of realism. I’ve really felt like what it smelt like, what the colours really were, how they came to be, texture and so forth. So that was the grounding and that was what I kept with me always. In England I had no paternal relations at all. My father was an orphan and his father had emigrated after my grandmother, after my paternal grandmother’s death, I think she must have died when my father’s brother was born. So she was gone, long gone, never spoken of. His father took the other son, this is my understanding of it, took the other son to Australia and then disappeared or died. And I knew that I had an uncle Geoffrey in Australia, but I had no relatives at all in England. So, Norway became even more important to me.

Marit Allen Page 11 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1]

You’ve just mentioned that your understanding of realism was informed by your experience of Norway and not in Britain, could you just say something about the difference between the two?

Well, I think it would have been the difference for me, not the difference for others. And the difference for me was entirely centred around family. And, well yes, and landscape and the smell and the feel of the country. I mean when my mother first came to England, the joke was that she asked the person sitting next to her on the train if there was only one architect in England, because everything looked the same [laughing], all the houses, rows and rows of houses. She thought there was only one architect in England and that none of the men in England were married because they none of them wore wedding rings. Those were the two [laughing] significant things that she noticed as a young woman. And I suppose that growing up in the north of England, no, I think that my father’s influence was very strong in that he gave me a feeling of morality and right and wrong, and hard work that were born of being a northern man, which he was. I think he was born in Yorkshire and lived in Lancashire most of his life, and he would never, ever short change anybody and he believed in hard work and sticking at things and honesty above all else. Those were things, if you like, that sort of moral fibre of the northern ethic that my father instilled in me very strongly. But I always felt that England was full of grime and smoke and it was never very – except when we went for walks on Sunday morning – it was never a place of any natural beauty for me, not where we lived, in the north anyway. When I moved to school, that was different, they put me in a boarding school in Shropshire and that was in a very beautiful place – that’s another story, part of the story – but for me Norway was so dramatically beautiful that I identified much more strongly with that.

Did your father ever tell you about his early life as an orphan?

He did, he told me of the struggles that he had and I’m sure that informed his ethic of hard work. He was very, very handsome. He looked like, somewhere between David Niven and Gregory Peck and he had black hair all his life. And he got away with a great number of things because of his good looks, I’m sure. He was very charming, very good looking and he used those with great effect, both of those two gifts I think. He told me a lot about his bicycling with friends when he was a young man, it was a great source of freedom for Marit Allen Page 12 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side A [part 1] him I think. Before he could afford a car he used to ride a bicycle down the country lanes in Lancashire and Cheshire and enjoyed that very much. He played a lot of football and that was fun for him, but mostly his life revolved around hard work and making good I guess.

And how did he earn his money?

He was a hotelier, he had a hotel in Warrington when I was a child. And he had, the back of the hotel adjoined the back of the theatre and so people who were performers would come from the theatre after the performance through the back door of the hotel and my father would entertain them, and he enjoyed that very much and he probably should have been an entertainer himself, he probably would have been a really fine actor I think. But that wasn’t on the cards. But he enjoyed those people and he introduced them to people and he was kind of, he would perform with them after hours, or I suppose, I wasn’t around at that time, but I know that he enjoyed that. And later on he had a hotel in Lymm in Cheshire and he sort of changed the way things worked in a hotel at that time, in the early fifties, late forties, early fifties. He sort of glamorised things and he catered for a lot of weddings and dances. I remember we had a dance floor in the ballroom, we had a large ballroom and a band would come and play on Saturday nights and for weddings and for events and there was a special place where they changed and put on their band uniforms and set up their little rigs and things, it was great fun. And so at that point then, I suppose I was about seven, then there were a lot of glamorous people coming in and out and people dressed in their finery and brides and people dressed in evening gowns, lots of dances and balls and things. And my father – how are we doing?

I think I might actually just stop the tape there.

[End of Tape 1 Side A]

Marit Allen Page 13 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

So, did your mother help your father?

Oh my mother helped enormously, yes she did. My mother had enormous skill with flowers and from the fifties – fifties was the days of Constance Spry and flower arranging schools and finishing schools and ladies knowing how to do flowers – and my mother threw all that out of the window. And we had a huge garden and I used to help her twice a week, on Saturday mornings and Wednesday mornings, we used to do the flowers. And she did these enormous flower arrangements, wild and wonderful things that became a focal point for everything that happened in the hotel. And she used to do the tables for the weddings and wonderful drapery and little things to go on top of cakes and all around the tables and she just had an amazing flair. And because, I think she brought a Scandinavian influence into it, so she chose very good colours and mad carpets and paintings that nobody would have thought of doing, and fabulous fifties sort of wavy screens and rubber plants and exotica and wallpaper that was enormous red and green jungle leaves in small spaces where people normally would have done stripes or, she was always going the other way. And she helped him greatly and then my father had a flaring temper and he would sometimes get into terrible trouble with the staff. And my mother would always be the one to go and call them back and go to their houses and placate them and apologise for him and be sweet to people. She was very charming. And so she was always the peacemaker and he was always the showman. And the combination was pretty good, they were like fire and water I suppose. They were both very lively in different ways. And my father dressed for dinner every single night. And I remember him getting into his black tie at six o’clock, six thirty every evening and shaving again and making himself – he always smelled so good, always had Old Spice aftershave and looked so glamorous and fabulous. And my mother would dress for dinner too.

So was your family home at that point…

Within the hotel.

…within the hotel. Marit Allen Page 14 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

Yes.

And was that the same place that you were born in?

No. We moved when I was seven, and we moved to Cheshire when I was seven, so I have much more memory of that. And the huge garden where we would go and pick flowers and swing in the orchard – it was a beautiful garden, it was a wonderful garden, so I spent most of my time up a tree or on a swing or just, I had bantam hens and rabbits and anything that would breath, as I say, that would be my request for a birthday or Christmas – something with a heartbeat please! [laughs] So, it was involved in a lot of visuals I suppose, you know my mother was very – there were articles written about her in the newspapers and people would come and have their weddings there just because they knew she would do these wonderful flower arrangements. And she was very good at incorporating me, you know I’d be there to help her tip out the smelly flower water and clean all the vases and go and pick new flowers from the garden. So that was one of my tasks.

So was Cheshire less grimy, I suppose, than other parts of…

Yes, it was, it was much prettier and the garden was big enough for me to get lost in on a daily basis. It was nice. But there were still not enough children, not enough playmates, you know. I was an only child until I was fourteen and then my mother had another child, so I have a sister, whom I love dearly of course. And we’re very close now, but then it was a complete, almost like a generation away, so I was constantly begging for another sibling.

And who did you turn to most out of your mother and your father?

To my mother. And her Norwegian influence I think was very strong, always, and we used to return to Norway. Sometimes my father came, but very rarely. Usually it was my mother and I on a train and then a boat and then another boat and up the coast of Norway and it was a huge adventure every year.

Marit Allen Page 15 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

Were you conscious of the difference between wartime Britain and Britain in the immediate post-war period?

Well, I suppose the difference that affected me the most, being small, was the availability of food and sweets and treats. I remember rationing, I remember not ever having tasted a banana, only having dried fruit. But I wasn’t very interested in food anyway so it didn’t really bother me too much. I think the biggest difference was when we moved to Lymm and there was more of a country atmosphere around. I suppose that was the biggest change that I noticed, you know, and after all that was way after the war, so I didn’t really, no. It’s almost like the difference between darkness and light I suppose. The war years, I was very young, until I was four and there was a lot of darkness around then it seemed to me, and then you know, by the time I was seven it seems that the skies had cleared and everything was more available and times were just generally…

It seems that colour was quite important to you at that time.

That’s right yes, it was, very important. Absolutely. Colour and smell I think, yes. All the senses. And because I was fortunate to have a Norwegian mother I think, we were never afraid of the senses, my mother was very physical and very affectionate and she was always aware of colour and smell, and sense and touch and so on. She would always hug me and hold me and she was very easy, physically, unlike a lot of English mothers I think, who were very restrained with their children at the time. So we had a very close, sort of easy going physical relationship, which has helped me a lot. Dealing with actors, for example. I find it very easy to be physical with people without there being any implications at all, so that’s been a huge help I think. Although I would never have thought of it at the time.

Yes. Can you describe your mother to me?

My mother, I just remember her laughing. I think she was very beautiful. She thinks her nose was too big. I think that she was extremely handsome. She had twinkling blue eyes and strawberry hair that was loosely curled and brushed away from her face. She was always outdoors and walking and athletic, or sitting in the sun and she was a very sensual Marit Allen Page 16 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] person, she loved the sun, she loved wind, she loved nature as I’ve said, she loved the earth. She didn’t love animals particularly, and I don’t think she was very fond of young children, but she was totally vivacious and very unpredictable. She was very well informed, she had a really good brain, she suffered I think from not being required to use it enough. So it was always surprising to get her point of view on something, because you’d think oh maybe she’s sitting in Cheshire and not particularly aware of world events or so on, but she always had an opinion, she always knew and it was never what you might expect, it was always entirely fresh. She seemed to have a wellspring of good sense and fairness, so even though it was unpredictable and even though it might not have been what you’d expect, it always made you stop and think and she was challenging in that way. You know, you could never rely on her just falling into the perceived opinion of a certain situation, whether it was international, national or personal. She was very accepting of other people’s behaviour, she was very accepting of unusual alliances or relationships, she was very open- minded.

Did she see herself as a foreigner?

Always. She was always a foreigner. She was always a foreigner in England and she was treated as a foreigner by the local people. People in Cheshire didn’t know how to react to her and she was, I think, lonely in that she never forged the kind of female friendships that she probably needed, because she would always just speak her mind and people in Cheshire were taught not to do that and she wasn’t prepared to compromise. So I think she found herself to be quite lonely. Although she had coffee mornings and although she invited lots of women around for coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, for as long as I could remember, I still feel that she affronted people by speaking the truth and speaking her mind and so they found her difficult to deal with I think.

And would you say that she was politically minded?

Yes. I would say that she was politically minded and she was much more liberal and open-minded than my father who was, who I suppose, he was a product of his time. He had never been, never experienced people from different cultures, different races, whereas my mother was from a different race, if you like. And the Norwegians are so open-minded Marit Allen Page 17 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] about race in any area, for any reason, my father had been brought up I think with the preconceptions of his time, you know, and he had very little experience of people from other cultures. But when he did, when in his hotel life, he opened the whole thing up, not just for these events, but he courted – he was mad about sport, he adored cricket and football – and so he courted the MCC and he got the MCC to bring the English cricketers to the hotel and he accommodated them in a very particular way so that they came year after year. The Australians and then sometimes the English team and then football teams, I think he had, in the late fifties when the English team, cricket team were doing incredibly well, the time of Dennis Compton and Graveney and Freddie…? Anyway, they were really doing incredibly well, they all came to stay at the hotel. My father created special menus for them and special sporting activities; they could play tennis, they could play bowls, they could eat steak. I mean he had everything lined up for them and it became quite a thing, you know, it was like a celebrity hang-out, if you like, but particularly sporting people. And so then he would have the West Indians come and stay and he would have the South America football teams, so Pele came to stay. And as he got closer to those people, so he became very enthused with the idea of having black people as his friends, that became very exciting for him because he’d never experienced anything like that before. So then he took my mother to Jamaica and he himself went to Australia, travelling with the MCC. So it was, you know, he had flair in that way, although as I say, he was a product of his environment in his initial sort of meeting of peoples and the world and so forth, he developed something more for himself I think, he began to discover that different people had very strong qualities that he could identify with and admire and have respect for.

So how well did your parents fit in with traditional village life in Cheshire?

Absolutely not, neither of them. They neither of them fitted in in any way. And I think that that applied to me, I carried that mantle if you like, I didn’t fit in either. And I think I had to learn to love what I had and to respect them for who they were and not to ask to fit into the village life or, I mean they didn’t belong, I didn’t belong to the Young Conservatives you know, which everybody else who went to school with me did. I didn’t play tennis and go to the tennis club, I didn’t want to go to the tennis club balls. So I guess that what they instilled in me was a kind of a maverick, outsider kind of independence Marit Allen Page 18 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] which again, I recognise and respect enormously now, although I never had the comfort of belonging and being conventional. I never really wanted to be. I was really, not proud, but happy to have to fight for my own turf, if you like.

So, are your parents visually different from other people? Was there anything that they wore particularly that marked them out?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh, my parents were so much more glamorous than the people around them and I say that with love, rather than pride, you know. It wasn’t something that I needed to be proud of, ‘cos it was just an everyday event for me. My father, as I say, was unbelievably elegant and he wore, you know he wore a lot of, he liked the feeling of cashmere. He wore traditional English, but with a slight edge, clothing in the daytime and to go to play golf and so on, but then he dressed up as I say, in black tie every single night. And my mother had a gorgeous figure, very rounded and she was very pleased with that and taught me to be pleased with rounded figures too. And she used to buy her clothes from a woman in Manchester who was an émigré from central Europe, maybe Budapest or somewhere very elegant, maybe Vienna, and her name was Gertie Samuels and she had a sort of salon in Manchester in Market Square, which was – yeah, I think it’s called Market Square, was – the smartest sort of square near Kendal Milne which was the Harrods of Manchester, and it was all black marble. It was very like Chanel’s place in Paris, and maybe she knew that, because I didn’t know that at the time. And Gertie Samuels had this salon and she used to buy for her clients, she used to call my mother and say that she had this suit that she needed my mother to come and try on and then when my mother did go and try it on, she had also bought the gloves, the hat and the shoes and the blouse that went with it, and it came as an entire designed outfit. And it would be bought for my mother, in her size, and she would be required to buy it. [laughs] And I remember lots of the outfits that she had from those days. You know, she had amazing sort of camelhair striped suits, day suits with fur collar and unbelievably soft and elegant and black, I remember she had a black silk moiré sort of cocktail suit, very waisted with a huge open collar, all sequinned with a white dicky inside it. And she was very, very spiffy in the fifties, she really was smart.

And did she make her own clothes as well? Marit Allen Page 19 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

Oh no, oh no. She would never do that, no. She had a dressmaker and sometimes I’d be allowed to go to the dressmaker with her, but she didn’t make any of her own clothes.

Did she wear a lot of make-up?

No, she wore make-up, but not a lot. And she used to love fresh skin and freckles. She used to sit in the sun, she was a real sun worshipper, she adored being tanned, but because she was slightly blonde and slightly redhead, she would freckle rather than tan, and she was very proud of the freckles, she thought they were just the best and she was very into a very healthy look. And she didn’t wear any eye make-up, but she wore lipstick every day.

And did she wear any particular scent?

She did, she liked Chanel Number Five and Elizabeth Arden lipstick, as I remember, and almost always red and Chanel Number Five was a big thing for her.

And what kind of things did your parents read?

They read all kinds of things; they had a pretty good library. They read Henry Miller, they read Hemingway, Damon Runyon, they had a really quite eclectic mix of books on the shelf. And they were very excited by theatre and less by cinema, but by music, they loved – I mean the night they had been to – Manchester was a scene of, it was a centre for things to open in those days, so a lot of shows, musicals and theatre shows, would open in Manchester, pre-run before London and they went to the opening of West Side Story. And they came home – this is not linear by the way [laughs] – they came home and they woke me up in the middle of the night and they got me in my nightdress to sit in the living room with them and to listen to the whole score of West Side Story and go through it song by song, and they joined in and they did the dances and they were completely riveted, they were absolutely mesmerised by it. They were electrified by it. I mean their enthusiasm was just absolutely electric, they were so excited by the choreography, by the music. So they were very modern in that sense, you know, they were very excited by visuals and by music. Marit Allen Page 20 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2]

So they could read music?

They gave me a piano, but they couldn’t read music themselves. Oh, my mother made me learn the accordion when I was little and then she killed the whole thing stone dead because she made me play the accordion in front of other women and I used to get so shy and so embarrassed that I used to try not to do it. But that’s a shame, because I could still be playing the accordion today.

Do you know why they particularly favoured theatre over cinema?

They did take me to the cinema. The first thing they took me to was Hamlet, was Olivier in Hamlet and that was stunning, obviously. That was really stunning. They were interested in cinema, but it wasn’t available somehow and it was a bit of a to-do to go to the cinema, and especially, I suppose with a child you know, to go in the afternoon didn’t work out – they both used to rest in the afternoon because they’d worked all night – so we didn’t get to go to the cinema very much. But that happened at school. I started to get really interested in the cinema at school.

So can you just clarify where you first went to primary school, and then moving on from there, to the second school you attended?

Yes, I went to a kindergarten in Latchford and then I went to a primary school in Altrincham in Cheshire – it’s Bowden I think, and that was a very, a sweet little school and my mother used to join in the school run with other mothers. And my clearest memories of that – although I do remember it very well, I remember the geography of the classrooms and so on. But I remember the day that I – oh, I hated mathematics – and I had white mice, lots and lots of white mice and I took a white mice to school under my blouse one day and I kept it running around under my blouse until the maths lesson and then I let it come out from underneath my blouse, crawl along my shoulder and got a very free lesson that day. [laughs] Poor woman, was terrified of mice. And then I moved to – oh, I moved to a primary school at the age of nine, in Shropshire, and that was hard. My mother and I cried every term and every half term, we cried for days. And it was in a beautiful building Marit Allen Page 21 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] in Shropshire, it was called Moreton Hall and it was the prep school for a school called Adcote School, [interference on tape] which was near Shrewsbury and it was the most beautiful Tudor style Victorian building. And I would say that the course of my schooling, that the actual architecture of both of the schools that I went to was the most important part of my education. I learned more from the buildings really, and from the landscape than I did at a desk.

What did they teach you?

Well, the, I suppose Moreton Hall, my first prep school, it did teach me a lot, it taught me about being away from home, being separated from my mother in particular – parents of course, but my mother in particular as we had such a close bond – so it taught me about separation and independence. I had to stand on my feet because there I was very clearly an outsider. My mother sent me to my prep school wearing – she sent me there wearing the uniform, which was beige and soft moss green, twinsets and tweed skirts with no petticoats. She sent me there – and gymslips of course and shirts and ties. So that was the, the Sunday uniform was the beige twinset and green skirt and the daily uniform was a green gymslip with a white shirt with a striped tie. And I learned how to tie a tie of course, and keep the knot for the whole term, that was very important. And I learned that when it was Saturday or, I guess Saturday, was the day we were allowed to wear our own clothes, my mother sent me with scarlet, emerald and royal blue skirt, blouses and hand knit cardigans and hand knitted stockings for the winter, with a liberty bodice and suspender belt. And everybody else wore, I don’t know, blue, beige. And they were little double- breasted sort of spencer kind of cardigans, hand knitted with little revers, a bit like a military style, and skating skirts, completely circular, wonderful, sort of felt I suppose, skirts and red stockings. And I was the only child in school wearing colour, there was no doubt about that, and the shape that I – tiny little nipped waists and so on, they were all wearing very, very plain things. And they took me down into the bushes where we had dens, under the lilac bushes and – the first or second weekend – and they tore my clothes apart. They tore my clothes off me and filthied them in the mud and tore my stockings off me and tore my suspender belt and covered everything in mud and jeered at me and teased me and, what they would have considered to be perfectly fine teasing, but it was essentially persecution. And I remember picking up my things and storming up the garden Marit Allen Page 22 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] path to go back to school and thinking well, they don’t like it, that’s fine with me. This is what I have, this is what I’m going to wear and nothing that anybody is going to say will make any difference to me. And I think that was an important moment in my life. That made me, I think that made me sure of my own judgement, of my own confidence, of my own grounding. In other words, my mother had instilled in me I suppose, and my background, and Norway, they’d instilled in me a kind of, it wasn’t a self-confidence, but it was self-understanding I suppose. So I felt that they were wrong and I was right, for me I was right and nothing that they could do – I didn’t want to belong to their group, I didn’t necessarily… They could come to me if they wanted to, if they wanted me to be part of their gang I would be, but I didn’t need to be, I was quite happy on my own. And that was, I suppose, a defining moment. From then on, I think that helped me in my work at Vogue very much, or at Queen first and then Vogue, because I was able to back my own hunches, I was able to understand my own knee-jerk reactions to things, I didn’t have to rationalise. And still very often, I don’t rationalise. When I’m coming to try and construct a character for a movie I go, instinctively I go inside and I find what feels and my senses tell me are right for that person, not what conventionally necessarily would be the way to go. So I think that was very important.

And what was your mother’s view of that episode when you told her about it?

I think she just said, ‘Good on you Marit. That was good. You handled that fine’, you know. She wouldn’t be upset by it, she would just consider that you know, I should be able to fight those battles, I should be able to make those decisions.

And did your weekend clothes last the course?

Oh yes, [laughing] oh yes, they did. I guess I got some more stockings and some new suspenders and just went on, yes.

And was it something that you kept up throughout your school days?

It was, yes. I was the one, for instance in my secondary school, in the big school, I was the kid who campaigned that we should be allowed to listen to radios and that we should be Marit Allen Page 23 C1046/13 Tape 1 Side B [part 2] allowed to listen to music, which we were not allowed to do when I first came to school. And I would go to the head teacher and to the assistant head teacher, who was my favourite, and rationalise it and ask them to explain, why is it that we can’t listen to music, what is it that’s bad about music. And I won several battles like that. I thought that ballet ought to be taught at school, because I thought that it, although we did what was called natural movement at school, I didn’t think that that was challenging enough, I thought that girls ought to be able to learn ballet if they wanted to and I desperately wanted to be a ballerina. And so I campaigned for ballet to be brought into the school and eventually it was, too late for me, but the other children benefited. Okay?

Yeah.

[End of Tape 1 Side B]

Marit Allen Page 24 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

Right, so could you tell me some other things about your school days. What else did you learn on your own terms at school?

Well, I learned about arts and crafts. That was in fact the architecture of my school. I learned about William de Morgan, although I didn’t know that that was what I was looking at, I would sit for many, many hours reading or just talking, or playing and looking at these beautiful tiled fireplaces with de Morgan tiles and beautiful small stained glass windows that were William Morris style, and the beautiful oak panelling in my school. We had a fantastic oriel window, the great hall was quite magnificent and it had a balcony with pressed copper plate facings on the balcony and magnificent sort of Tudor style fireplace with big iron holders for the wood and for the grate and so forth. And that impressed me very, very deeply. And it was years later that I realised that you know, that that had been really, that was right under my skin. And then, in terms of academia, I was really, really keen on English and history. I used to adore writing essays and you know where we were required to write and essay that was four pages, I’d find myself having to stop when I’d written twenty-four pages and feeling quite sorry for my English teacher, because I knew she was going to have to read it all, but she never seemed to mind and she was an icon of mine, she was really a huge influence in my life. She was Irish and therefore refused to teach us Irish history, we had to skip that chapter. She had beautiful white hair and she was a cousin of Greer Garson. She taught with incredible vivacity. She had real fire, she was one of those teachers that you would always wish to have. And so her two subjects were my favourite subjects and I learned history from her in my own way I guess, and she responded wonderfully well. I wouldn’t be able to remember particular dates, but I’d remember the kind of tobacco that Bismarck used to smoke when he was giving these important meetings and structuring new countries and kingdoms and so forth. I remembered minutiae and I suppose the smell and sound and feel of historical figures and I used to be able to recall those details for exams. And my mother taught me that exams were a challenge, rather than something to be frightened of. And she would either call me or write to me – we weren’t allowed to receive telephone calls actually, until we were in the sixth form I think – but she would encourage me in the most fantastic way to be challenged by exams. And so I would go in there with you know, high spirits, whereas Marit Allen Page 25 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] other kids would go in there quaking. And I really enjoyed exams for that reason and I would try and tackle questions with the knowledge that I could bring, rather than the conventional I suppose, you know lay it out in systematic order. And you know, to their credit and my good fortune the examiners seemed to think that was okay and I got good results at school. And I just loved that part of my education. I loved English, I loved English literature and I wanted probably to be a writer or certainly I wanted to go on and study English literature. And I wasn’t bad at languages, because I already had Norwegian, spoke it fluently so it wasn’t so difficult to move to French. I loved music, but I never worked hard enough at it. I did all the exams and didn’t stick with it. And I suppose the most sad thing for me was that I loved art and I was doing pretty well and I was exhibited in all the school exhibitions and won prizes out of school and things, until I had an art teacher in probably my fifth year and she hated my style. I was very meticulous and I used to do a thing with a lot of shading and a lot of detail and a lot of intricate work, and she only responded to broad strokes and impressionist kind of, or even contemporary kind of splashing of paint and she thought that that was art as she saw it. And so she, I think she did me great damage because she squashed anything that I had and I became very reticent in art and I couldn’t pick up a pen and I still can’t draw today. Although, up until that moment I’d been able to draw perfectly well and I still can’t draw now. So she kind of, she blocked that passage for me. And you know, I’ve always been sorry since. I recognise that that’s exactly what happened.

And did you throw yourself back into literature at that point?

Yes, absolutely.

And did you still have the same Irish English teacher?

Yes, all the way through.

And what was her name again?

Her name was Miss Hunter. Yeah. And the best thing was that for instance, there was one night when I was sleepless and I was wandering around the school and that was completely Marit Allen Page 26 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] forbidden in my school, absolutely forbidden to leave your room after lights out and there were bats in the corridors and it was freezing cold and it was a real conventional English girls’ boarding school. And I wandered downstairs and I found her, she was in the kitchen making herself some cocoa. We were never allowed in the kitchen, we were not allowed to wander about at night, and she saw me, I saw that it was her, I crept into the kitchen and to her enormous credit, she neither scolded me for being up, or for being in the kitchen and I was able to sit on the counter with her and talk to her about her life and about why she never married and why she left Ireland and why she was teaching at that school and she was, she was wonderful in that she was also unconventional in a very conventional situation. And the best thing of all was that she formed, I think she formed my education and she formed my enthusiasms about literature and about history. And I always felt that she’d been a real influence in my life and I would, year after year I would think about her and remember how she’d been, remember her approach to me and how generous she was with me. And about two years ago, three years ago, I managed to get her telephone number and I was amazed that she was still alive, and she was at home in Northern Ireland and I called her and I said, you know I have to tell you that you have been an inspiration for every day of my life and you’ve given me something that is immeasurable and that you should realise that your influence over me has been absolutely shining and that everything I’ve done, I’ve owed in part to you. And it was just such a relief to be able to give her the gratitude that I’d always felt. It was just one of the best things that I can remember, you know, in my life, there are certain things that you do that are without, that you can’t quantify, that they’re so valuable, and to be able to thank her for the gifts that she gave me is one of the most important things that I could possibly have done, and she died soon after.

And why did you identify with her particularly?

Because I think I recognised that she had intelligence that superseded convention. She was interested in the spirit of people, not in, of course she had to regulate people’s behaviour, but she recognised people’s spirit, rather than people’s academic qualifications or capabilities. I’m sure that was what I responded to.

And was she interested in the way people presented themselves visually? Marit Allen Page 27 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

No, in fact she wasn’t particularly interested in that, she always wore Irish tweeds. And she always wore sort of a raspberry Irish tweed skirt and a soft green Irish knit sweater, she was very conventional in her dress, but it was her spirit that was unconventional. And I guess, even as a child, I was able to see that there was a difference, there was a difference but it was the same thing, the fact that she could recognise the spirit and she responded to that. I could see that that was how she was unconventional.

And did she introduce you to both reading and writing?

Yes, she did without a doubt. And words, definitely.

And are there any words particularly that you remember her teaching you?

No, I can’t remember any words in particular, I just remember that she was never critical of how the words were put down. And as I say, if I remembered details about historical characters, she would be perfectly happy to take that instead of dates.

Yes. And what books did she introduce you to?

Oh, I can’t remember any defining books and that’s terrible. But just the joy of literature in general, that I owe to her, yes. And I don’t remember any particular books, I’m afraid. Should.

Were you introduced to any particular artists I suppose, in the art class before you fell foul of that particular teacher?

No, I wasn’t nearly as – I suppose that, actually my parents had a great love for impressionists and for certain fifties artists and I think that I probably picked up from them more than from school. I don’t remember the art classes being the way that I think they should have been.

And did you take an interest in the sciences at all, at school? Marit Allen Page 28 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

No, because I couldn’t bear cutting up frogs and dissecting things. No I wasn’t interested in the sciences at all. And I wasn’t at all good at sport. The only time I played a decent lacrosse match was when I had to be the captain of the side because I was the captain of the house. [laughs] That was pure enthusiasm over skill. And that was the only decent lacrosse match I ever played. And I was reasonable at swimming; I used to like that.

And when did you first start to learn about things that existed outside of school – when were you first introduced to ideas about the wider world?

Well, that was kind of despite the school I guess. Well we did lovely plays outside in the summertime, Midsummer Night’s Dream I remember very well. But there was a girl in my class called Juliette Antrobus and her cousin was in the class below, and Juliette’s father was very interested in film and he was a boffin kind of man who was a wealthy businessman of some sort from Birmingham, and he insisted that we should be shown films, and the school didn’t have a budget for that kind of thing, but he brought the projector and the film to the school on Saturday evenings, and I can’t remember how many during the school year he brought, but he set up the projector and the screen and he showed us on Saturday evenings and we all sat in a line on the hard floor and the films that he brought that were the most influential for me were the films of Olivier and Vivien Leigh. He brought That Hamilton Woman, he brought Pride and Prejudice, he brought all the early films that those two did and that sealed it for me, that was then another world opened. And there’s no doubt about the fact that that was the first sort of tentacle into the outside world and I became very, very keen on Olivier and Vivien Leigh and I used to read everything avidly about them and their life, and their lifestyle, and the theatre, and the movies, and where they went and what they did and how they lived their lives. And I slept with pictures of them under my pillow. And then Vivien Leigh and Claire Bloom came to lunch at my father’s hotel, during the holidays, and they were both wearing matching mink coats and matching sunglasses and matching high heels and they were just the epitome of glamour. And that was sort of very seminal, the fact that they were as magical as they were in…

Did you actually see them? Marit Allen Page 29 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

Oh yes I was, oh yes, my father took me to talk to them and I had my photograph taken with them and I had to make conversation with them. It was very scary. But at some point, oh then I became very involved with the Wild West, that was my second passion. I, for some reason, I can’t remember how or why, I became very, very connected to the idea of the early American West and bears and – not cowboys, pre-cowboys – but Davy Crockett was fashionable at the time and Disney made that movie with Fess Parker and I thought Fess Parker was the most beautiful man that walked the earth. But Davy Crockett, I knew everything about Davy Crockett, I avidly read historical books about him as well as the Disney version of it, and then I wrote a piece, when you’re supposed to write about your favourite hero, I wrote a piece about Davy Crockett and Miss Hunter was smart enough to realise that it didn’t matter that it was unconventional and she put it in the school magazine that year. And that impressed me, not that it was a piece of mine, but that it was a piece of mine about something that nobody else knew about or cared about. That was pretty nice, I was very pleased about that. And my parents took me to see Fess Parker when he came to Manchester on a promotional trip and that was just the most extraordinary moment, because I had tried to get my father to get Fess Parker to stay in our hotel and that hadn’t worked. His PR machine replied very politely that it was a little too much out of the way for him and he was only going to be in Manchester – we were twenty- five miles away – and he was only going to be in Manchester overnight. So, he was staying at the Midland Hotel, which was very grand, and so I persuaded my parents to take me to the Midland Hotel, that night when he was doing his appearance, and we stood waiting in the lobby – there were not other people, it wasn’t like there was a huge fan base of screaming kids, it wasn’t like that at all, there were a sophisticated gathering of people in the lobby just as always – and Fess Parker came in dressed in buckskins from head to toe, six foot four, with his Davy Crockett hat and my parents and I, we saw him coming in and I followed him in a complete coma, I think, of excitement. I followed him as far as the lift and he was getting into the lift with his entourage and he turned around and I was ten maybe, maybe thirteen, I can’t remember, thirteen possibly, but very small and very slight and he got into the lift last and turned around and I walked right up to the lift door, facing him and I looked into his eyes and he looked at me and there he was with buckskin sort of suede and the doors closed, the lift doors closed with him looking into my eyes and he Marit Allen Page 30 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] went away and I fainted dead on the floor. [laughs] My parents had to come and pick me up. That was my first real experience of real costume, I suppose.

Well I suppose it’s also your, perhaps your first experience of a member of the opposite sex?

Oh yes, oh absolutely, yes. True, that was real hero worship.

And did you find fandom a point of connection with your parents?

No. I mean they weren’t in the slightest interested really. They were just doing it for me, they were doing it because I gave them no choice and they understood how important it was for me. I mean to me, looking back on it, it’s remarkable that they had the time and the presence of mind to actually take me that far and to be kind enough to experience it with me and to be there with me, that was very kind I think.

I think I just sense, in a sense, that it was caught up with your father’s business interests.

Oh I see, yes, right. Well, I think that – yes, I suppose they understood it, from that point of view. But I think also, the other thing that really helped me in later life was the fact that my father knew how to treat these people like ordinary people, that he had the greatest respect for people who are famous in their own right, but he never spoke to them as if they were anything other than just people, friends, people that he was just coming in contact with. So there was never any feeling of awe about people who are famous, and that helped me a great deal, because I’ve, although at that particular moment in my life as a young adolescent I was awestruck by him, he was also almost within reach, you know my parents sort of put me in a position that I was, that I wasn’t so separated and I’ve never been afraid of people who are famous or successful. I’ve always been able to just look at them and feel about them as if they were just people, but then the proviso being that you know, that they are people who need to be treated in a special way.

What did the girls back at school think about these things?

Marit Allen Page 31 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

They were pretty amazed. They were all amazed I guess. And you know, a lot of them were farmers’ daughters and one of the sweetest girls in my class was the vicar’s daughter, she was lovely. They all thought it was pretty amazing. But then my father also used to send me these care packages at school, that included things like roasted grasshoppers and worms in tins. He would go to Fortnum and Mason’s and get me these unbelievably grotesque little things, you know, salmon’s eyes or mussels in brine – things that would be absolutely disgusting to children – and he would send me these as my food packages.

So, was that because he didn’t have to worry about the quality of food where you were?

No, that was because he thought it was, no he just, it was his way of teasing me.

And what was food like at the school?

It was just dreadful.

What kind of things were you served up?

The puddings, I think the puddings were best. You know, jam roly-poly and spotted dick and all the things that one remembers. And the food other than that was just horrible, really horrible. I remember the bread was very often soaked in water to revive it. I remember not eating very much.

What kind of things did you eat at home?

Well I used to eat pretty good food at home. We used to, because it was a hotel, we would eat from the kitchen, so my mother never cooked. So at that point, I didn’t learn anything about cooking or housekeeping, or anything of the sort, because we were served our food by a waitress and we sat down and we would have lamb chops and three vegetables and gravy, everything served properly and knife and fork in the right order. So I didn’t know, and I didn’t have to wash up, I never had to make my own bed, I never had to change my own linen. I was brought up in a sort of a very – and it didn’t seem strange to me at the Marit Allen Page 32 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] time of course, but I had to learn a lot when I got married, when I came to London and learned to be on my own, I had quite a lot of picking up to do.

And did you revel in the fact therefore, it felt like your home was like a hotel?

No, I hated it. I hated it and I hated the fact that I didn’t have any companions, really. I had animals; I had a dog, I had cats always, but I never had enough playmates. I never had any siblings until Kari came along, and it was almost too late because I was off at boarding school. No, I hated not having any privacy. I hated the smell of living in a hotel, I hated the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. I hated the fact that my parents worked most nights, in fact all nights and would just pop up and see me. I had to learn how to be sociable because they would, if there was somebody that they particularly wanted to impress or somebody they thought would be interesting for me to meet, they would bring me downstairs and introduce me to people that I didn’t want to talk to and I would have to be as charming as my father had taught me to be. So I would have to sort of be like you know, a little performing child now and again, which I hated. But I learned how to do it.

Yes. And did guests generally take an interest in you being there?

I would keep myself apart from them, I tried hard not to have anything to do with anybody. Yeah, I mean I learned how to talk to people in a sociable way and how to ask questions and how to be interested in other people, but I didn’t enjoy doing it.

And was there any part of it that introduced you into I suppose what you could call the adult world, in terms of things that you might have glimpsed or…?

Oh yes, oh yes, there were always little scenes, little pieces of action going on that were fascinating. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean it was a really good view of society too, because we would have the people from the village who would be locals and regulars and then we’d have people who were in their finest moments, like at their weddings and in their twenty-first birthday balls and so forth, who would be really dressed up. And it was very interesting to watch behaviour.

Marit Allen Page 33 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

I suppose I’d just like to ask you about whether or not you thought it was a space of leisure time or a space of work?

Oh, I felt very much it was a space of work. It was definitely, yes it was everything was a work in progress, everything. And it was very undomestic, I guess that’s what I, what I felt as a child, that yeah, it was a very different sort of space from anything for instance that I might have felt at my grandmother’s where it was truly a domestic space. And I guess I always yearned for that.

So where does the hearth of home exist for you?

It exists with my grandparents and it exists in my Norwegian summers, that’s where home really was.

So did you ever holiday in Norway with your parents?

Oh yes, every summer. I went with my mother every summer. But we didn’t just stay on holiday, like two weeks here and there, we used to stay for the whole summer. So I got very used to that too.

And what, did you see your extended family?

Yes. And played with them and grow up with them to some extent. And I still have the connections with them now, which is great, it’s wonderful. So that’s sort of my family, I go back as often as I can.

And did you travel anywhere else, in your childhood?

We went to Portmeirion and I loved Portmeirion. Oh, it was such a magical place. That was my favourite childhood holiday, apart from Norway, and we went to Portmeirion several times. And the architecture and the colours there just absolutely, they were spellbinding, you know they were so lovely. I remember that with great pleasure.

Marit Allen Page 34 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3]

And did you have any idea at the time that this was formed from Italian ideas about architecture?

Well I think my mother must have talked to me about the fact that Clough Williams-Ellis had brought it from you know, from his various travels in Italy. But we didn’t go to Italy, I don’t think we went abroad very much, because my parents were too busy, you know to travel. That’s why I usually went with my mother, not with my father, he would visit if he could, but usually it was holidays with my mother.

Right. So when did you finally leave the boarding school?

I left at eighteen, I took A levels in one year because I was a September child, so you know how it is, the years break up strangely, so I was one of the oldest in my year and I didn’t want to wait around for another year to take A levels so I took three A levels in one year and got those.

Can you remember which ones?

Yes, they were English – or was it four? – English, history, French and art I think. Did those, in a year and that was fine. And then I wanted to go to Dublin University and I applied for Dublin University and my exam results were fine except that I didn’t have either maths or science, so I got turned down. I cried for days, absolutely days. And then my mother had a brainwave and she sent me to Grenoble University to study French. Actually to study literature in French, so I studied French language and literature in French, and I’ve never been sorry about that.

I’m sure, but can I just ask why did you want to go to Dublin University?

I wanted to go because of James Joyce I suppose. I wanted to go because to me, Ireland was the seat of exciting literature and I knew, I had a feeling, I mean I love Dylan Thomas but to me Dylan Thomas seems more Irish than English you know, being Welsh. So I love the rhythm of those words and he was a special favourite of mine and I felt that I could get closer to him and to that kind of literature if I went to Dublin. And I had a passion for the Marit Allen Page 35 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] idea of Dublin anyway, I thought it was a wonderful town. And I was right, but I didn’t go.

Had you visited it before then?

I think we’d been to Dublin briefly, yes.

And, in going to Grenoble and studying French literature, what did that offer you?

Well I wanted then to come back and try again for Oxford or for somewhere to try and study literature because I was so completely engrossed in words. And I did sort of want to be a writer, I wanted to be something connected with words anyway, but it didn’t happen that way, ‘cos I still didn’t have maths and science. So I left Grenoble with those qualifications and the French came in very useful. But I came back thinking that I just wanted to read for the rest of my life.

And was it a happy time?

In Grenoble? Oh it was wonderful, absolutely amazing. It was the beginning of all that sort of cultural excitement. We were, I guess I was a sort of beatnik, I wore a lot of black polo necks and a little bit of gold jewellery and slinky capri pants and I hung out with, I didn’t hang out with any of the English. The English tended to stay with themselves, by themselves, and they had red sports cars and were very rich, but that didn’t seem attractive. I used to hang out in the Maison de Café with the students from the art college and we formed a clique, and I had a really interesting, fantastic time with them. We used to go to the French movies. It was the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague in France – it couldn’t have been a better time for me, because I went to see A Bout de Souffle, I went to see Cocteau’s early movies, Beauty and the Beast and the [inaudible], and all those movies were just happening. Plein Soleil with Alain Delon and it was just so riveting and so exciting, it was an amazing time. Suddenly it was like the world was full of the emotion of literature and the pain of literature and the pain of experience of love and we used to sit up of course, all night discussing love and discussing pain and discussing reality and I remember Saint Exupery was a favourite of mine and I remember reading Vol de Nuits and Marit Allen Page 36 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side A [part 3] being able to envisage for the first time, flesh being rent by metal and the strain of staying awake all night when you were trying to deliver the mail by plane in those early days in South America. And there was a record, a recording of the Petit Prince that Gérard Philippe did and his voice to me was like, oh, it was like heaven. His voice was just so beautiful. And then he died and we all became involved with, there was a tragedy at Fréjus and there were people who were drowned by some extraordinary accident and as students we all got on the bus and we all went to Fréjus to try and help. It was…

[End of Tape 2 Side A] Marit Allen Page 37 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

Of course you don’t realise that your own life could be of any interest at all, until you realise that it probably isn’t just like everybody else’s.

No, quite.

It’s only then that you realise that there might be you know, some interest or some influences.

Oh well I think distance and the passage of time offers your own life experiences the ability to become more interesting.

[laughs]

So, you mentioned that your time in France awakened you to emotion, particularly through the channels of literature and you described yourself dressing like a beatnik. How did you learn to dress like a beatnik?

Oh I suppose it was looking at pictures of people like Juliette Greco, who was singing in smoky nightclubs in Paris, and Francois Sagan and Romy Schneider and people in France who were – Simone de Beauvoir I mean, and Sartre, of course they were very vocal and very much in the consciousness of the French, and very exciting people, so to do anything that they did seemed like definitely the way to go. That was the train of thought, existentialism was, you know the beat that we were all walking to, we were all interested in, all that kind of unconventional excitement and new way of living.

And how or where did you hear these new ideas?

Well, we were all talking about them, drinking coffee, talking about them all day, all night. We didn’t sleep very much as I recall. And the press would be full of them and, yeah just through newspapers and newsreels and well, there was no television, didn’t have any Marit Allen Page 38 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] television, but through movies and movie magazines. I guess, reading their books and so forth, listening to them on the radio.

So you were interested in immersing yourself in this culture?

Yes.

And what did you like more, the style or the ideas behind them?

Well, they were so interlinked, they were so completely copacetic weren’t they? I think that one couldn’t have existed without the other.

And did you meet anybody particularly, when you were studying in France that had an impact upon your life at that point?

Not really, I mean we all had, there were some interesting French people in my group. There was a girl who was very unconventional and was really outgoing, trying everything and she was kind of like a yardstick, you know, she would very often go too far and then talk about it, talk about all of her emotions that she was going through, these experimental things in her own life. And so I was able to hang on to things for myself, you know places that I didn’t want to go, things that I didn’t want to do, I was able to listen and not to have to experience everything. But I guess that at that age, you’re experiencing everything through your skin anyway, you know, so everything is very very hyper real and very intense, very intense. We would go to the flower festival in Nice, in a whole bus of us you know, and have all kinds of unbelievably exciting experiences, life sort of started to open up I guess at that point.

And did you still feel different from everybody else at that point?

I felt much more in step with those art students and students of philosophy and so on. I felt that I’d at last found people that I could really identify with. I think that was the first time.

Marit Allen Page 39 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

And what were your experiences of being in a different country?

Well I mean, the first experience was with moving in with a family and travelling on a tram into Grenoble every day. I was living in a little place called Monfleury with a lovely family, called the Gerards and those children taught me French better than anybody else of course. Little child at the table, pointing her finger at me and telling me no, not like this, like that. Day after day after day. And getting on the tram and being completely overcome by the smell of garlic. [laughs] And getting used to that and realising that in fact you know, that this might seem obnoxious or objectionable when you first encounter it, but it’s something when you do it on a daily basis, that you can really get used to. And then I bought myself, I had little money, but I bought myself a moped. It was one step above a moped, it had a real little motor to it and the wheels were not properly aligned, but it was great. It was green and I was free and I could go to my classes and I could up the mountains and I could go join friends or not, I could go off on my own, I had the most fantastic time on that moped, I loved it very much, it was great. Then I remember very clearly going down to the South of France in a gang you know, with others. I learned something there that I was able to use on Hulk, interestingly enough. Because Hulk is about – Ang Lee approached it in a very scientific way, I don’t know if you ever saw it, it was much misunderstood, but it was about the barrier that we all have within us that we can transcend that takes us from being ordinary people to superhuman acts and superhuman strength. And, it’s very well documented, there are all kinds of examples of people, you know women being able to lift a car off the top of their child who’s trapped beneath it, with superhuman adrenaline energy, and things of that sort. I mean we became very acquainted with all that because Ang Lee has fantastic research at all times. But one of my friends was being attacked in a side street and I’d lost her and I was looking for her everywhere, and a whole lot of my friends from Grenoble, or people I knew, not real friends, but they were people I knew sitting in a café on a tiny side street, and there was a girl in the middle of the street who was being attacked by a gang of youths and then I saw that it was my friend Sarah, and I said to the kids sitting in the café, ‘For goodness’ sake, help Sarah’. They just said, ‘Eugh…’, true friend style and so I realised that it was down to me and I levitated and screamed in such an unbelievable way and flew on top of the back of these boys, men, young men, tearing at them with my hands, scratching them with my nails, pulling their hair and this unbelievable yell came out of my throat and Sarah Marit Allen Page 40 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] looked up and saw that it was me and the boys vanished, every one of them, there must have been about seven of them around her and they vanished. And that moment was something that I recognised as one of those moments where they couldn’t, they didn’t stand a chance against me, I was tiny, they were seven, they didn’t stand a chance. The noise was so terrifying that they didn’t know what was going to happen next, and Sarah got up and we went away and everything was fine and it informed everything that I suppose I came to understand about how to… We all have it in us, we all have that click that can take us into super drive, I think.

And it’s something that stayed with you?

I think if I was ever in a situation – I know I’d kill for my children, my grandchildren. I know I still have that, absolutely. And I’m not at all afraid of it, having recognised it once I know that it’s there and I’ll call on it if I have to.

So how long were you actually in France for?

Only for a year.

Only for a year. And were you sorry to leave the place?

I was. Towards the end of it, I went down again to the South of France with my friend Sarah, who had a lover and was off, and so I spent some time by myself. We had no money at all, so I learned to live on fruit. We had tomatoes, or I had tomatoes from the market for lunch and peaches from the market for supper. And I was hanging out in a bar by myself and I was there because I knew the waitress and I knew that I could have fried egg on toast or something for almost no money, and that she would protect me from anybody that came in and try to bother me. And it was down by the harbour and I used to love walking around the harbour, and the boats and the yachts, to me it was so exotic and so exciting, I just loved the water. And I loved going on boats when I was in Norway of course, as a child, so there was a connection there I see. And there was this group of young men there and they were obviously from a boat somewhere and they were drawing straws, they were drawing matches rather, they were playing you know, and they were Marit Allen Page 41 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] talking and they were looking at me. And one of them got the short match and he came over and asked me if I would like to have a cup of coffee or like to come back to the boat with them, would I like to talk to them, would I like to be friends. I said, yes, that sounds really nice. And he was exactly what I wanted, he was the most attractive man I’d ever seen in my life, [laughing] after Fess Parker I guess. And I came home and told my parents about it. I said, he is it, he is six foot one, he has a beard, he smokes a pipe and he’s a Buddhist. And my parents said [laughing], oh no. I think it was all of their worst nightmares, all of the things that they thought were completely out of, I mean they couldn’t, it was exactly what they didn’t want. And of course I fell in love with him, desperately in love with him and then he went away on his boat, I came back to England and I pined all summer long and got some letters from him, and then he wrote me a letter to say he was coming to London, so I saved up all my pennies and I got on the train and went to London to meet him.

And was he your first love?

He was my first love and he was, yes, he was my first and greatest love I guess. I mean, all aspirational, you know.

And what was his name?

His name was Juan Breytenback. He was half Spanish, half German and I think they were running guns at the time, on this boat, to Morocco. Either they were running guns or marijuana, but I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was exciting and illegal and unconventional. And I talked to him a lot about Norway. And then my mother came to London to rescue me, to bring me home and she said – I was staying with him in Swiss Cottage or somewhere and he had wonderful friends who were all different colours and different races and it was just so exciting. And we hadn’t consummated our relationship, that was pending, and my mother came down and she said, I’ll meet you at four o’clock – no, I’ll meet you at three thirty at Fortnum and Mason, we’ll have tea and I’ll have a look at this young man of yours. He was twenty-six and I was nineteen. So we sat and had tea and he was reasonably well mannered and he smoked his pipe and he talked in a very soft and interesting way to my mother and we then, [laughs] she took me to the outside and she Marit Allen Page 42 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] said, ‘Now then Marit, I’m taking the train back to Cheshire at five minutes past five from Euston station and if you’re with me and you come home, that will be wonderful and if you don’t, then you will no longer be my daughter’. And I said, ‘Well, I think I’m going to stay here’. So she said, ‘Taxi’ and then she turned to me and said, ‘Goodbye Marit, it’s been so nice to know you’, and off she went.

And how did you feel at that point?

Well, I felt shaky, but okay, this is my life now. And he, the very next day left for Norway. He couldn’t take it, that was too much for him. [laughs] I got a postcard saying, sitting – and oh, he wrote in the most divine and I’m sure a sort of drug-induced kind of lyricism you know – and he was sitting there watching the seagulls and it was exactly as I’d described it in Bergen and it was a place of dreams and have a nice life, and goodbye.

And did he visit Norway because you’d told him about it?

Yes, exactly, yes. And I saw him one more time. I saw him in an airport in Amsterdam, going in the opposite direction, one day, across a barrier.

And did he recognise you or see you?

He didn’t see me.

So, how was it that, where you were staying in Swiss Cottage, you’d been renting?

Well that didn’t work of course, because he left. So then I found my friend from Grenoble, Sarah, and she and her brother were living in Paddington or somewhere, they had a flat and I could squat on the floor. So then Sarah and I got a flat together on Oakley Street in Chelsea, number eighty-eight Oakley Street, we took a first floor flat and it was cold water. There was a bathroom halfway up the stairs that was shared by the whole house and there was a telephone on the top floor that you could put coins in. And we had one hotplate to cook on, in a cupboard, and we had one – there were two rooms, so one room we shared as a bedroom, the other room we had a sort of a cot, if you like, in each Marit Allen Page 43 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] room. And that’s where we lived. And we lived on nothing, I had nothing. And so we lived on instant coffee and baked beans. And then I got a job at Jaeger, working in the lift. My father had known the woman who was the Personnel Director of Jaeger, so I went there thinking well even if I haven’t got my father’s reference, maybe his name will make some difference. And she very kindly listened to me and what qualifications do you have – well I speak French and I have French literature certificate and I have these exams and she said, ‘Well that’s very nice, very nice indeed. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll give you a job in the lift because you have such a nice smile and you will welcome everybody to Jaeger’. So that’s how I started and I earned eight pounds a week I think.

So were you still not in contact with your parents?

Oh no, my parents had cut me off at that point, so I had no contact with them at all.

And did you have any contact with your grandparents or your extended family?

No, no, no. Nobody.

And how did you feel at that time?

I felt shaky at first, but I felt that this was probably the way it was supposed to be. You’re supposed to be able to stand on your feet, look after yourself, get on with it.

So can you give me a self-portrait of your working life in the lift at Jaeger?

Well, I didn’t do very well. I wasn’t very good at operating the lift and I remember one day a friend of my mother’s came in, from Cheshire, and I said, ‘Oh hello Mrs Beasley’, whatever her name was, and she cut me completely dead, she didn’t know who I was because I was operating the lift. And that was a seminal lesson too, that taught me a lot, I never forgot that. And, oh then they gave me a job in the sweater department and they couldn’t call me Miss Allen because there was another Miss Allen, so they called me Miss Oakley because I lived on Oakley Street, and they taught me how to fold sweaters up and wrap them in plastic bags and put them back on the shelves. So I learned that, I picked Marit Allen Page 44 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] that up quite quickly and I used to hang out in a coffee bar, been trained in hanging out in coffee bars, and there was an art gallery just around the corner run by two men who were very, very kind and sweet and they were interested in primitive art. And they met me in the café and they took me back to their art gallery and they introduced me to people and they were very kind and they were the first people that I got to know in London, so I used to spend a lot of time in their art gallery and go to their openings. And around the corner there was a hairdresser. I went to the hairdresser one day, I don’t know how I could afford it, and the woman cutting my hair said, ‘Which magazine did you say you worked for?’ and that was it, that was all I needed. Then I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to work on a magazine, my favourite magazine was Queen magazine, so I was going to work on Queen magazine. That was it, that was established. So then I just had to get a job.

So, working for Jaeger was simply accidental?

Yes, accidental. It was just because in fact I knew my father had a connection with the personnel lady.

So, your interest in working for a magazine was different from your…

Oh completely.

...interest in wanting to work in fashion?

I didn’t want to work in fashion. I just wanted a job. I just wanted to survive. No I didn’t, in fact the thing that that served me well for was the reference that the woman gave me. She gave me a wonderful reference when I finally did break down the door at Queen magazine; the only reference that I had was the one from Jaeger and she must have been very kind because that was a great help.

Well you had a, you were well trained in coffee bar culture.

[laughs]

Marit Allen Page 45 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

How did it differ, the London scene from the scene that you’d experienced in France?

Well, it was much more grown-up. You know, there were lots of adults about which wasn’t much fun, but I suppose that then, I mean once I started working for – I mean I was living just off the Kings Road and there was coffee culture there just beginning, just beginning.

So what year would this have been?

Well, I was trying to think about that. It must have been about sixty-two or three. And there was a Norwegian woman who had a shop on the Kings Road where Jaeger, funnily enough, have the corner now at the top of – what street is it? Quorum used to be in that street. You know by Antiquarius.

It’s just by Antiquarius, on the corner.

Yes, the other corner.

Nearly opposite the cinema.

That’s right. And this woman called Kiki Byrne, who was from Trondheim, from my mother’s town, she had a shop there. And I went there and bought a suit, but I mean buying, I bought a duck egg blue linen suit which was the first sixties shape I had ever seen and it was unbelievably cutting edge. It was, what became the classic sixties shape of a short top, swinging a little bit and an A-line skirt, very short, and a kind of a boat neck, stand away boat neck with buttons. And that must have taken my money for at least two weeks. I mean then I had to walk to work and then I couldn’t eat at all, I’d just share a bit of Sarah’s. And those things were of great value I think, learning to live on almost breadline money and learning to stand on my feet and learning where to splurge. I had to buy that suit, it was absolutely stunning, it was the first thing. No, I’d always had clothes that I really liked I suppose, but it was the first sort of sixties thing that I had and that was a great help I think in my interview, so it was a smart move.

Marit Allen Page 46 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

And was it in some ways informed by the way your mother used to buy clothes?

Yes, absolutely. Yes, and my mother taught me to be extravagant when necessary. She taught me you know, that you buy jewellery for yourself, because if you’re waiting for somebody else to buy it for you, you may wait forever. [laughs]

It’s very true. [laughs]

Yes. [laughing]

And, you mentioned that you were you know, you remember very clearly the clothes your mother used to wear and you stress the importance of buying a particular outfit which makes a particular impact, and you also spoke of your time of dressing like a beatnik, but there were other things going on at that time too, in terms of changes in fashion. Were you aware of those at that time?

Well, I don’t think that it was until – the convention was that one dressed very much as one’s parents dressed, in the late fifties, wasn’t it true? So I guess that dressing as a beatnik was the first step, and from there on… and especially I think, it was helped by my mother cutting me off. Then I just had to go on my own and be independent, a hundred per cent independent and not have any of her influence whatever. And the influence that she gave me was to be brave, you know, to go and do what you think you should do and wear what you feel is the right thing for you. So she gave me the courage to go it alone and to do my own thing. But you mean in general terms, what was happening in fashion?

Well I suppose perhaps the difference between a French beatnik and an American rebel, for example.

Yes. I mean James Dean and Natalie Wood and Rebel Without a Cause, that was at about that time, wasn’t it? I mean those were the kind of films that I’d be watching when I was in London. I was a big fan of James Dean. Big, big fan. But then, I remember when I was first working on Queen magazine, the convention still was rooted in the fifties. It was still very much London couture as well as Paris, you know. New York didn’t figure. But it Marit Allen Page 47 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] was French and English couture that was, those were the things that we reported on and when I was first employed as a junior on Queen, the first sessions that I went on were very sort of fifties orientated ball gowns with above the elbow length gloves and very fine things. I mean it was against those things that I finally found my own voice in fashion and it was supporting the revolution that was the excitement for me and that’s really where I came in. You know, because I was introduced to fashion of the fifties if you like, through my mother and through the people who were in charge at Queen magazine when I started there; they were very, very steeped in the fifties and convention and this is the way we do it and this is the way it’s done. And it was with the advent of the youth quake, of the youth movement that I was able to say well, you know, that was the old order, this is the new order. You know, we didn’t wear satin in the fifties in the daytime, but now that’s what we’re going to do.

So, tell me about the interview at Queen magazine and how you landed it.

The job. Well, that was fun, that was really great fun. I, having realised that that was the only thing that I wanted to do, I called up and asked if I could have a job. Now I didn’t know whether I wanted a job in fashion or in features, I had no idea at that time. I didn’t even know how a magazine was structured or how the departments were delineated, I had no idea. So I just knew that Queen magazine was full of excitement and it had a political edge to it and it was socially unconventional, even though it was a society magazine, it was clearly an unconventional and slightly dangerous magazine at the time. And so I called up, from that little callbox at number eighty-eight Oakley Street, with my two p and I called up and asked if I could have an interview and they said, ‘Well what are your qualifications?’ ‘Oh well, I speak French, I have a French degree.’ And, ‘Can you type?’. ‘Oh yes.’ Couldn’t type. ‘And take shorthand?’ ‘A little bit.’ ‘And what are your other strengths?’ ‘Well I’m very interested in literature.’ ‘So which department do you want to work in, we have no vacancies.’ So I called every day, every week, consistently, I just didn’t stop calling until the poor woman, who was Jocelyn Stevens’ assistant, she said, ‘You know, I am so tired of hearing your voice, I am so tired of you calling up, I’m going to ask you to come in on Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock. So, and that was when the Kiki Byrne’s suit came in. I bought the Kiki Byrne’s suit, I went in to Queen magazine, which was on Fetter Lane in the heart of newspaper land, just around the corner Marit Allen Page 48 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4] from the Daily Mirror, and she led me up to the boardroom, which was on the top floor, and to my great surprise Jocelyn Stevens himself came up, who was the publisher of the magazine. And he looked like a young god, at the time. He was in his late twenties, early thirties, he had a mane of blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He was wearing shirtsleeves, white shirt with coloured braces and his sleeves rolled up, just like a newspaper man. And he talked to me for about two hours and he told me about journalism, he told me about Condé Nast and what devils they were and he was there to change the world and he was going to change the world of publishing, and independent publishing was the way to go, and the way Condé Nast treated the people who worked for them and the way he treated the people who worked for him and how exciting it was, and what did I want to do, and he described to me the different departments and how they operated and how they functioned and what happened and I think in his conversation I kind of wanted to work in the features department. But after about two hours, two and a quarter hours, he said, oh! he had to go and he was rushing down the stairs and I followed him, rushing down the stairs and he said, ‘Right, so, you want a job. So you have private means?’ And I said, ‘No, I have no private means’. ‘Well then how are you going to be able to work for me?’ And I said, ‘Well, I was sort of hoping for a salary’. He said, ‘I don’t know about that. What about five pounds a week?’ So I said, ‘Okay, fine, five pounds a week, that’s fine’. And I knew I could barely survive on five pounds a week, but I was going to. So he said, ‘Fine, done’. So I said, ‘So, I’m going to work for you?’. ‘Yes.’ ‘Five pounds a week?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well when do I start?’. He said, ‘Tomorrow’. So I, Thursday morning went into the office and I was shown a desk in the fashion room and that’s how I started.

So you didn’t make it to the features department?

No. Caroline Conran and Minn Hogg were in the features department and they were lovely and they were wonderful, and I had the greatest regard for them, they were fantastic. And they were interesting to listen to and learn with, and I was put on a junior desk and my boss, my first boss, was Lady Philippa Wallop who was convention personified. She was gracious and kind and classic and she wore a lot of Chanel and she married Viscount Chelsea, she became Lady Chelsea. And she taught me what I needed to know about convention and Annie Trehearne was the fashion editor and Maggie Buchanan was her number two. And I started out typing envelopes and I would wait until lunchtime, because Marit Allen Page 49 C1046/13 Tape 2 Side B [part 4]

I couldn’t type really, and so there was a huge pile of mistake envelopes [laughing] underneath my desk and I eventually learned to type that way. And Beatrix Miller was the editor. Mark Boxer was the art director and the art department was full of people that I identified with. There was a sort of a young mob of unconventional graphic designers who became my friends, and they were the ones I made the connection with, not actually with any of the women in my department, I hung out with the people from the art department and got to know them. And we eventually became collaborators and we would do things after hours in our own time and that’s how I learned to put together sessions and work with photographers and work with the graphic designers and art directors and that was my starting point.

[End of Tape 2 Side B]

Marit Allen Page 50 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

Okay, so this is the Marit Allen interview, tape three, recorded on Tuesday the sixth of September 2005. Marit, when we last spoke, I think we got to the point in your life when you started at Queen magazine?

Yes.

And you recounted to me the episode of meeting Jocelyn Stevens on the stairs.

[laughs] That’s right.

Could you I suppose define for me what your job there was and what were its duties?

Yes, and what about who else was there?

Yes, well you did mention that last time.

Caroline Conran and Minn Hogg were there and they both went on to do wonderful things, and they were in the features department. And I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be in the features or in the fashion department and Jocelyn put me in the fashion department because they needed someone to help out Lady Philippa Wallop – did we go there?

No.

Lady Philippa Wallop was doing some sort of special pages and so they gave me the job of being her secretary slash assistant and my functions apart from making her calls and typing up her envelopes, which was hard for me ‘cos I couldn’t type, was to walk Annie Trehearne’s dog, which – she was the fashion editor – and to pick up Maggie Buchanan, who was the assistant fashion editor, pick up her dry-cleaning and take it to her before her evening functions. And I did quite a lot of that until I made really good friends with the art department – Mark Boxer was the art director – and Max Maxwell became my boyfriend, he was one of the graphic designers. Barney Wann was another one of the graphic Marit Allen Page 51 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5] designers, who became my lifelong friend. And we had a lot of new young photographers coming in from New York, David Montgomery was one of them, and there was a little tiny studio in the basement and we so we used to work at night and at weekends and I would work in conjunction with the art department. They would say to me, we’d love to do some pictures, experimental work with David, can you gather some things together for us. And we would work at night after everyone else had gone home, in the basement and make photographs and they’d be shown later to the art director and to Beatrix Miller who was the editor. And that led to Beatrix asking me to take on these pages called About Twenty which was the young, the beginning, the very very beginning of young London fashion. And she put me together with Caterine Milinaire who was the daughter of the Duchess of Bedford. And Caterine had a pink mews house in Cadogan Mews and a Mini Minor and I had a cold water flat with a bus – no bus pass, but just a bus. And she wore pearls and cashmere and I wore anything that I could find that was funky. We got into her little Mini Minor to do our first recce and we discovered that we were born on the same day. And she said, ‘We’re going here’ and I said, ‘I think it would be good if we went there first’, and we sat in the car, front seat to front seat and we had an encounter of wills. [laughs] And we discovered that we were each, although very different, as strong-willed as the other and that we had more in common than apart and we became lifelong friends and we worked together, and we did these pages called About Twenty. And we went to discover all – Beatrix Miller gave us a free rein and she gave us as many pages as we needed and well, two to four pages I should say. But then the issue started to go fortnightly, so that became a lot of work. And we went around and met and talked to all the young designers of the moment and we put together our pages, we arranged the photography, she had funky sort of aristocratic and intellectual and artistic connections because of the whole Woburn scene and…

Sorry, could I just ask you to explain what the Woburn scene was?

Yes. Well, her stepfather, Ian Bedford and her mother, Nicole Milinaire as she had been, they gave weekend parties and house parties that included everybody from Callas to the latest, most hip young photographers or actors, or people who are movers and shakers in every different walk of life. So I used to go up there with Caterine and her brothers and sisters and we used to meet all these people and make good social network kind of Marit Allen Page 52 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5] connections. And so we would gather together people and photograph either in their houses or use their art studios – Topolski was one of them – and it was a good start. We had a really good time, we enjoyed ourselves enormously and we just worked incessantly, we worked twenty-four hours if necessary and it was a huge buzz. We had a fantastically exciting time. And when we got the pictures in, the art department who were all friends, we’d all work together on that, they had very strong ideas and I used to write all the copy. And for writing the copy I got an extra two pounds a week and that was supposed to be an absolute secret. Caterine never knew that I got paid two pounds a week more than she, because [laughs] I sat at home and wrote the copy. But that was how it was. And Beatrix was an amazing teacher. She had a feeling that I could write and so she kept me there one night, the very first time I had to do it, and she said, ‘Now this is what you’re going to do’ and I did it. And I must have re-done it and she stayed there while I was typing downstairs – my typing had got a bit better. And I would type the copy and take it to her and she’d throw it in the bin, say nothing, throw it in the bin. I’d go down again, I’d type it again, I’d take it to her with a smile on my face, she’d throw it in the bin. And this happened six or seven, eight times and she was there and the lights were on and it was dark and she would send me back again, ‘Come on Marit, you can do this’. And she finally sort of flew it back at me and I went down in utter frustration and I just typed it exactly as I felt it and I took it back up to her and she said, ‘Now you’re talking’. And that was how she taught me how to write copy. And she had been a brilliant copywriter herself in New York. She was a sort of hotshot advertising and editorial copywriter for Harpers and various different things in New York, so she was the best possible teacher. And she taught me how to feel words through and she would occasionally give me articles to write, not just about fashion, but about other things and she would get me to interview people and that was really interesting. She would get me to write copy for other people’s stories and when people were on holiday, the copywriters, she would pass me twenty-eight pages to do by next, you know, by Monday. It was fun. I was living in a garret in Shepherd Market by this time and we were interviewing, I mean we were working together with people like Foale and Tuffin and Jean Muir, Gina Fratini, John Bates, Gerald McCann – they were all friends of ours, we used to hang out together and go to their workshops and sit around for hours and see what they were up to. And it was a, it was a sort of time of mutual stimulation and everybody was feeding into everybody else’s programme. And James Wedge was making amazing hats, Bailey was taking pictures, Jean Shrimpton became a very close friend of Marit Allen Page 53 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5] mine. It was a time when – I mean people say that if you didn’t, if you weren’t on drugs in the sixties you, if you remember the sixties you weren’t there – I remember every single part of it and I didn’t take drugs. I was not [laughs] interested in anything like that. I was just interested in the adrenaline rush of working and it was the best ever thing and I just was incredibly fortunate to be there at the right time.

It seems as if the working environment of Queen magazine was actually quite important to the opportunities it afforded you and I suppose, just for clarity, could you perhaps just describe the building that Queen magazine was housed in?

Yes.

Also I suppose, how the different departments fitted together to constitute, you know, the working practices of the magazine.

Yes. Well actually that becomes more important really with Vogue magazine, the geography of the building. However, the geography of Queen magazine was crucial to Jocelyn Stevens’ ethos at the time, which is to say it was on Fetter Lane, so it was between the Daily Mirror building and Fleet Street, which was very operational at the time of course, a hundred per cent. And it was a tiny, modern fifties, sixties building, five floors straight up, small. Very intense and I don’t remember if we had a lift, I don’t think we did. It was a lot of running up and down stairs and frantic messengers and things happening and it was like a microcosm, I suppose, of the newspaper office except that it was a glossy magazine. And Jocelyn wanted it to feel that way and be that way, he wanted a sense of urgency and that this story was going to break it all open. So the fashion and the features played into his sense of urgency about what was happening in London and he would run a story on Frank Sinatra’s shady side and maybe his Mafia connection - Robin Douglas- Hume was writing articles. And if there was a whiff of a lawsuit, that would be such a buzz, he would be so excited, that would be the best thing that could possibly happen and of course it would make the magazines fly off the shelves. And I suppose that the urgency of him wanting it to be essentially features led and to be close to a breaking news kind of paper, it helped us to go in that direction with fashion as well, because anything we did had to be relevant and relate and had to be new and cutting edge or it didn’t have a place. Marit Allen Page 54 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

So it didn’t have, if you like, the grandiose aspect of Vogue at the time, it was much more instant and it was much more, we were working to a tighter deadline and we didn’t have the sort of restrictions of the aristocratic overlay that Vogue had. It was a different kind of more urgent feeling I think.

Well I suppose that would have been underlined by the fact that it was fortnightly…

Yes.

…eventually rather than just monthly.

That’s right. Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes. I think I did the very first story – I did Zandra Rhodes’ first story. I did Ossie Clark’s, I think, first or second story on Queen at the time. And Caterine actually went, I think she went before me and she went to New York, to American Vogue to do some buzzy pages of her own there.

Right. Could you perhaps explain how you went about meeting these young designers, because they wouldn’t have had any exposure so you might not necessarily have known where to look for them.

Well, I think as in all sort of small milieus, one knew about the other, one would lead to the other, so it was like tom-toms. You know, you got to know pretty quickly who was interesting. And it was always, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a question of learning or academia, it was a question of this moves me or this feels right, this has the right sort of edge to it, this is something that I haven’t experienced before that I haven’t seen before and it was really a question of breaking down the barriers of the status quo, the society, the whole society that was revolved, that fashion revolved about and was revolving around fashion, it was a question at that moment in time with the music that was happening and the photographers that were happening, of trying to completely sweep away the status quo. I mean, if somebody had asked me to Ascot I would have laughed, I wouldn’t have wanted to go. Even though I was very happy to go to Woburn because it was very funky actually, what they were doing there and the gatherings that they had were sort of a bit like left wing Paris, but in Woburn Abbey. But if somebody had asked me to go to the Boat Race or to Marit Allen Page 55 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

Wimbledon, that would have been exactly the opposite direction to anything I would have wanted to do or a place I would have wanted to be seen. I would have wanted to be seen in the art galleries or the nightclubs or the little cafes and had very little time for any of that really, because we were all working so hard.

There’s a term which has been bandied about in relation to what that scene was about, and it’s called ‘Mixing It’ – have you come across it?

No, it sounds right. [laughs] Sounds absolutely right. Well, it was like that, I mean we were all, it wasn’t that it was so much promiscuous, it was that there was such a strong connection between us all, because we were all excited about the same things. I mean James Wedge was excited about the shape of hats and doing things that had never been done before. And Foale and Tuffin were excited about the whole liberation of the female form and the fun and the fun that could be had suddenly. You know, Mary Quant I think – did we talk about – she had this amazing business set-up when she had Ginger Group and they were fun. You know, Archie who was the business person, he was always behind the scenes, but Alexander Plunkett Green was witty and entertaining and was incredibly clever with his whole presentation of Mary Quant. And his naming of the clothes as they came out on the catwalk when they did a show would make you laugh out loud. I mean he was really fun and part of it and Jean Muir was very retiring, but very sweet and Ossie Clark was in his own world already, but he was very gregarious at the time. It was just a great fun mix of [phone ringing] people and things.

[break in recording]

Now you just mentioned four designers – James Wedge, got Tuffin and Foale – count them as one I suppose.

Yes.

Zandra Rhodes and Ossie Clark. Now they’re all products of a British fashion education.

That’s right. Marit Allen Page 56 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

They all graduated from the Royal College of Art.

And that was the network really, it started there.

It seems to me, the inter-disciplinary nature of your working life at Queen was also something that was in evidence at the Royal College of Art at that time. So could you just talk about what you knew of the Royal College of Art and what they were doing, particularly in terms of fashion education?

Well, Jamie Ironside, who was the Dean of the fashion school, was a real force to be reckoned with. She was brilliant and she, she had those people really, she pushed them to the degree that they were absolutely ripe to explode at that particular moment and of course there was always, there were in the fine arts, David Hockney was there and he was a great friend of all those people. And Derek Bosher and others, I don’t know if Tony Donaldson was there at the time. But anyway, there was lots of cross-pollination between those departments as well. And then I think that that thrust, it just sort of popped out of the ether at that particular moment in time. And I mean I was sorry that I hadn’t gone to the Royal College, but there was no time for that, you know, that just didn’t play so I was just happy to meet them and they all introduced me to each other, and there we were! All of us, out there.

And could you describe a typical working relationship between one of these designers and the things that you were doing, I suppose, would they come and – how would you meet them, for example?

Well, we would go to their workshops, that’s how it would happen. They didn’t have backers for the most part, they weren’t particularly well organised, there were not necessarily fashion shows. What would happen would be that we would know, you know, just from telephone contact, we would know when, for instance, Foale and Tuffin had a new collection ready. And they were in Ganton Street, which is just off Carnaby Street, so it was easy, we would just pop round and go and see them and look at the clothes on the rail. And then they would have a girl there who was one of their friends who would put Marit Allen Page 57 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5] the clothes on and we’d see the clothes and then we’d assess what we thought was the spearhead of what was about to happen or what would come or what would be a fun story to put together and we would link all these elements up and then get them together with a photographer and a story would be born. That would be how we’d assess what was going on at the time.

Could you describe any characteristics of these dress designs that were particularly within that period, your period at Queen, particularly?

Well Mary Quant was the most famous, she was the first to be famous and she retained that position all the way through. The others were young and struggling and poor and fun. And I think, I mean it was only two years that I was at Queen, so I think probably that most of the significant things that I remember came afterwards when I started at Vogue magazine. That was really, when things really started to generate a lot of international hubbub.

So can I just ask you again, what were the two years, you know what dates were they?

What were the two years? Sixty-three to sixty-five. No, sixty… it must have been sixty- three and sixty-four. I think about sixty-five I must have moved to, sixty-four or five I moved to Vogue, I can’t remember exactly.

So, what were the reasons behind you moving?

Well, there was a woman who was working at Vogue magazine called Lady Claire Rendlesham and she was the one who took the first picture with Bailey and Shrimpton and she went to New York with them. And she was brilliant, she was a wonderful fashion editor. She was haughty and impossibly difficult and glamorous and skinny and a real livewire. And she was doing these pages at Vogue that were very significant and Jocelyn Stevens wanted her to come over to Queen magazine. Annie Trehearne wanted to step aside, or she was going to step aside. So Jocelyn wanted Claire Rendlesham to come over and to take over the fashion department at Queen. And Alisa Garland, who was then the editor of Vogue magazine, she contacted me and she asked me to come and replace Claire Marit Allen Page 58 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

Rendlesham on the Vogue magazine pages called Young Ideas and they were the ultimate pages. I mean they were the pages that we were modelled after on Queen magazine, so it was incredibly flattering to be asked to take over those pages from Claire, whom I had the most enormous admiration for. Then Claire came over to Queen magazine - and it all happened very, very quickly – she came over to Queen magazine to talk to us about the fact she was going to take over and I told her that I was going to leave and go to Vogue or that I’d been offered that position, and Jocelyn had of course told me that Vogue magazine, Condé Nast, were terrible people to work for, one should never work for that corporation because there was once the story of a woman who’d worked there for thirty years and they gave her the sack summarily and she jumped out of the window, and that’s what happened when you worked for Condé Nast. You were likely to get to the position where you would have to throw yourself out of the window. So, I had to consider very carefully and I was very young and my parents didn’t have much to say about it, and I don’t even know if we were actually in contact at the time. So I was in a most terrible spot and Vogue were pulling on one side, Claire Rendlesham threatened to go to Queen if I didn’t stay and I had to escape, I had to run away from town for the weekend because I didn’t know what to do or where to go. And so I went away from town for the weekend, I came back on Monday morning and went to Vogue magazine and I started to work for them. And Alisa Garland as I’ve said, was the editor at the time and Beatrix Miller hadn’t come, Max Maxell came over, he became the art director, the youngest art director in London. And Max and I were, we were a couple at the time, mostly because again, he was just extraordinarily gifted and it was very charismatic, that kind of talent. He was the most superb graphic designer and he had such an elegance of taste and such direct and positive and dynamic points of view that he became incredibly attractive because of the way he was, you know, in his work and in his life. And he brought Barney over and then within months Beatrix Miller became the editor and so very suddenly and quite by osmosis, it became the team that we had had at Queen, we developed a new rhythm and the same team on a bigger scale in the Vogue, under the Vogue umbrella, you know. So it was kind of, it was something that you could never have predicted but it worked really well.

So could you tell me your views about Vogue magazine at that time, just before you joined – what was your view of British Vogue?

Marit Allen Page 59 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5]

Oh my view of British Vogue, it was largely influenced by Claire Rendlesham because it had become very apparent very quickly that Claire had got her finger on the button and I think that her pages and [clears throat] ethos and what she was bringing to Vogue was what I was connected to and what I was interested in. The rest of Vogue seemed very alien to me; the High Society section of it, the Ladies Who Lunch sections – it was all very foreign to me and I suppose I felt if they wanted me to be there, we would have to co-exist. And we co-existed well. I think they thought that I was an outrageous little upstart, but they took me under their wing in a very motherly way, the women who were there when I arrived were Sheila Whetton, who was the most elegant woman, who was extraordinary and who had modelled for Molyneux when she was young, and she still had that elegance and refinement. And Melanie Miller who was an American lady who had worked for Glamour magazine and she had the whole sort of almost powdery, ethereal American feeling about her and her work – she used to work with Henry Clarke a lot. And Helen Robinson. Everybody had their own department. There was a woman called Helen Robinson who was responsible for the shoes and Sandy Bowler was responsible for corsetry, and this was a completely new world to me, it was the most extraordinary thing. But there were some really elementary and very excellent things about it, which were that if you were responsible for an area of clothing, then you had to learn about that from the ground up. You had to go to the corset factory, if you were the corsets editor, and you had to learn how corsets were built and you had to know about the whole process from how they were created and how they were built to how they were merchandised and how they were sold. And the same thing applied to the shoes – if you were in charge of shoes you had to know about the lasts and about where they went and where they were made and how they were created and constructed. I remember they wanted me to do a story about knitwear, but before I was able to do that they sent me to Hobb [ph] of Hawick in Scotland to understand how knitwear was made and how the machines worked and how it was. And then they sent me to Leicester to look at how knitted under apparel like vests and things, how they were made and what the machines were like. So it was a very responsible organisation and it was very structured and it was, it was like learning a craft, if you like, to be a fashion editor at Vogue magazine, there was nothing light-hearted about it. But I was fortunate in that they were an assembly of people, and women in particular, who were generous in spirit and who would, you know, take me under their wing if you like. But there was an extraordinary connection for instance with accessories. We were, Vogue Marit Allen Page 60 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side A [part 5] magazine had its own library of accessories that were suitable for the season coming, upcoming. So in autumn there would be a room where shoes were sent from Charles Jourdain, Roger Vivier and various – Eddie Rayne – they were very much connected to Vogue, so they would send their new collection of shoes in the sizes that models were likely to use and we would have shoe racks and an entire room full of shoes. And then the accessories, the same thing. Adrien Mann or whoever was making the kind of jewellery that was going to be used in the editorial pages if they wanted it to be used, they would deliver crates of accessories and they would be laid out beautifully in this accessories room. So whenever you were going off on a shoot, you had your model chosen and you knew where you were going, and so you would go into the accessories room and you would select from the accessories that were there and use those to go with the clothes that you’d chosen. And that’s how it worked.

[End of Tape 3 Side A]

Marit Allen Page 61 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6]

Tape 3 Side B [part 6]

I think it was very responsible.

Yes. It seems quite different from your experience at Queen magazine.

Yes. It was very much more businesslike. Very much more businesslike in every way. And we were made to be very aware of the advertisers and one had to visit the advertisers. If it was Burberry’s or whoever it was, Daks and so forth, you know, everybody deserved at visit. So you couldn’t just, as I had done at Queen and just fly off and go and find the fun people, you had to do your, pay your dues and you had to go off to Margaret Street and you had to beat the street and you had to go and look at everybody in the rag trade. And if somebody like John Marks was coming up, then they had to be accorded the same respect and the same time and attention as all the obviously hip young designers. And you know, and John Craig was making blouses and Wallis began to copy Paris and everybody got their time. We were a very responsible organisation and everybody was accorded respect. And not just the advertisers, the advertisers, they were accorded respect with a doff of the hat, but everybody else was you know, investigated and seen and assessed and if they were doing something that was fun and interesting, then we’d bring their clothes in too. But we used to have monthly meetings, or weekly meetings I should say, and the magazine was mapped out obviously, ahead of time and we were allotted pages and we would then offer Beatrix a synopsis of what we wanted to do and how we wanted those pages that we were allotted to look in that particular issue and we would have issue meetings so that they whole thing was co-ordinated and…

So could you tell me what your actual job title was?

I was the fashion editor of the Young Idea pages.

And can you remember what your starting salary was?

[laughs] Well I know my starting salary at Queen was five pounds a week, which went up to seven when I did my copy. That was stunning. But my starting salary at Vogue was Marit Allen Page 62 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] probably something incredible for me, like twenty-five pounds a week. Because you were expected to have a private income, which I didn’t have. [laughs]

You mentioned that you looked quite different from most of the other staff members at the magazine, so could you perhaps paint a self-portrait of yourself at that time for the tape?

[laughs] Well, I was a skinny little slip of a thing, with brown hair, glasses, pointed features, twinkling eyes and an outrageous amount of enthusiasm. I would say that was how I was.

Okay. And what would an average outfit to work be like?

There wasn’t much of it. [laughs] There was one mad day I remember, because maybe it describes how I looked at the time. I was on holiday with some dear friends of mine in Mallorca, which was not a venue at the time, on the north coast in Deia, and he was a writer musicologist and she was a photographer and they were wonderful people to be around and the whole village was full of artists and it was a very interesting venue. And I found with Toby, my friend, I found some beautiful sort of hazy impressionist printed linen in a little corner shop in the village, which had one café, and I took this to the local dressmaker and I said, ‘Please make me a dress, and it’s round here and you cut out there and it’s short like this and it goes like that’. And she made me that dress. I got a telephone call or a message somehow that I had to get on a plane from Palma, Mallorca to go to cover the collections in Paris and that was the dress that I wore to the Dior collection that day, the next day – literally, I went from this tiny village in Mallorca to the Dior show where everyone was dressed to the nines and wearing furs, and I was wearing this tiny little slip of a sundress and it caused quite a ruckus. But I mean, it was just what I wanted to wear and it felt like fun, so…

And of course you must have had a badge saying you were from British Vogue which would have accorded you a certain status?

Yes, yes.

Marit Allen Page 63 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6]

So, did you go and see the seasonal shows, twice a year?

Yes, I did. I did. I was very, very fortunate and sometimes – there were several times when I went alone, which is unthinkable now, because now of course it’s a huge team and it’s such a huge business and so frightening to me now, the whole… I mean there was the Chambre Syndicale of the couture and so on, existed then, but once I had a ticket, you know and Vogue would send me then there was no problem. It was always a front seat or a second row seat and British Vogue was becoming quite noticeable, sort of excellent in its own way at the time, and so we were given good seating. And I would go by myself. I remember – and then Parkinson would take the pictures, or Bailey would take the pictures and heaven knows how I managed to orchestrate it all, but there was French Vogue as a backup. So I maybe would go into French Vogue and they would help me with the logistics, and we would probably work in French Vogue’s studio or go out on the street. But there was one series of collections that I did cover by myself, which I remember vividly, which was when Cardin really hit his note. He just did the most exquisite, timely, monumental collection and it wiped everything else sort of off the street. It was about the same time that Courrèges was starting, but Cardin got it in a way that was just so full of life and colour and inspiration and it was, it was this whole space age thrust of the sixties with Gagarin and the moon landing and all this business. I mean, he got it but he humanised it and he made it more feminine somehow and he made it more delicious. It wasn’t so scientific, it was much more sort of, it was more like vegetables than plates, if I can just put it that way. [laughs]

[inaudible]

Courrèges was more like plates and Cardin was more like mm - delicious ripe tomatoes. You know, it was much more tactile somehow, much more luscious. And I remember calling Beatrix Miller from the middle of the Place Vendôme and saying, we have to drop everything, we have to just do an entire issue with Cardin’s collection, it’s just the most amazing thing. I felt sick with excitement, I didn’t know how to contain myself. I ran into the Place de la Madeleine and bought every single marguerite and, marguerite and marigold that I could find, from the stall. I had very little money but I bought all of them and rushed back up the stairs to Cardin and he was saying goodbye to Jeanne Moreau and Marit Allen Page 64 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] there was kissing all around and everyone was… so I ran back against the flow of people with this armful of flowers and said [laughing], ‘You have to take these flowers because this was the most wonderful moment of my life, thank you’. And he was very gracious. Anyway, Beatrix, she calmed me down and she said, ‘Now Marit, Marit, Marit, settle down, take a deep breath, have a glass of water, we have to cover the whole, the gamut of the collections. Your enthusiasm’s interesting but, you have to rein yourself in because we’re responsible for everybody, that’s the way Vogue works’. So that’s what we did.

So, you mentioned that the seasonal collections are very different now than they were then. Obviously you’ve just spoken about the Paris fashion week, could you perhaps say how many people were showing in Paris at that time? And whether or not you covered any other fashion capitals?

Oh, I didn’t cover any other capitals. Milan hadn’t really, it was really ready-to-wear, they didn’t show couture. New York hadn’t started up and London was just on its last legs. So we did go to London, but the other ladies at Vogue magazine covered London because it was much more in their world, it was much more connected to Princess Margaret and the Queen and elegant ladies who went to important functions. Unlike me who, I was just kicking over the traces and looking for the thrust of fashion, if you like. But maybe I should go back a bit to the very first few issues that I did at Vogue, because I wanted to work with Bailey and I think Bailey, Bailey thought that it was really funny that somebody who was as small and relatively insignificant as myself should be given that position. And so he insisted, it wasn’t my idea, nothing to do with me, he insisted that I should model I think the first three or four groups of pages that I was going to do, that I should do it myself and he thought of the ideas and he thought of where and how and how to group it together and so on. And so that’s how it happened. And at the same time, I became friends with Vidal Sassoon and he started to cut my hair himself and we became good friends. So you know, there was a strong connection between the photography, hairdressing – all the models did their own make-up, you know, so I did my own make-up too. But it was not a question of vanity, it was just a question of, that was kind of in the air. It was like everybody was doing everything and I suppose that Bailey felt that I could represent my own pages and that was probably the first time that that had happened and I think that he, without maybe even intellectualising it, he could see that that was something Marit Allen Page 65 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] new, that I was probably the prototype of the kind of things that were happening at the time and the kind of look that was about, and so why not use me?

Do you think it had something to do with the skills that you’d learnt at Queen magazine?

Quite likely, I mean I learned a lot at Queen magazine, obviously, but I was learning every day and I certainly didn’t learn about standing in front of the camera at Queen magazine, that was a new experience. And it wasn’t an experience I needed, it’s just that as an experience it was kind of part of the fun if you like, you know.

I suppose what I’m referring to is that idea that you were proficient not only in creating imagery, but also you know, in terms of wordsmithing?

Yes, and probably projecting the image too. It was just an integral part of the whole thing I think. In the same way that each person became multi-skilled, then we also were all part of the same whirlpool of excitement and breaking new things, barriers, breaking things down.

So could you explain to me where Young Idea at Vogue featured in the magazine, what its realm was, what it had to cover…

Yes.

…and I suppose the space that you were given to express those ideas.

Yes. Well I was given usually between four and six pages an issue and they were very different from the other pages in the magazine and there was not a particular place for them, they were placed where I guess the art director decided that they had the best rhythm if you like, where they broke up other stories. So you know, if there was a Henry Clarke story on beachwear, then my story about Ossie Clark would slot in nicely between that and some evening dresses, you know, so they would choose the rhythm of the pages. But I would work together with the art department in terms of the photographers and the models and the locations. And you know sometimes, if for instance we’d be tied up with a Marit Allen Page 66 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] country, like for instance Portugal was just building the Algarve, so they wanted, they wanted Vogue to cover the Algarve in a fashion story, so they would approach Vogue and Vogue would say to me, now, how about that and I would say I think Helmut Newton would be fabulous and why don’t we do it all in black and white and that would be nice with the light and the buildings and the white and the black, and I would choose the model and Helmut would be approached. Helmut and I would talk about the model and we went off with one or two models and a lot of black and white clothes and we landed in Spain and June, his wife was there. We landed in Spain, we drove up the coast from Seville, we went over into the Algarve and the Portuguese Tourist Board obviously were paying for our trip and our accommodation in the same way that they do today. And Helmut took one look outside and said, ‘I’m not going to shoot here’, and he disappeared into his room for three days. [laughs] He didn’t like it. ‘I want to go back to Spain.’ Now Spain spoke to him, he loved that coast of Spain, hated the Algarve, wouldn’t go out. Wouldn’t go even as far as the bar. [laughs] So June and I spent three days talking through the keyhole and trying to persuade him to come out and he came out and he took the most sensational photographs [laughs] of beautiful clothes against beautiful white buildings in black and white. So there was a lot of, there was a lot of excitement you know, about where we went and it was all very sort of fly-by-night, it was all very unorganised, disorganised, under- financed, by today’s standards.

It seems to me that British Vogue was very interested in European travel at that point in time and Portugal wasn’t necessarily the only country covered.

No.

Could you perhaps say something about that – that relationship I suppose between the possibilities of fashion and the possibilities of travel?

Oh travel, yes, exactly. No, they were interlinked, you’re right. I mean in terms of my own memory I know that I went for instance to Israel with David Montgomery and we did a fashion story there. Actually, I was six months pregnant with Ben, whom you just met, at the time that we went there. And it was interesting in terms of visiting Israel and Israeli politics and understanding the nature of the country being built at the time, as it was. That Marit Allen Page 67 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] was in 1968 I suppose and we took photographs with girls in the army and we took photographs on the Heights of Jericho and we encountered Palestinian children who hated us because they thought we were Jews. And I’d never seen hatred in people’s eyes before, it was a very new experience for me and very salutary. I understood a lot more about the politics of that particular area having visited it. And we did do a beautiful story and it was the beginning of the folkloric kind of feeling which I had, I’d sort of had a pulse on it at the Paris collections; I bought a book called Tilke, Tilke’s Book of…, I bought it in French, …of the Clothes of the World. And I bought that book and again, it kind of took a real hold on me and it coincided with the whole business of interest in ethnic clothing that became such a strong element of the early seventies and it was exactly at that moment that they wanted us to go to Turkey. So I went to Turkey with David Bailey and we did one of my very, very favourite sessions – and I think it was 1972 by that time – and we went right into the heart of Turkey, we went to Goreme, which was this extraordinary valley of pinnacles, of sandstone. We went up the Bosphorus and it was gently snowing as we drove up the Bosphorus coast. And we went, we had a wonderful trip. I went there as well with Parkinson, but with Parkinson it was quite different because we went to the Topkapi Museum and we stood on the rooves and the dresses were floating in the wind and it was very different to Bailey where the wind was howling and the snow was falling and the light was interesting. So we did in fact travel quite a lot and that was a fantastic part of the job.

Just want to kind of ask you to map I suppose, two different visions that you’ve just described. You spoke of space age Cardin and Courrèges and the notion of space travel and you’ve just described a hippy enthused aesthetic which is redolent of the late sixties and early seventies. Could you perhaps describe how that shift evolved I suppose, across the pages of Vogue magazine?

It’s a very good question. I think that the Courrèges and hardline geometric sixties, the whole line, that it was very, very intense at the time, it was a flame that burned very, very strong. And then, for every reason; for political reasons, for musical reasons, for the reasons of the politics of the world I suppose, things suddenly started to seep away, the space age, it just sort of evaporated because we realised that you know, that we could wear graphic little tiny interesting, fun dresses and miniskirts and we could get away with it and Marit Allen Page 68 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6] we could have fun with it, but all of a sudden the whole drift became, it changed – I can’t put my finger on exactly when it changed – but it changed with everything at the same time. It was when The Beatles went to India and did Sergeant Pepper. It was when Lanvin and Ungaro and even Cardin, they all – it’s like osmosis, I’m sure that everything happens in fashion, it’s something that is fragmented and exists in the air, in the ether, it exists everywhere at the same time and lots of people have tried to describe it. It’s very hard to put your finger on why and when the changes happen. But I think it was definitely a question of more political awareness, an awareness of other nations of the world and it wasn’t, we didn’t have to break those barriers down any more, we’d done that. And actually we were not individually going to travel to the moon, we were not, that became clear. So then we came to, it seems that then we decided to inhabit more of a universe instead, more of our world I should say, so space travel, that was done and dusted, we weren’t going there, it had been done, it was fabulous fun but now we started to look around and to see Turkey and to see Greece and to see Portugal and to wander further and I suppose that British people started to go further for their holidays and it became a much more usual thing for people to go to Spain than it was to go to Blackpool. It was a whole social and political thing as well as a fashion thing, so as always happens, these things are integral and they’re linked and I would love to be able to put it in better words, but…

I think that’s quite a good summation. I suppose one of the things that’s interesting about British Vogue at that time is that it wasn’t solely about setting a fashion story in an exotic location, it was also very much about offering a certain kind of travel writing to go along with it, it was very instructive I think in terms of the tourism that it was trying to promote, but were you ever aware of the political awareness about situations in some of these countries also being evidenced in the magazine?

I know that Beatrix Miller was, in my view, the most excellent editor, because she was interested in literature, she was interested in words and whether they came from a political or from an arts area, she wanted to have it, she wanted to publish it, she wanted to be involved with writers who were interesting. And Polly Devlin was the features editor on Vogue at the time and she was dynamic and she was a writer herself and there was definitely a feeling of trying to include in Vogue things that were politically and culturally exciting and cutting edge. In the same way that there had been to some extent with Marit Allen Page 69 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6]

Jocelyn at Queen, but it had to be fashion orientated. Except for, I mean but if you look at American Vogue in the fifties and sixties, there were always fantastic photographs of cutting edge artists and playwrights and it was very much more sort of culturally based. And it seemed that that was part of the breathing, you know, that that was the life and in London you’d go to underground theatre and Heathcote Williams and you know, The Royal Court was very active. And then of course the whole music thing, you know, that was very important and they were interested, The Beatles were interested in India and mind changing things and colours. And then there was Apple who came from Holland who were amazing and who sort of took a corner shop on Baker Street and painted it in hallucinogenic rainbow colours and – have you got any reference of Apple?

Yes.

Yeah. And they were wonderful.

Were they linked to the Apple record label?

No, not in the slightest.

Right.

No. But they were fabulous, and there were… who else? There were people who were interested in fairies and people who were interested in mythology. Suddenly it was like, you know, the door opened and all, any influences that were around were absorbed by all aspects of creativity.

There’s one other element of Vogue magazine that picked up on that and I would say that would be food writing.

Yes.

Is there anything that you could say particularly that you remember about that?

Marit Allen Page 70 C1046/13 Tape 3 Side B [part 6]

No, not actually. Elizabeth David was the goddess of food. And it was before Tessa Traeger started taking food photographs. I was working with Ron Traeger, her husband, a great deal and that was really before she started taking those pictures, so I don’t have a very strong memory of the food connection, if you like.

I mean it’s always there, but of course Elizabeth David’s reign was that much earlier.

Yes. It was around, you know. She was the one who changed the tide.

Okay, I’m just going to stop it there.

[End of Tape 3 Side B]

Marit Allen Page 71 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Okay, the Marit Allen interview, tape four.

[laughing] Getting on.

Getting on. Tuesday the sixth of September 2005. Marit, I’d just like to ask you to describe for the tape how a fashion shoot is actually put together, from conception through to completion really. I suppose from the initial idea that you have through to it actually appearing in a magazine.

Yes. That’s a very good question. So, it would begin at the fashion shows. The ideas would then be generated by what I’d seen either in couture or in ready-to-wear, but in my particular bailiwick, was ready-to-wear, that was what I was responsible for, the young ready-to-wear at Vogue. So I would go and see the collections of the young designers that I felt most interesting and then from those [clears throat], ‘scuse me, from those designers’ collections I would find within myself if you like, I would find what I thought was going to be the thrust of what was new, what was going to come, what was exciting, what was interesting and also what would hang together as an editorial story. So – and I became more and more interested not just in reporting fashion, but also linking it to a way of life. And that was I suppose a new adventure, actually taking it into - not just doing it in the studio – but taking it further and taking it to Wales with Jean Shrimpton or taking a story to Paris with Sarah Moon. The Bill Gibb collections, when that whole wonderful thing started to happen, it would become apparent to me having seen the collections, that these were the things that were leading the way, these were the stories that need to be told. So then we would have an editorial meeting with Beatrix and each fashion editor would put forward an idea for that particular spring, summer, January or whatever and we would then be allocated a certain amount of pages. So – and the idea would have to be accepted by Beatrix before anything ever happened – by the editor. So then, having accepted the idea she would then look at my suggestion for the location, for the photographer, for the model and for the clothes. The clothes would then all be called into the office, they would all be hanging together. We would go through them with the photographer so that we would have then a general meeting of the people involved – not the model, but possibly the hair Marit Allen Page 72 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7] person, who might do the make-up as well – and we would discuss exactly how that story was going to play out, where it was going to be; if it was on the Yorkshire Moors or in a small cottage in Wales or whatever. And then I would gather together the accessories, either before or after that and rather than use the accessory wardrobe that was available at Vogue, very early on I started out by assembling my own accessories, in other words, things that I thought were cutting edge or that were appropriate for the clothing, which was very often nothing to do with the established order. So I would find antique jewellery from the antique markets and ask people to lend things to me or buy them and use the things, and use new shoe designers and boots, crazy boots, or whatever it was. So then the whole thing would be structured in a very organised way, but I would try and bring in the elements of, the sort of maverick elements that I was interested in as well and Beatrix was very long-suffering and she would allow me to do that. And we would then go off, photographer, model, hair person, myself, we would go off to wherever the location was designated and take the photographs, bring them home, they would then go into the art department, then I would work with the art director and the graphic designer on how to lay the photographs out. On choosing the photographs I was always involved – I don’t know if people still are – but I became really involved with photography, I used to take pictures of my own for a small sort of instant story, but I used to go through the photographs with the art department, make the choices, work on the layout, then I would write the copy. Then Beatrix would see it, then we’d proofread it, then it would go to press and then it would be on the stand.

Right. Just to bring you back to before you went on – well I suppose as you were about to go on location…

Yes.

…would you have any notes or sketches, or any material that would come with all of the clothing, all of the accessories you were going to bring to the location?

No, no. It was definitely not as structured. The idea of how the story would play out would be a matter between me and the photographer. So for instance, Norman Parkinson would like very much to go and photograph at Laycock Abbey, which was where Fox Marit Allen Page 73 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Talbott developed a camera, and he had this vision of a double image of photography, the way that they were almost ghostly very often, at the time when they started to do those beautiful mystical kind of photographs, and so I chose chiffons and floating things that were sort of ghostly and drifting and appropriate to his ideas. So we would marry the whole concept and he would then double-expose and walk through the wonderful stonework and into the gardens of Laycock Abbey and do his strange double-exposures. And it was very collaborative, it was very exciting. And that happened quite often. And I must say that was the most interesting part of the whole job at that point, once the huge excitement of Swinging London and going to New York with it and representing it, and being an ambassador if you like for Swinging London, once the excitement of that had worn off, then it became much more collaborative I think with the photographers, about you know, I mean if for instance I said to Parkinson, ‘Look I’ve got this whole set of what I think are completely new proportions, completely new directions; the skirts and the jackets, the way they fit together. I don’t think it’s ever been done before. Let’s do it in a very volatile, very interesting kind of way’. Then he would go with that and you know, if it was a sort of a softening, at home, really sort of country, moody, textural feeling of clothing and knitwear and soft tweeds and things, then Bailey would go, we’d go to Jean Shrimpton’s new little cottage in Wales and take pictures of her peeling carrots and sitting by the fire with her cat. And those sort of pictures really hadn’t been in the fashion magazines before. And I got more and more interested in sort of storytelling and, and then working with Sarah Moon was interesting because she was very interested in storytelling. And she was sort of intellectually challenging the way that photographs represented women and – we did some beautiful sessions together and I loved working with her. It was really fun.

I just want to ask you for clarification on a certain point. You mentioned earlier that one of the things you helped innovate in Vogue magazine was the representation of a life in fashion photographs.

Yes.

Marit Allen Page 74 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

And that might point to an idea of reality, but then you’ve just said that you were particularly interested in storytelling in an image. Could you just clarify your position on those ideas?

Yes. I think that when I very first was running for the job at Queen magazine, Beatrix asked me to make a note of six ideas for six stories that I wanted to execute in fashion terms and the one I remember clearly and the one I never did, and I suppose it was my guideline all the way through my work, was the song that Frank Sinatra sang called The Lady is a Tramp. And I wanted to visualise that in fashion terms and to make that come to life. And as I say, I never did that, but it really was the forerunner of the way I wanted to represent fashion and I think that eventually I did represent fashion that way when I wasn’t having to do straight reporting as with the collections, or a straight story. But it was much more a representation of a way of life and being alive and riding your bicycle down the street and laughing and running with your friend to lunch. And it was trying to take the pomp I suppose out of fashion and to try and bring it back to earth. And it synchronised, you know, with the photographers and we had lots of fun with it. Does that make sense?

Yes, well it’s quite interesting. There’s the famous Cecil Beaton example of the fashion story that he never shot, which was all of his elegant fashion models at the scene of a car crash. And that’s how he felt about how he would have liked to break with convention, but never felt able to, and it’s quite interesting that you felt too in your own…

Yes, definitely.

…personal history that there was a shoot that you could never…

That I never achieved. Actually I approached Don McCullin to do that story, and he’d just come back from Vietnam. And, I mean I loved his work and I had enormous regard for him and I, very trepidatious, asked him if he would consider doing this. And then he toyed with the idea, he gave it some thought but it was just too much of a jump for him, it was too, it was too awkward a transition from Vietnam to you know, to, even no matter how gritty or realistic, a fashion story. But I think that really for me it was the perfect segue Marit Allen Page 75 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7] then to go into film, because there I hope I’ve been able to represent a clothing link to life itself, which is my interest.

Can you - just want to ask you more about how you would decide which photographer was most suitable to the story that you are about to commission or to put into action?

Well, that was really led by my interest in photography anyway and the general interest in photography at the time. I mean if it was going to be a clear-cut rather graphic story, then someone like Guy Bourdain would be perfect for it. If it – I did a session that I felt that was absolutely perfect for Helmut Newton which was Twiggy, at the very beginning of her career, dressed like a boy – dressed like a man I should say, dressed like Fred Astaire. And it wasn’t really so much cross-dressing, that wasn’t the thrust of the story, it wasn’t that she was cross-dressed, she was dressed like that and she had such long legs and I put lorgnettes on her and long, wonderful long chains of jewellery and silver walking sticks and Helmut found this deserted amazing location that was like seeing her through rooms and rooms and there she was at the end. And she, because of course we didn’t know at the time she was going to become a dancer and do a stage show, but she took to it as if that was her mission in life, and she became Fred Astaire for the session. And she was a tiny little thing, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time, but she got right into the spirit of it and Newton of course had been there forever, and it was one of those glorious things where everything worked and gelled and that was what stimulated Diane Vreeland to come to London after she saw those photographs and she came to London and I took her on a tour of all the designers at the time so that she could connect what was happening in London. But, so the linkage there of Twiggy who had a very boyish figure anyway, in clothes that were like that and had that sort of twist to them, and Helmut Newton who was obviously interested in that kind of thing anyway, that became a natural, a natural link. Guy Bourdain, as I said. Peter Knapp for example, who was a Swiss graphic designer of brilliance, who was the master behind Elle and Elle revolution in Paris at the time. I did really interesting graphic photographs of graphic clothes with him. And Ron Traeger, I mean we’d do, there’s a wonderful session of Twiggy on bicycles, riding all around from Rossetti Studios over to Battersea Park that Ron did. And he was always so full of life and realism that then that became natural.

Marit Allen Page 76 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Was that the famous…

So it was a question of feeling it through, you know.

Was that the famous photograph of Twiggy on a bicycle with a striped top on?

Uh hm.

Very energetic.

Yes, exactly.

So… one of the things that’s quite interesting about Vogue magazine at the time – this is something you said yourself earlier – was that it was populated by and large by women and this afforded an atmosphere that might not have been so much in evidence in a more male dominated work environment and I suppose in Queen being based at Fetter Lane, it would have been, there would have been a lot of men around, it would have been, there wouldn’t have been many women and that’s very, very different to what you’ve just recounted about Vogue. Can you say something about the opportunities for women at that time in that particular industry?

Yes. But for instance I’d like to also say that although the fashion room, and even the features room to a lesser extent, were dominated by women, the art department, the graphic department, the photographic area, that was all dominated by men and there was a definite, you know, there was a definite mix there. It was definitely that, you know, that we worked extremely well together. As far as opportunities for women then, I think it’s the same everywhere. I think that if you have the enthusiasm and if you have a real wish to do it, then I think you do it and I don’t know how it is today, I don’t know how it is for - I do know that there are very few gifted people working in fashion journalism, very, very few. And they haven’t all been women, Michael Roberts was incredibly gifted and a wonderful, brilliant writer. Suzy Menkes is still an amazingly gifted and acerbic kind of writer. So it’s not true that they’ve all been women, but I just don’t know. I mean people say that the atmosphere of young people being able to forge ahead these days is very much Marit Allen Page 77 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7] more difficult and that it’s very much more business based and I don’t know how that affects an organisation like Vogue. I mean they still have Lucinda Chambers who’s a very gifted fashion editor. It’s hard to say if anything stopped and started, I don’t really know if it has.

I suppose I was just interested in you referring to Sarah Moon and the kind of photographs that she was taking that I suppose were very different from the kind of photographs that a lot of the male photographers were taking…

Yes, absolutely.

…and I just wanted to see if there were those differences evident within the kind of, the people who were responsible for commissioning those kinds of images within fashion magazines, but you’ve just explained it by paying reference to Michael Roberts really I think. You mentioned Swinging London as a term and I think it’s appropriate that we have a discussion about it seeing as we’ve been talking about storytelling and a notion of reality.

[laughs]

What’s your view on what that term meant and what it might have been like to have been an ambassador for Swinging London?

That’s right. I didn’t like the term. I mean it was an Americanised term wasn’t it? And Time magazine I think were the first ones to come up with it. But then – and it was like hotpants, a term that I absolutely loathe and I’ve never spoken those words together before – but the thing is that there is something clever about giving something a term, because once it has a term then it has a recognised life, and therefore a recognised lifespan I suppose. But Swinging London and the miniskirt and those designers, we all profited by the recognition that was given to us by the title Swinging London and by the recognition that New York gave us for example. Because their ready-to-wear industry, although I’ve learned since about people like Claire McCardle and wonderful fashion designers who did actually revolutionise sportswear, the thing was that in England there was no such thing as Marit Allen Page 78 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7] sportswear, even though we were talking about shorts and little bomber jackets and so forth and so were they in Paris, Emmanuel Kahn not, you know, not least of all. Dorothé Bis and all those – a little bit Sonia Rykiel, although she was a little bit ladylike always – and Daniel Hechter and those people were doing active clothes and so were we here, but they weren’t active clothes that were really in essence sport clothes, which the American daywear even seemed to have, it seemed to have a different provenance. But we were all taken over to New York by a man called Paul Young in the very early days of the Swinging Sixties, and we were taken over in a private jet and Mary Quant and Alexander, John Bates, Foale and Tuffin, Gerald McCann, myself, Vidal and several others were all bundled on to this plane. And we were taken by Paul Young to the opening of the shop on Madison Avenue called Paraphernalia. Now Betsey Johnson, as I recall, was the only American designer who was there and she was – no, no, sorry, one more – John Kloss. John Kloss was very, very underestimated, very wonderful man who died very early. But he would have been, he would have been like Perry Ellis or more, Calvin Klein, he was incredibly creative and wonderful. So then we were all taken to this opening and we were paraded through New York in a funny sort of way, we didn’t realise it of course, but there was a big party given for us, Kennedys came and it was really fun. And we were taken up to Fire Island and we had a wonderful weekend there and threw each other into the ocean – it was all very exciting to come from London. And then later on I was asked to go as the representative, I think of the British Council, and to compere various fashion shows that were representing English fashion for the American buyers. So it became quite real then at that point, that I was representing English fashion and trying to in fact be a sales ambassador if you like. And then they did a television sort of documentary about my time in New York and what I was up to and that was shown on NBC I think. But that was, it was just a laugh, you know it was funny. But the actual business of doing the pages was what I was interested in.

And were Vogue happy for you to make those trips?

Oh yes, yes, they were behind it.

And…

Marit Allen Page 79 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

No, yeah they were behind it – they weren’t behind it financially, but I mean they were behind it in essence, yes.

So do you identify Swinging London as being particularly British or particularly American?

Particularly British.

Right.

In fact, although I had the highest regard for what was happening in Paris at the time, I always felt that Swinging London was our territory and that it really came from here. And I think you can’t underestimate the power of music within that, that The Beatles and The Stones most particularly had a lot to do with it.

It was very much covered in newspapers and magazines and indeed television, but do you think it was in evidence in the streets of London too?

Well not at the beginning, because at the beginning I did this session with Traeger at lunchtime with Nicole de la Margé and another girl, Agnieska [ph] or something, in miniskirts in rush hour at lunchtime and the faces of the people around were really the picture, it was just wonderful, they’re seminal shots of complete shock and horror in the faces of businessmen and street traders and secretaries and mums and dads, absolutely horrified, so it wasn’t in evidence. But I suppose because it was my world and I moved in a circle of people who all did those sort of things and went to those nightclubs and to those concerts and so on, that I felt that the world was populated by people who all dressed like that. [laughs]

So could you, could you tell me the period of time that you worked at British Vogue [beeping noise] and how you then moved on from British Vogue and into film costume?

Yes, well the film world itself was becoming incredibly exciting at the same time. I didn’t mention that before, but obviously… Marit Allen Page 80 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Can I just hold it…

Yes.

[break in recording]

It was just that…

This beep.

Yeah, just a lorry reversing. Can I just ask you start again though?

Yes. The film world [beeping noise] in London was really beginning… oh there it is again.

[break in recording]

Okay, so if I can just ask you that same question again.

What was it?

About, I suppose it’s about how you shifted from working at Vogue and moving into film costume.

Oh yes. Okay, so film was very, it was very exciting in London at the time and for instance, Caterine, aforementioned – she dated Terry Stamp – and Edina Ronay who was her best friend dated Michael Caine. So we were all part of the same thing – Ken Russell, Shirley Russell – they were people that we looked up to. My husband, Sandy Lieberson, was involved with film, he was a producer at the time. He produced one of the seminal movies of the sixties which was called Performance. So I became acquainted with the whole world of film and people in film on both sides of the camera. We used to use a lot of actors in our stories as well and I took photographs of Jane Asher for example, and Marit Allen Page 81 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Sarah Miles and Samantha Eggar and Julie Christie – they were all people who featured in the stories that I was doing, so I would approach them and ask them if they would be part of a session with David Bailey and they would love it, so we all became very acquainted. So I knew Nic Roeg through Sandy and through Performance and we became friends and he asked me to do the clothes for Julie Christie for – not Bad Timing, the one before. Anyway…

Don’t Look Now.

Don’t Look Now, thank you! And before that, I had been asked to put together a really sort of super sixties look for Susannah York in a film called Kaleidoscope with Warren Beatty and so I asked Foale and Tuffin to design the costumes and I acted as a sort of co-ordinator and worked with the story and the film people and I was there on set and did the fittings and they designed the costumes. So we put that all together as a team, and that was fun, so that was the very first step out. And then when it came to Julie’s costumes – that was 1972 and I was just about to have my third child - and so I did all the fittings with Julie and some things for Donald and put it all together and sent it off to Venice and had my baby. And that was really fun to do and that was the first sort of real extension for me of storytelling through clothing and identifying a woman with a real beating heart and a way of life and clothing her in a way that was realistic and still serve the story. So then Nic asked me to do Bad Timing and by that time I’d sort of eased away from Vogue because I by this time had three children and although I’d kept working with the first two, right up to the last minute, I felt that three was really, I should pay some attention to that whole side of things [laughing] and so I stopped doing my fashion features for Vogue that were fulltime and I started to do small features like ‘What’s Happening Here and Now’ and take my own photographs which was much more manageable. And eventually that drifted away and as things progressed I would get more and more involved in film, mostly through Nic Roeg’s movies, that was really where I started.

Now, I’d just like to take you back to Performance, because this is quite an important film in the way that it attempts to describe a particular scene that you were very much a part of, so could I just ask you about your views on the film?

Marit Allen Page 82 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side A [part 7]

Well I wasn’t directly connected to Performance because it was, they sort of, it was an amalgam I think. Deborah who was living with Donald Cammell pulled the clothes together, Deborah Dixon who had been a model before. And so I wasn’t connected to it directly, just indirectly, and I felt that it was unbelievably brave, but I was very involved by this time in having my family and I remember the day that – no it was Ben, wasn’t it? Yeah, the day that Ben was born – that’s right – Sandy came – this is Performance, that was not – Don’t Look Now was when I had Holly, Performance was when Ben was being born. And Sandy came into the hospital to see him and to see me and he had the Warner Brothers big shots, had been on the set the day before and threatened to close Performance down. So my personal life and Performance and the stresses of the making of Performance and what it implied and the ground it was breaking and the dangers that it was, you know, that it was showing and so forth, they were all linked to my [laughing] private life as well. So I’ve always been very proud that Sandy was involved in Performance because I felt that it was really a very gritty and realistic and exciting film and a sort of very strong cultural representation of a lot of the darker side of London at the time.

[End of Tape 4 Side A]

Marit Allen Page 83 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

Right, Performance wasn’t the only film that was shot in London at that particular time and I suppose a film that’s far more directly concerned with the industry that you were working within was Blow-Up.

Indeed.

It’s claimed that the figure of the fashion photographer played by David Hemmings was actually modelled on David Bailey and other photographers…

That’s right.

…so can I just ask you about your views on the film and what the reception of that film was like in London at the time?

Yes, it was quite electric. There was like an… Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment as well as Tom Jones, as well as you know, but there were things that were connected to London life as well as the gritty stuff that are not part of this conversation, like A Sporting Life and the hard realism that began to emerge in British film that interested me personally. But Blow-Up I thought was a really, really interesting and tremendous film. I remember at the time being slightly shocked by the idea of what happened after I had closed the door [laughing] and left the session. I remember thinking, wait a minute, it wasn’t like that when I was there. But of course I had closed the door and left the studio and those things did go on and so in fact, although I suppose I was a little bit naïve, it was much more true to what was really going in London than I was even aware of. I think Antonioni did a fantastic job and I think Hemmings was wonderful and I think David Bailey was just written all the way through it. It was interesting, very interesting. I liked it very much.

I suppose what’s interesting about the film is that your role in the, you know in the production of fashion imagery isn’t actually featured in the film…

No, it just doesn’t exist. Marit Allen Page 84 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

…and I just wondered if you had anything to say about that?

Well I probably felt that it wasn’t a complete representation, but I know now that Antonioni didn’t need to represent it fully, that he had a story to tell and that the thrust of the movie was in the discovery of the development of the photograph and the actual, the mystery behind that. So I mean why would he take the time, step back, it wasn’t as if it was Funny Face and you know, that it was a story about the fashion business. It wasn’t, it was a story about a murder. It was wiser, older people looking at something that we all grew to understand.

And there were other films I suppose of the time that aimed to document that particular idea of London being a fashionable centre, such as The Knack and How to Get It, do you have any memories of those kind of more light-hearted films?

Well they were fun, but I suppose that I – they were fun, I didn’t think more of them than that. I think that A Taste of Honey for example, was much more interesting I thought, because it was a – although it was set at the same time, it had much more social content. And I was looking for things like the French cinema that I’d seen in Grenoble, you know, the really hard-nosed, exciting, like Breathless. I was sort of looking for that to come out of London and it did sort of eventually in its own way.

So were you a keen cinema goer all the way through your time at Vogue?

Oh yes, yes.

And which cinemas did you frequent?

The Curzon in Mayfair, that was my favourite cinema.

Any particular reason?

Marit Allen Page 85 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

It was just, they always seemed to have the most interesting films, apart from anything else and it was an interesting location. It was on the edge of Shepherd Market as well – I used to live overlooking the Curzon Cinema, a little attic right at the top so it had a kind of, a funky kind of feel.

Well it had quite interesting interior decoration, I saw that.

That’s right. It did.

I’m not sure when that was put in, but I’m sure it was around that time.

Yes, yes.

So, you mentioned that the reason why you moved into film costume was simply because it was a network of friends that you had and that it also related to the work of your husband…

That’s right.

…he was in film directly. Was it a conscious attempt on your part to have a career change?

No, it wasn’t, it just evolved and I’m forever grateful for that. It wasn’t something that I had a sort of throbbing desire to do. In fact I didn’t know that I was going to be able to do it and I had to learn at the sharp end, because Nic Roeg took me away to Vienna to do Bad Timing and I had never been, essentially, completely responsible for the look of a film on the film set, so the whole process of preparing for the film and the continuity and being there and dressing crowd [laughs], that was all something that I had to learn absolutely on the set, which was, it was hard going but it was extremely thrilling and it was like a burning experience, it really was. And from that moment onwards, or from that experience onwards, that’s what I wanted to do.

Marit Allen Page 86 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

I think you were quite lucky in a sense in terms of designing Susannah York’s costumes, designing Julie Christie’s costumes – it’s a manageable amount that almost – you can correct me if I’m wrong – reflects the kind of work that would be put into a fashion shoot.

Precisely, yes. With more realism and more story, but that was the way that my fashion shoots were going anyway, so that was quite an easy segue that became much more of a career, in parenthesis, when I did Bad Timing and then I was responsible for everybody from Harvey Keitel to Art Garfunkel and the crowd. I mean that became then, then it was like a career, then it was oh yes, this is big business, this is the real thing. And I was incredibly fortunate. I mean it was I suppose just because of the way I like to work, it was a natural segue, but it was a big jump actually, it was a big leap and I’ve always been grateful for it.

I think the costumes that you put together for Julie Christie to wear in Don’t Look Now, they’re quite interesting because they almost represent both worlds – it’s about storytelling, but it’s also about a fashion sensibility. Could you talk through some of the costumes that you put together for that film?

I know that there were some lovely, there was a beautiful little tightly fitting brown colour, brown and beige cashmere sweater that I loved and I had to fight for, because it was exactly the right thing for her and for the scene and the producer didn’t want me to spend the money on a cashmere sweater, why would a lambswool sweater or a [inaudible] sweater not be as good? And that was my first exercise in putting my feet where my instinct was. I had to absolutely insist that it was worth spending that money on that item because it was going to show on screen. And it’s my view that it showed on screen, whether consciously or sub-consciously. I remember the underwear and the nightdresses all being very beautiful, vintage, one of a kind, sort of sensual, sexy things that were not usually seen on film. I don’t think people were used to using vintage in film particularly and there again, that’s something that I’d learned in the fashion world, that you could drift sideways when you were thinking about a woman’s life, that everything didn’t have to be regulated, everything didn’t have to come from the same sort of stores or look as if it was part of the same wardrobe if you like, didn’t have to directly reflect one single avenue of thought, that you could take things from everywhere and incorporate them into Marit Allen Page 87 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8] representing a woman’s choices in her life. And Nic was very open to that kind of thing, so that was my good fortune.

And would you, would you describe those costumes as being fashion conscious?

Yes, I think she was a woman who was aware of her time, wasn’t she? She was living in the country but she was wealthy aware woman, she was smart, clever and interested in what was going on around her, so there was every reason for her to be fashion conscious, fashion aware.

So did you follow the same process that you went through for creating a fashion shoot to create these costumes?

I should think so. I think that’s probably right. I mean reading the script, digesting that and feeling through the kind of woman that this was, that she represented and then formulating the kind of clothes that are going to work for the scenes that are involved in the film.

And would you have been given storyboards to look through?

No. No. Not at that stage.

Right.

No. Film was much more loose. It was much more handheld, it really was, and Nic’s process in particular.

Right.

Was much more instantaneous.

Well could you describe then a formal process or a more modern process? For costume design. Marit Allen Page 88 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

For costume design? Like for instance on The Hulk for example, there we had a huge number of storyboards and some definite requirements of costume. But again… it’s very difficult for me to formalise it, because I feel that film is organic and the directors that I work with have fortunately been people who can go with that kind of flow, so I tend to assemble if you like, the clothes that I feel appropriate for the characters in the scenes in the story. But for instance, like White Mischief, which was done in, which we filmed Kenya, I took what I considered to be the library of costumes that a character would need, then I would have to somehow make it flow through the story and invent and re-invent and pull from the background and find from here and there things, because I didn’t have the capability of actually building clothes there, which is something that I’ve now learned to sort of embrace in my film clothing process. So now I’m much more likely to actually be building things than I was in those days when it was much more like, oh my goodness, we’re going to Africa, we’d better take all these clothes! [laughs] And sure, we made things for Charles Dance and we made things for Greta Scacchi and so on, but it was a question of really thinking on your feet and really we would, for instance, go in with Mike Radford at the beginning of the movie in the prep period, the last two weeks in Africa, and have a sort of blitz fitting of each character - and there were so many. And I would have carved out in my mind the different women and their different, the likelihood of their different styles. So Geraldine Chaplin and Sarah Miles would have totally, totally different styles from Susan Fleetwood who was a society woman, who was a little nutty and although they were all slightly crazy, they all had very different carved styles, and Greta the most of all. So we would have, as I say, a sort of blitzkrieg fitting and then do the rest on the run, running. Finding the clothes and making them work and putting them on and it was…

It seems quite a shared characteristic between your life as a fashion editor and your life as a film costume designer in that not only is it organic, it also seems intuitive…

Yes.

…by its very process.

Marit Allen Page 89 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

That’s right.

I just wondered if you could expand upon that perhaps.

Yes. I think it’s hard to elucidate exactly how it happens, but I know that I feel a character – male or female – I feel it organically. I feel for instance, the film that I’ve just done, Brokeback Mountain, there are two young men there, their clothing is defined by their economic status to a great extent and the character. One who is more handsome, more flashy, rides, bullrider, he’s definitely a more glamorous kind of character. The other who is insular and incredibly impoverished and leading a really, really gritty and thankless existence. Well, their clothing reflects directly and that’s something that’s so clear in the script and so clear in the story that I can take it, I can take it there with clothing in a very direct way. But that takes me to the first fitting and then the actors and the director play their part and then the actor will put something on and it will suddenly take on a life of its own and it’ll be the shape, or it’ll be like that but shorter, or it’ll be like that but narrower, or it’ll be a polyester shirt that I’ve always hated and that I think is quite foul and I’ve been trained to loathe polyester all my life – Heath Ledger will put it on and suddenly it is exactly the business, this is the shirt that this man would wear. And Heath has come to it and I have recognised it and taken it from there and then worked it through with him. And you know, there’s information that comes forward like, in research every time I do a movie, that for instance cowboys and bullriders wear Wranglers and farm labourers and farm workers wear Levis, so there you have it, that’s the rules. So you play with the rules. And you absorb wherever you are and whatever you’re doing and whoever you’re costuming, you absorb as much information as you can about what really happens with those people in that place. And then, together with the story, with the actors, with the director, with the DP and with the sets and with the landscape, then you work within that whole wonderful canvas and work to make the clothes serve the story and the actors.

Now, I think there’s one essential difference between working as a fashion editor and working within film costume, and it’s the notion of research and the level of research and I’d just like you to talk about that.

Marit Allen Page 90 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8]

Yes. It’s absolutely crucial. And the only thing that I can prepare is my own sensitivity to the subject or to the place. For instance, if I’m going to be working in Russia or in Kazakhstan, very often there’s a language barrier, there’s a time problem, you don’t have the time to actually immerse yourself in a scholastic way in the way that you would most appreciate and you would most like and would be most beneficial. So you have to take it in through your skin. You have to, for instance I did a film about Stalin. Well, there are twelve men sitting round a table and each – in 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950 – those twelve men have to be carved as a character somehow for the audience, so that they represent something each man becomes an individual. So then I have to learn that Bukharin came from a particular area of Russia and was more likely to have worn an organic Russian shirt than for instance Khrushchev or Stalin or Beria and learn very quickly about Russian folklore, Russian history and try and incorporate that with the various characters and assemble that in a way that’s going to tell the story for the audience. And that’s hugely challenging and incredible fun. But for instance Ride with the Devil which is set in the American Civil War, it was told from the side of the south, well you know we all have images of American Civil War and we know about the period, the period is very well documented so it’s the Civil War, but it’s almost always told from the side of the north and this story was told from the side of the south. Well, for my, fortunately Ang Lee and the production designer are both deeply involved in research and had assembled the most enormous quantity of books and reference – written and verbal as well as picture reference. So for instance, there’s a raid on the town of Lawrence that is perpetrated by our southern heroes on this town, unsuspecting town, and the women of the town who are not killed - they had a hit list of men that they were going to kill going through the town – the representation of the day is actually documented by women who wrote about it subsequently and their descriptions informed what we did in terms of the costuming, you know. And that’s fascinating, that’s incredibly exciting. And one of the most exciting costume moments in my career happens on the ridge of the hill, on the rise of the hill just before that raid when our entire army of southern ragtag people have stolen northern uniforms. They had no uniforms of their own because the southern army had no money to support them, so their own supplies had run out long before and whatever they had were used, in other words there were a few sort of light grey uniforms that were left over from the south, but the rest they had made themselves these guerrilla shirts that – it was the very first time for instance that guns were used on horseback for battles, it was that moment – Marit Allen Page 91 C1046/13 Tape 4 Side B [part 8] and they designed, these southern boys designed their own shirts which had four pockets, which I found out from research and looked and looked and looked, where did they keep their guns, where did they keep their ammunition, how did they do it? And finally found a photograph that was of Jesse James when he was sixteen years old and he was one of these young boys and the photograph was actually to the knees and I could see that there were pockets below the belt as well as above the belt, and we made those shirts, all of them, they didn’t exist anywhere and each of the characters had their own sort of run of shirts that they had made or their girlfriends had made and embroidered during the winter months and as they stand on the ridge of the hill above Lawrence, they take off, at a given signal, they take off their fake union uniform, they throw it on the ground and they’re standing, sitting on their horses in a blaze of colour of their guerrilla shirts that are all handmade and handcrafted, and they surge down the hill in a blaze of red. And that was actually documented by women who saw them coming. And so when you can link actual research, verbal, written or photographic research and you can link it all together and you can have women who are willing to sit and sew for you all through the night and in the end I had to hand embroider the leading shirt myself because the embroiderers freaked out at the last minute, and when you can actually do that and put it together and see it on film, that’s a blast. That’s wonderful.

[End of Tape 4 Side B]

Marit Allen Page 92 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9]

Tape 5 Side A [part 9]

Okay, so the Marit Allen interview tape five, Wednesday the twenty-first of September 2005. Marit, I would just like to ask you first and foremost about the role of a film costume designer in relation to all of those other people that are involved in the making of a film. Could you describe where they fit in?

Yes. I mean the costume designer’s approached by the producers to meet the director and the relationship essentially is with the director of the film. I’m responsible fiscally to the producers, but I’m responsible creatively to the director and he’s the person that I collaborate with the most. And my first job is to try and get inside his head and to try and talk to him about how he visualises the film, and it’s surprising how few directors actually, they don’t speak clothes language at all as a rule, but what they do speak is an emotional or a textural language. So they communicate that to me as best they can and then what I try to do is to, then my job is to break down the script, my job is then to visualise each character throughout the course of the story and the activities that happen during the course of the story and plan for all that. But then, then I build up a team of my own department which consists of an assistant costume supervisor whose role is to organise and take care of and maintain and prepare the costumes in rota, if you like. And then the rest of my team, people who stand by the set and take care of the actors. So that’s my team. But my closest collaboration thereafter is with the production designer, because obviously it’s crucial that I don’t put a pale lime green silk costume in front of a lime green wall, that’s happened – not to me necessarily – but it happens in fact frequently, more frequently than it should. But also to collaborate intensely on the mood of the piece and on the various climates involved in the film, in the story. So that’s my closest collaboration. But then I work with the casting people, not just to find out who’s playing who, and their measurements which is important, but I also try and work with the local casting people. So for instance if we’ve got huge crowd scenes, I try to get involved as much as possible in talking about the type of people and sometimes go on radio and talk about the kind of people who would most ideally like to come and present themselves for a certain scene. And so I do work with the casting people which is maybe an unknown thought, but I like to do that as much as possible. I don’t work with the location people so much, except to go and see locations where it’s necessary. But in fact, part of my costume supervisor’s job Marit Allen Page 93 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] is to make sure that we have the right facilities and changing areas when we move from one place to another, so it’s adjunct to my role to be aware of how we’re going to fit these three hundred and sixty people when we move down to Baton Rouge or whatever, whatever the circumstances are. And to make sure that we have enough costumes and so on for those. And then I work with my own dyeing and breaking down department, but that’s within my sphere very definitely, but those are crucial people to me. And as far as the rest of the hierarchy goes, I collaborate with the production office inasmuch as I need logistic help and that just about takes care of it. But I suppose if you think about pecking order; director, producer – those people are the crucial ones, they’re at the top – production designer is next. Director of photography is on a par or only just a notch below the director and in fact I do collaborate with the director of photography, I mean that’s a crucial aspect too. The closer I can get to what they’re seeing and how they’re representing it, then the better I know how my costumes are going to actually be portrayed on the screen. And certain directors of photography have particular dislikes about colour or about texture and sometimes they understand what I’m doing and they actually sort of soak it up and sometimes they’re a little resistant and have their own sort of bailiwicks and I have to make sure that I can negotiate those waters, so to speak.

So just for clarity, could I ask you to describe the role of the director of photography and the production designer, what their remits are really?

The director of photography is an incredibly important and crucial member of this team. He’s the one who represents what we’re all doing on the screen, he works closely with the director as to the placing of the camera, the aspect of lighting, whether in fact a room is going to be dark and there’s going to be a shaft of light on a pair of purple gloves that are sitting on a table or whether in fact it’s all going to be so dark that nobody sees anything anyway. I remember one story about a costume designer I adore who worked on a wedding dress with thirty-two different shades between white and cream and the whole thing was a blur [laughs] and no definition, it wasn’t possible to define one from the other. And that in fact is, that’s the kingdom of the director of photography. So, a director of photography, he sets the tone of the colour and the texture and the shape of the lighting and he’s the one who represents or doesn’t represent what you’re doing in total. And it’s always a very good idea to have a nice relationship with the director of photography and it Marit Allen Page 94 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] can be a wonderful collaboration. They like what you’re doing and you understand what their needs are, then it works very harmoniously. The production designer’s, his or her task, is to visualise each location as they come along and to either design or to re-establish an existing space so that it follows the story. And then the, actually the property people are also, I’m also collaborating with them because there’s always a grey area between what is costume and what are props, and anything that is held or worn on the body, held by or worn on the body is considered to be costume and anything that is static, picked up or otherwise moved about the set is considered to be props. And I always try to work closely with them because for me, even if it’s set decoration and there are clothes within a cupboard that’s opened, if they don’t truly represent the character that I’ve been dressing, if there’s a purple jacket in there and in fact that character only wears browns, then that to me isn’t true to the story, so obviously there has to be a collaboration there as well. But the production designer is I would say a notch above my category, costume design, their credit comes ahead of mine, however if we don’t work well together we both suffer, so I tend to try to have an excellent relationship with the production designer.

Now you mentioned that the director doesn’t necessarily always understand clothing and that they more often than not see things in expressive terms or poetically, more abstract terms…

Yes.

…do you often find that you have to educate the director towards your point of view, or do you often find that you’re competing…

Oh no.

…with other people within the group such as the director of photography or indeed the production designer to get your particular point of view across?

No, I would never presume to educate a director because they have absolute control of everything and they have their own vision. It’s a question of trying to move into their vision or to understand the feeling it is at the bottom of what it is they want, so words Marit Allen Page 95 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] aren’t really important. And I remember a story about Stephen Frears and Jim Acheson – Jim, who is the costume designer I respect above most others – and he said to Stephen Frears, ‘Oh do come with me’ he said, Dangerous Liaisons, ‘into the seventeenth century’. And Stephen said, ‘No Jim, you go into the seventeenth century and I’ll join you there’. So you know, you don’t educate directors, they’ve got much too much on their minds. They want to see it. And to me, the crucial moments with a director are in the first fittings with the actors and what I try to do is not to make clothes for those fittings, but to find clothes that approximate shape, colour, texture and to bring a mass of thoughts to that particular meeting and then to work it through. And generally a director will sit quietly and watch and absorb during that time, then what I do is to photograph everything and we don’t have our major discussion obviously, in front of the actor, but when we have our own private time with the photographs, then we can get down with a knife and fork and divide the good from the bad and say well, that didn’t really swing on that man, that jacket would be great but it would have to be smaller, longer, shorter, in a different this and that. So in that sense, it’s quite easy to work with somebody who doesn’t speak a clothes language because you can work with a general outline and their contribution helps enormously if you’re listening between the lines. But that’s a great deal of my job, it’s to listen between the lines, both with the director and with the actors. So I have to try and be very sensorily aware of all their feelings about shape, tone, colour, texture and then try and amalgamate that and work from those first fittings to create something that’s going to please everybody, so it’s going to make the actor feel the part and the director.

So is the first fitting the starting point in the creative collaboration or do you do anything before that point first?

Well I do a huge amount of research before that first fitting, and that is generally led by the director. There was a wonderful moment when we were about to start Brokeback Mountain, when there was a meeting with three of us; the director, the director of photography and myself, we all met in one room and we all arrived with the same book in our hands. And that book became – well that was completely independent – and it became the Bible of the movie, that was the book that we drew on and that was our inspiration and…

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Can I ask what the book was?

Yes, it was Avedon in the West, in the American west, Richard Avedon, photographs that he took – which I can show you. So it’s a question of making sure that all minds are on the same page of course. I mean the same with Ride with the Devil, which I did with Ang Lee as well, the production designer Mark Friedberg was absolutely enthralled by research and Ang also always does an amazing amount of research, so there were books on the shelves in the art department that – and in my room too – but we collaborated and we read the same books, we looked at the same photographs, we, you know, we absorbed all the same historical information. So working from that point, it’s you know, it becomes something that – a movie is an absolutely living, breathing thing. It’s like an entity, it’s an amazing thing to be involved in a creative process that involves so many people who are all working towards the same end and if they’re not in harmony, rather like an orchestra, then it definitely shows in the final result. And when everybody’s working along the same orchestral piece, then I feel that that also shows and I think from my point of view it’s evident in Brokeback Mountain to a great degree, but there are other times when it isn’t so harmonious and the best thing is to try and all work along the same track.

I just want to draw you back to your own team within the costume department and area. What kind of space do you occupy across the space of the film, because you must obviously operate in more than one place at more than one time?

Yes we do, we move around all the time, but we start off with preparation so we have an allotted amount of preparation time, which depending on the project might be a quick four weeks or a quick eight weeks, sometimes it’s eleven, twelve weeks. And that prep time is usually spent in the studio, close proximity with the rest of the production so that one can be alongside the art department and collaborate more freely and the director can pop in for various fittings. And that, there’s usually a base that actually remains in a studio, if you have such a place, or in a production office that’s set up in another town. For instance, in New Orleans [inaudible], so that office remains. So whether we go off on location or not, there is always a central office and someone holding down the fort and answering questions and then maybe the dye studio stays there and maybe those people come when necessary on various location forays. But then we move – well, it depends, I mean if you Marit Allen Page 97 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] move locations then you just have to work on the wing really. You don’t really have a base as a rule, so you work out of the back of your car or you work out of a hotel room and, I mean occasionally you have more than a large drive before the location begins and we’re always the first and we always have fittings in the morning, or as a rule, hours before we actually start to shoot, so it’s a very rigorous life [laughs] and usually means an enormous amount of early rising and travelling and staying late, because we’re the last ones there too.

Right. Seems a very basic question to ask, but where do all the clothes come from, that become some costumes?

No, it’s a good question to ask. Let me give you for example, All the King’s Men, which is the film I did recently in Louisiana. Well, a lot of the clothes came from Cosprop and Angels – when I say a lot of clothes, but technically actually we almost didn’t use those clothes at all, because by the time I got closer and closer to the project with the director, it became more and more evident that he didn’t want the film to look elegant or sort of aristocratic southern in the way that one’s instant sort of reaction to Louisiana in the forties and fifties would naturally appear to be, and it became progressively more and more about the people, about the working people, people in the fields, the cotton pickers and slaves – no, not slaves actually – but working folk. And as we got closer and closer to the project it became progressively more evident that the director wanted clothes that were literally in rags and all earth tones. And those clothes don’t exist any more. In fact most of the research shows that people in the south for example, and farmers, that they wore blue denim a lot and they wore overalls a lot and just by fluke the director didn’t want to see either blue denim or overalls. So it was a question of assembling clothes that represented the period and the people and their function in life, but that toned exactly into the colour bracket that the director then put around the whole thing. So it was a question of mostly – I mean I did go to all the houses in the south, in Louisiana and South Carolina, New York, Boston, I did a lot of buying and people sent clothes to me from California, so clothes came from markets and thrift stores and junk shops and I used to go on a weekly or twice weekly sort of blitz expedition to the local huge sort of thrift emporium and fill up carts of clothing that we would then break down and dye and mash and adapt to make so that in fact we had hundreds and hundreds of garments that all fitted into the colour palette and Marit Allen Page 98 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] the class of people that we were talking about, because those things don’t exist to rent and they certainly don’t exist to buy. So it was question of absorbing clothing and making it work for the look of the film.

Just for clarity again, I presume that Cosprop and Angels are costume hire companies?

They’re costume hire houses, exactly. And then for example, the clothes, if you can imagine being far removed from home or out of touch from local supplies and the places that you know that you can pull things from, which is the case with a lot of location work, then what I would do is to find something from the stock for instance, that I had rented from these lovely costumes from Angels or Cosprop, and put these things on to an actor. For instance, Sean Penn, I needed to start off with him in the thirties and then move to the forties. Two very different shapes, and he wanted to be a lot larger than he really is, so then we had to start by building a body, a larger body for him. And then I would during the course of the fitting put on the jacket that I would think was the perfect jacket for him in the thirties and he’d put it on, say this is too small. Yes, I know it’s too small, but please put it on again and let’s think about that shape, let’s think about the cut of the armholes and the way that the jacket is very narrow at the top and the small lapel and let’s look at that and visualise it in your size. And would you like to look at these fabric swatches, and I don’t know anything about fabric, you do that. Very good. So then we move on from there. So then, all the clothes for the actual, for the leading actors are therefore built to size, to colour, to need of the film. So that involves a tailor or – and I also have a dressmaking shop within the production office, wherever that may be – and so the, as a rule, the women’s clothes are made in the dressmaking shop and then a tailor will come in and make the clothes for the principal actors. But I must make it clear that as a rule the principal costumes are made for those principals and it’s the extras and the small parts generally that you can pull from stock or from things that you make as you go along, things that you adapt. But the leading characters, all their clothes are made specially for them.

And what happens to those clothes once the film has finished, generally?

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Well the clothes obviously that are rented go back to the rental house. The clothes that are built for the film belong to the production company who made the film, so they have to all be put in embargo as it were, until the release of the film anyway, they belong to the production company, in this case Columbia. So they belong to them and Columbia decide where they want to house these costumes and they keep them all together in their appropriate order with the scene numbers tagged on them until the film’s released, because there’s always a chance that at the last moment they may need a close-up of a hand moving this and they need the jacket and the shirt involved or, many times there’s a little tiny insert that they need, so they need to maintain the costumes in perfect running order as it were, until the film’s released and then they absorb them into their own stocks or they do as they please with them.

Right, I see.

And all the clothes that we purchase for example, the clothes that are bought, well we use them to give back instead of loss and damages, instead of loss and damage charges we give them to the costume houses. Or we donate them to costume houses anyway, or it depends entirely on the heart and mind of the producers as to whether costumes that are actually belonging to the production company where they end up.

I see. Now, it strikes me as quite unusual that you have a dyeing department and a breaking in, is it, department? Or breaking down?

Breaking down. [laughs]

[laughs] Could you explain something of that department and what they do to clothes?

Absolutely.

And how this has come about?

Yes, well it isn’t something that’s immediately obvious to the naked eye, that most costumes in film, they have to look as if they belong to people and as a rule costumes Marit Allen Page 100 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] don’t look as if they belong to people, they look like costumes and that’s something that I’ve been fighting for a very long time. I like costumes to look as if they belong to people and as if those characters have just picked that whatever it is up from the back of the chair that morning and thrown it on, rather than come to a costume department and been fitted for it. So there’s a great deal to do in terms of making clothes look inhabited and it’s the other part about actually constructing clothes for a story, is that it’s almost impossible to find the right fabric in the right colour, you just have to sort of take that on board. And then you have to interpret and extrapolate. So for instance, for a jacket for Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, which looks like just any old jacket that you might walk into a farm shop and buy in the 1960s in the Midwest, the fabric was, I found it in Los Angeles on the top shelf of an old stack of wool that had been there since the sixties. It was a piece of women’s coating fabric that was grey and black, boucle wool, check, but what we wanted was for it to be earth tones and it’s wool and it’s very difficult to dye wool without using heat and if you use heat you shrink it and if you shrink it you might not have enough to make the three jackets that we needed. So that’s the beginning, you have to take your heart in your hands and just be very brave with your dyer and say okay, let’s go for broke, we’re going to make this a sludgy green and let’s see what happens. And in this case actually, we had to send it to New York and get it dyed and the poor person had to dye it and then send it back and there were pieces that were just a little off, and so then we decide which are the best pieces of that fabric and we make into jacket one, jacket two and jacket three because you have riding doubles and you have stunt doubles and you’re going to get wet – or he is – so you know that you have to have minimum of three of these jackets, so that’s where the dyeing comes in. Now then, I wanted it to be lined with what looked like a really rather ratty and bad fur fabric that had just come into being in the sixties and in common use, but all the fur fabric that we could find to find exactly the right density, the right length, the right texture, that was one thing, that took a great deal of work. Now we found that and then we had to dye it, so we had to dye it a kind of a caramelly colour and again, that’s another process that takes skill and care because it can get blotchy and it can not look right or real or whatever. So that’s another, we put those two component parts together and we make the jacket. But then when the jacket’s made it looks as if it’s just new and this is a guy who’s extremely poor and he’s obviously had this jacket for years, so then you have to take your heart in your hands again and you have to throw that jacket into a washing machine. And this is all part of the breaking down process. Then someone Marit Allen Page 101 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] attacks it with a cheese grater, with files, with stains, with colours and makes it look as if this jacket has been through hell and back and is suitable for a man who’s been working as a cowboy or a ranch hand and it in fact it’s supposed to on screen look absolutely natural and believable and it’s a long and hard process to get it to that point. And the same for instance with the jacket that was bought for Heath Ledger for the same part of the sequences, it’s called a Carhartt, it’s a jacket that every American knows by heart, every actor including Paul Newman has worn one at one stage or another in a movie. It’s hell to break down, absolute hell to break down. You need a number of them, because again, you’re going to have riding doubles, stunt doubles, he’s going to fall, it has to look old. So you have to buy six maybe for a start, four possibly. And then, that jacket, which is indestructible, has to be broken down so that it looks old and worn before you begin. So it’s a very, very crucial part of what I do, is to make the clothes look how they should look and to look inhabited and to look aged and to be the colours that you want. So whether it’s sophisticated and glamorous, or whether it’s rustic and old, all of these things, because of the difficulty of finding the fabric that you want in the colour that you want and texture that you want, invariably you have to accept the fact that you’re going to have to find one thing and turn it into something else.

Seems to me not only a laborious process, but also quite an expensive one?

Yes it is, it’s expensive in terms of people and time, it is expensive and it’s hard for production companies sometimes to realise how crucial that is and how important it is to the outcome of the look of the film. But it is a very important part of it.

I’m not sure if this is possible as I’m sure the budget for costume for each film varies, but could you give a kind of rough estimate of what proportion of a film’s budget is actually normally devoted to costume?

Well, it used to be a given amount. It used to be I think two and a half per cent, or three and a half per cent of the overall budget, but I haven’t met a producer recently who’s been able to accept that. They, it’s very hard for a production to accept actually that a costume budget is going to be a realistic amount of money. I mean I tend to try and work within a realistic budget, but I mean I know that there are others who have enormous budgets and Marit Allen Page 102 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side A [part 9] spend huge amounts of money. I don’t particularly feel comfortable working that way myself.

Okay. You mentioned that in your career you’ve been very keen to promote the idea of clothes looking as if they’ve been lived in, rather than as I say, just been fitted on to that particular actor or actress, how did that come about and what would normally happen before that point in time? I’m just trying to, I suppose, locate historically when that change happened.

Well, it is a much more recent phenomena, I have to say, because if you do look at old movies, it’s very often that you’ll find, especially with Hollywood movies – if you look at a Hollywood western for example – everything is just straight off the machine, brand new, everything, there isn’t a scrap of dirt or wear. You know, whereas a jacket, we would put stones in the pockets of a woollen jacket and spray it with water so that the whole thing sags, it’s quite obvious that this is a modern technique, this is something that we’re learning as we get more and more looking for reality I think, within the stories and within – I think the audience demands it, I think the audience is smart and they know that, they don’t know exactly the processes that you’re going through, but I always feel that if an audience is comfortable looking at what you’re giving them, then you’re telling the story the way it should be told. If an audience is uncomfortable or they feel, I think they feel if the clothes feel like costumes and if they feel like costumes they’re much likely to accept the story. And after all it’s the story that we’re driving at, the story is what’s the important part of this particular process. So if anything is distracting them from the story, then I personally find it to be a deterrent and I think the audience feels a little edgy and I don’t think that they can focus as much as they should on the dialogue and the actual process that unfolds…

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Tape 5 Side B [part 10]

It’s hard to mention films without, you know, without implicating somebody.

Yes, well I suppose in more general terms, you’ve been a cinema goer for a large part of your life.

Yes.

What films made an impression on you, particularly in terms of film costume?

Well there’s an interesting thing that’s happened in film costume. There was a time – every, if you look at for instance, let’s take Cleopatra, just for instance. Cleopatra has probably been made seven times, I’m not sure exactly how many times, but if you compare Theda Bara, 1928 or early thirties Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor’s 1954, fifty-six – I can’t remember the dates exactly – but if you compare those two Cleopatras and any others that you happen to find, you will see that every decade interprets a period in a way that reflects its own decade. The same applies to the twenties, if you think about The Last Tycoon when it was made in the seventies and it was about the twenties, it was a seventies view of the twenties. And that’s always been true and you can’t help that somehow. I mean you know, when we make a Victorian film today, what we’ll do is to interpret it, we’ll put it through if you like, twenty-first century filters. So if we in the twenty-first century don’t think that a quilted bodice is a very flattering item of clothing, then it’s our choice to eliminate that particular choice, even though it might have been very popular at the time. So we always filter according to our contemporary eye. But the whole business of trying to actually get back to the way things were at the time of the story rather than how we might see it or interpret it is something that we’re getting closer and closer to, I think.

D’you think that you’re always aware of that filter when you’re in the thick of making a film, or do you think it only becomes apparent with the passage of time?

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I think you’re aware of it when you’re making a film because you’re making choices for actors and actresses and even though you want them to look and feel authentic, you want also for them to feel comfortable, so there’s no point at all in putting somebody in something that’s correct for the period and makes them uncomfortable. I mean I never say to a director or an actor that that is authentic for the period, because they don’t want to know that, they want to be able to – that has to be subliminal in a way. Everything that you offer them has to be authentic to the period, but you don’t want to impose something on them because it’s authentic and they feel uncomfortable with it, or it doesn’t flatter them in some way or it doesn’t work for the action or whatever. So, I mean there was a moment when the BBC actually had a great play within turning costume closer to the period that it reflected and there were whole productions where the colour was de- saturated, if you like, and all the technicolour of Hollywood was drained out of production and they were famously called ‘BBC beige’ productions, you know, where everything had to be sort of soft tones of discreet colours, which is not of course true. In Victorian times there were ferocious colours and you know, and it’s perfectly right to use them, but it became a sort of a taste thing. There was a period I think in the seventies when everything had to be tones of beige because it was considered to be more discreet and more classy, but it doesn’t actually reflect what was really there, depending on the period you’re talking about, but there is that, sort of time filter where people impose today on yesterday.

Yes, I think that’s, I suppose it leads us on to the notion of interpretation in a way.

Yes.

You mentioned when you were helping put together Brokeback Mountain that three of you; the director, the director of photography and you, the film costume designer, arrived to the first meeting each carrying a copy of the same book, but you then went on to describe the fact that you had many other books that were informing all of your research towards the film.

Yes.

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So it seems to suggest that you’re not solely concerned with the actual literary text that the film is based upon, but that your interpretation is much broader than that, it’s informed by many other things. And I suppose in a similar way the costumes for the film operate in a similar way, that they’re not about recreating the most authentic costume in relation to the original text or period, but it’s about I suppose how they’re informed by other broader framework of ideas?

Yes, indeed. Yes, I mean I am more interested I suppose in trying to get a sense of the life of the person within the story. So rather than to be slavish to things that actually were actually were worn at the time, it’s interesting to – usually, I’m progressing I think more and more towards simplifying things and to getting to the reality of that person’s life and stripping away – I mean maybe it’s the project that I’ve been working on, but stripping away anything like gloss or anything like sort of movie magic and trying to get closer and closer to the reality of the people who are involved at that time in that place.

And could you – this is just a slight aside, but just while I think of it – you’ve mentioned about basing your research upon photographic evidence, upon historical evidence that you’ll find in books. Do you ever visit dress collections in museums?

Yes, I have done, I have done several times in the past. Museum of London for instance, for Florence Nightingale and Scarlett O’Hara and various other things. And that’s very interesting, it’s very interesting in terms of colour and texture. The costume houses also have wonderful collections of real costumes from various periods. Of course, I’ve also done costumes that either reach into the future or reach further back into the past where there is no photographic evidence and you know, and then there are other ways of approaching your research and other ways of defining what happened and what didn’t happen. But invariably, I mean even from the mud people, you know there are fragments of fabric and there is evidence of the kind of weaving that they used to do and so forth. So there is always, there’s always good stuff to dig for that is actual reference and research to be had.

The only reason I mentioned a museum dress collection is that their approach towards a definition of what historical dress is, is quite different from your approach as a film Marit Allen Page 106 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side B [part 10] costume designer and I was just asking you if they were supportive of your interpretation of historical dress or if you sometimes find them to be resistant?

Yes, I think a little resistant probably [laughs], because I mean they’re very academic and very confined to the rights and wrongs of dress, and of course people are not. People are not really particularly interested in the rights and wrongs, especially not the audience and especially not the actors and certainly not the directors – they’re not even vaguely interested in what was right and wrong. They’re interested in what’s going to tell their story.

I don’t know if you went to see an exhibition that was at the Museum of Costume in Bath, which was a series of film costumes around costume dramatisations and it was the first I think where they charted the different historical takes in film costume that have existed to date around these particularly well known texts, and that’s relatively rare I think in terms of museum exhibitions about film costume, but it’s something which is very self-evident within your own industry. D’you think that the general public or the cinema going audience are becoming more attuned to this specificity of what interpretation might mean in film costume, or not?

I think that the audience is, you know, of course there are very different audiences for different genres of film and I think the general audience is entertained by anything that’s entertaining to them – blockbusters for example. They don’t think much about the costumes, they just want it to keep on moving or be entertaining or fun or whatever. But then you take something like Far from Heaven where the director had a specific idea of wanting to harmonise the frame of a photograph with the wallpaper, with the chair, with the view outside and the colour of the tree and the scarf around her head, well then I think there’s a certain cinematic audience that are very interested in that kind of framing if you like, but I don’t think it’s a general audience, I think that’s a very specific audience. So I think there’s horses for courses, you know, there are so many different levels and types of film and I think that there are an equal number, if not more, costume designers who are well slotted into those various different niches and happy to work within different, totally different frameworks.

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So how would you site yourself within those particular kinds of film?

[laughs]

I know it’s a tricky question to ask.

It is a tricky question and I suppose because of my background, I started out doing things that were gorgeous to look at and very appetising in terms of visual delights and extras and tiny details and textures and colours. I was very interested in that when I started out working and I think I did some things, for instance White Mischief and Bad Timing and working with Nic Roeg who was very interested in that kind of thing. He would love that sort of refined detail, he would focus in, when she was trying to flee from her husband, he would focus in on a brooch that I’d found that would be an eagle with its feet bound by a chain and he would use all kinds of things that he appreciated that I would bring to the story, he would use them and be happy to and that was fun. And White Mischief where it was a most glorious period in British ex-pat society with you know, an enormous number of beautiful women who all had to be defined by their own particular look and late thirties and early forties, it was a most wonderful period to do and again, it was fabulous to find a giraffe print and make a cocktail outfit for Greta Scacchi and then find the sun setting between the trees and two giraffes just walking up behind here. I mean the serendipity of moments like that are things that you always remember and it’s great fun. But I suppose that progressively I’ve worked more and more with directors – and maybe it’s the times we’re living in, or maybe it’s the directors I’m working with – who are interested in the page and the story and the words. And it seems that I’ve got into a niche of working with boys on horses, which suits me just fine, the boys are beautiful and the horses are interesting. So you know, I find that that pleases me very much now. The closer I can get to reality, the more pleased I am and if I can help to tell stories then that’s the most gratifying thing I can imagine.

Very well put. So, just in terms of the chronology of the films that you’ve worked on – you worked with Nicolas Roeg on a number – was White Mischief the last film that you worked with him?

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No, he didn’t direct White Mischief, that was Michael Radford. But I’ve worked with Nic Roeg on four pictures and I did Don’t Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka – which was a huge 1940s with flashbacks to the teens, picture that didn’t do very well but was a huge enterprise and a big budget movie and very glamorous and lots of sort of Mrs Simpson things going on in there – and The Witches children’s story, I did with him too. That was fun. Yes, Anjelica Huston was the grand high witch – that was great fun. And, what was the rest of the question?

I just wanted you to chart really for the tape a chronology of things that you’ve worked on.

So then I also worked with Frank Oz on two projects, or three, maybe three. I did Little Shop of Horrors with Frank Oz, which I loved to do, which was huge fun and I still like it today. And then I did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with him as well, and that was fun too because the costumes played a definite part in the story and it was wonderful working in the South of France and Frank is the most delightful man. So I’d done that sort of comedy thing with contemporary clothes, which is as I say, great fun when the clothes help to tell a story and to define types and you know, to be part of the romp if you like. Mrs Doubtfire I did as well, which again was very good fun working with Robin Williams and the whole transvestite thing and making clothes. But then that also brings me to a very technical point, which is something we should talk about. But my own chronology then – so then I’ve worked on many other things, but the three films that I’ve worked with Ang Lee on are probably very close to my heart because I love him so much and I like the films and have such respect for him as a director. And I very much enjoyed working with Steve Zaillian, although he was very hard to communicate with because he, as a writer and director, really had his head completely crammed with the logistics of the very complex film that we did, All the King’s Men. I loved doing that film and I felt that I learned a lot from it too. So I suppose chronologically that sort of brings me up to date.

Now, you’ve just mentioned there that you very much enjoyed working on films like The Witches and Mrs Doubtfire and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which are of course humorous films. Is it because they offer the opportunity for exaggeration in costume?

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No, actually not, because I haven’t done that really. I mean I think of Anthony Powell doing A Hundred and One Dalmatians, A Hundred and Two Dalmatians, now that’s exaggerated costume, taken to the nth degree and it’s absolutely splendid and wonderful and theatrical. And if I was required to do that I would hope that I’d step up to the mark. However, no, the comedy that I’ve done is more subtle I suppose and I hope it’s funny in its accuracy rather than in its exaggeration.

I suppose that leads me on to a technical point of view which I think it would be good if you could define your position on it, which is how costume relates to character in a film?

Well completely. I mean it’s completely character driven, and should be. I mean the audience should be able to see for instance, the back of a character come into the room and not be confused about who that person is, because that person in the film is the only person who would wear that given cardigan, jacket, whatever it is. So I mean I think that it’s ultimately important in carving out the life, the emotions and the lifestyle and character of the person involved in the story. So I mean I think it’s crucial to be able to have the spectrum of the story within your mind as you’re designing the clothes for that particular character and to make sure that characters don’t cross over. It’s quite difficult sometimes because characters who either live and work together or are romantically inclined with each other, they very often begin to rub off on each other if you like, they begin to, in real life, look quite like each other or have similar tastes. I mean friends very often have sort of parallel tastes, so sometimes within the story you know, you feel you have to put a sort of a rod in the middle of two sets of costumes of two characters who are concurrent so that you can maintain your sort of direct course. One goes one way, the other goes another way so that the story is more helped by that definition.

It would seem that you need to document those differences quite clearly when you’re working within a film for your own clarity and the clarity of the people that…

Working around you too.

Yes, working around you. So how are those details mapped across the span of a film?

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Well what I do is I take loads of photographs, I take masses of photographs – good, bad or indifferent – and I always learn from the photographs I take during fittings, because there are things that are visible on film, thirty-five mil, there are things that are visible on film that you miss when you’re in a fitting because you’re emotionally involved with the moment and because the climate in the room affects your vision somehow, so maybe you don’t notice that that length doesn’t work really well, that it should be adjusted. But when you look at a photograph in a cold moment, you can see exactly where you need to go with those particular clothes. So then, having got the fitting photographs and then second or third fitting, by that time I generally have a flow of costumes for the length of the movie, because of course we don’t shoot in sequence so frequently you need to have the beginning at the end and the end at the beginning. So then I make a photographic book of each character, or a big file with all the fitting photographs and I immediately work them in sequence of story so that everybody around me knows that this is what’s intended for these scenes, even if they’re just fitting photographs and they’re not complete, they’re just concepts or whatever. So I suppose having had an editorial training, and I feel I still have a very editorial mind, it’s actually, one thing helps the other so that I tend to immediately want to nail down the sequence of the story for the character so that, well it does help the people around me of course and it keeps me on track too.

I think there are very close affinities between editorial fashion that you worked on in the early period of your career and the skills that you need I suppose to help define costume throughout its appearance in a film. It also reminds me of the way catwalk shows, fashion shows are put together – they’re also photographed and then defined in a very, very particular sequence.

That’s right.

Are there any other skills that you think you’ve brought from your earlier career into your current career?

Well, I suppose being able to work from instinct, I think has always been the thing that I count on most closely. Because when watching a collection and when assessing the work of somebody in the fashion world, or one person amongst many, then it’s an emotional and Marit Allen Page 111 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side B [part 10] if you like, a gut reaction to a certain style, a certain representation that is the thing that strikes you as being either new or relevant or interesting or that carries the moment or that represents the period or represents the social climate of the time. And I think that that was my skill as a journalist and I have no doubt that that same skill applies to viewing a movie, a story and being able to interpret it. I think it’s actually the same thing, whether a certain, I mean very often if I read a story, a character – for instance in Brokeback Mountain Michelle Williams plays Alma, plays the wife of Ennis in the character and I found one dress that to me just completely represented that character. Now, it didn’t necessarily fit into the story and it certainly didn’t fit Michelle Williams who played the part, but when I showed that dress to Michelle, she broke down in tears. Now, that dress was what we built on, that dress was the character and as she moved through the story we kept on coming back to that dress. And that again is, it’s a response to a shape and a style and a feeling of a piece of clothing that can represent a person’s entire life and I think that’s what I lean on and that’s where I go when I need to find out who I’m talking about within the story.

To turn it the other way round, one of the things that many fashion designers draw upon when they’re thinking about what they’re going to make for their next collection, is of course film costume.

Yes. [laughs]

[laughs] And it has a huge influence upon what’s produced as seasonal fashion design. I just wanted to ask you what you feel about that and…

Well I feel that it’s true. I mean I think that film and fashion are actually representing their own time, aren’t they, and collective, a collective emotional response. I mean there are times when everybody wants to be uplifted after a war for example, there are times when people want to break free of tradition like the sixties, and film and fashion represent those things in their own different way. I think it’s inevitable that they influence each other. I think that fashion designers, they sometimes do and sometimes don’t even recognise where they’re being influenced. I think that’s fair to say.

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Are there any particular examples that you can think of that you remember picking up on and thinking, ah, I understand where they’ve taken that from?

No, the most obvious one is Bonnie and Clyde and people keep on coming back to that, but there are so many others. I haven’t sort of done a study of it, but I know it’s there. But I’d love to talk about the actual technical details that are sometimes called for in costume design that I think people don’t know about.

Yes certainly.

If I may, can I?

Mm.

For example, Mrs Doubtfire, we spoke about just now. Well there was a moment in Mrs Doubtfire that was a sort of a technical hitch that people might remember, the story. Well she actually goes to the stove and her breasts catch fire and she takes two pan lids and puts them over herself and smoke spews out all over the screen. Well, we’d shot the sequence just after that and just before that - we’d shot out of sequence of course, and we’d shot her in this lovely little blouse, very respectable little blouse with a high collar and it was all embroidered with little violets down the front – very, very sweet, and it was in a white cotton. And just before we started to shoot the sequence with the stove, the special effects guys came to me, speaking about collaboration for example, and they said that we’ve got a real problem here [laughs], we can’t get the smoke to exude through the fabric that you’ve chosen to make that blouse in. What can you do? So it was my job then to find a fabric that had a different weave that looked, to all intents and purposes, identical to the one that we’d already filmed and I was in San Francisco – there are very few fabric shops in San Francisco and it was a matter of urgency. So I went with my assistant, we drove around the town, we went to every single tiny handmade, homemade, dressmaking fabric store, huge department store, every single place in town until we found a fabric that had the same visual appearance but that had a wider weave so that we could experiment with that with the special effects people so that they found one that they could expel the smoke through. And then of course we had to make it and send it off to the embroiderers so that they could Marit Allen Page 113 C1046/13 Tape 5 Side B [part 10] make the exact same shirt with the exact same violets in the exact same position, and all that has to happen at high speed because everything’s always in a tremendous rush, you know, it’s always tomorrow and it’s always every day and every second you know, is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars so time doesn’t wait. But that’s the kind of technical problem that I find very interesting.

I do have another question to ask you in that area, but I think I’ll turn the tape over.

Okay.

[End of Tape 5 Side B

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Tape 6 Side A [part 11]

[interference on tape] This is just leading on from what you were talking about. [end of interference] I was interested by what you said about the fact that sometimes an object can be thought of as a costume if it’s worn on the body or held by an actor…

That’s right.

…and then once it isn’t doing that or it’s left on a table, it ceases to be a costume and might become a prop or might be somebody else’s concern.

Yes, that’s true.

Is there any kind of incident that you’ve come across where that’s become an issue, or have you ever found that a costume has become so contentious that the director’s suddenly got involved or somebody else has said I need to tell you something about this, I don’t think it’s working or…

Well, generally once it’s been worn it’s established anyway, so once something’s established that’s hands off, that’s okay. I remember, oh – no, there was one incident I remember on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels when the director of photography said that he couldn’t photograph a pearl that wasn’t a real pearl, which was quite an interesting moment.

Very interesting.

Very interesting moment. Yes, the question came up just as we were about to turn over, ‘Are these pearls real?’ And my reply was, ‘No’. ‘But they’ve been strung, with perfect knotting and everything about them has a beautiful lustre and they’re very expensive, but they’re not real.’ And he said that he couldn’t photograph them. So I actually was quite humorous at the time and I said, ‘Bullshit’. [laughing] So it went on. He actually, the director was standing by, I think he agreed with me. And so we went on turning and it was okay. But that was a different aspect, that wasn’t actually a prop aspect, that was more a Marit Allen Page 115 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] sidebar kind of thing, you know, where I think that you know, a certain degree of – I don’t know what – arrogance, snobbism, something like that sort of creeps in and somebody sort of oversteps into the ridiculous.

Does it ever happen with an actor who suddenly finds that they’re actually unhappy with the costume…

Oh yes.

… even when it’s been you know, decided and cleared and established?

Oh yes. Well if it’s been established, if it’s been on film there’s little you can do, but it very often happens with an actor just before, or an actress usually, just before [laughs] you go to film and then you have to have something in your back pocket. I mean that’s where listening between the lines comes in really handy, because if you can hear that an actress is getting wobbly about a certain thing, it just behoves you to have two or three more things that would work in that particular scene and it would function with those requirements to have those up your sleeve so that you can bring them out at the last minute, because it happens over and over again that people get nervous about a certain costume or a piece of, shoes or accessories. I mean shoes that fit one day don’t fit the next, happens all the time. People are not a five and a half and they’re not a six and somewhere or other you have to, you know, you have to be absolutely sure that you have a pair of shoes that’s exactly the same height of heel but more comfortable, or that something that looked really dreary in one scene, they change their mind and want to wear something glamorous instead, well you’re always ready for those events, so you learn by painful experience that you have to have everything to hand that you possibly might need and you know, you have to have comfort zone. So, in fact what I do is to work within a closet of clothing, so I tend to think well even though this woman never has scenes when she’s in bed, I tend to buy a nightdress, dressing gown, slippers or whatever because that’s what that character would have in their lives, never mind whether there’s a sort of a scripted theme. Or, I mean my team laugh at me a lot because I have all kinds of back stories of things that these characters did on other days or you know, when they went to a funeral and there’s no Marit Allen Page 116 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] funeral [laughing] in the script, or whatever it is. So I tend to have sort of extra little pockets of things that I think apply [laughing] to the story. They sometimes work, yes.

And do the actors use those or make note of them?

No, they don’t make note of them, but they’re always very happy to see something else when they get a wobbly moment. Yes, it’s important to have.

Right. Seems to me you don’t only need a lot of additional clothes, but you also need a lot of tricks up your sleeve too in terms of how you can make that shoot more comfortable or how you can break something down further or how you can alter something. Are there any you can think of that don’t really apply to normal clothing, but are very useful in sort of developing film costume?

Oh yes, there are many, but let me tell you then about stunts, because that’s something that doesn’t come into real life that very much plays within the film world. There was, in Ride with the Devil, there’s a sequence where Skeet Ulrich, who’s wearing the most beautiful green, sort of rich dark green redingote kind of shape coat, yeah, beautiful. And he’s on horseback and he gets shot in the arm. Well, we’re in the middle of Kansas City and we don’t have the facilities to be able to reproduce costumes and we don’t have much of that beautiful green cloth left, we only have a limited amount. So I came up with the notion of making replacement sleeves, so that every time he was shot in the arm, we could take that jacket off and we could replace the sleeve very, very quickly, not with Velcro, but with a special kind of mechanism around the sleeve joint that we developed together and we had four sleeves and two jackets, so we could effect a change while they were reloading the camera, you know. And those are the kind of tricks that it’s really fun to come up with. And it’s a question of necessity being the mother of invention, I mean you never know what you’re going to have to do next, you don’t know that you’re going to have to replace a sleeve in a jacket that you don’t have enough fabric for. But that kind of opportunity presents itself invariably, every time you make a movie.

Mm, yes, that’s fascinating. Are there any other technical aspects of film costume design that you think as being particularly important? Marit Allen Page 117 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11]

I suppose that being able to represent an emotion through texture is very important and maybe not, certainly not written about and I don’t know whether it’s appreciated, but I think it’s one of those subliminal things, much like acting is very often, when it’s beautiful it’s very subliminal. I think that to be able to convey emotion through texture is something that I try to do and you know, I think that it isn’t anything that’s ever apparent, but hopefully when it works, you feel it, even though you don’t know you’re feeling it.

So of course this doesn’t refer to actual texture in terms of touch, but…

The visual texture.

…the visual texture, yes.

Exactly. Visual texture.

And, could you perhaps carry on the chronology of films that you have worked on. You tended to talk in terms of directors that you’ve worked with – is that how you tend to see it…

Yes, how I see the films.

…as opposed to pure chronology?

That’s how I see them, absolutely, yes. I’m not very interested in chronology actually, but I am interested in yes, in the directors and the director is the person who links the film to me personally, so to have a good relationship with a director is paramount.

So is it the director who decides to make that call and ask if you’d be interested in working with him, or her?

Yes it is. It is. Absolutely. I mean it’s the director and the story. I mean if it’s an interesting director and a story that I really don’t identify with or don’t like, then I must say Marit Allen Page 118 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11]

I’m lucky enough to be able to sidestep things that I think are projects that don’t interest me. I’ve been able to do that so far and I’d rather not work than work on a film that I don’t believe in, even if it’s a director that’s interesting. But I suppose the exception to that was The Hulk, which I didn’t think I was going to be interested in, and I was interested because it was Ang Lee, and it fascinated me that he would want to make that picture. And when in fact he gave me a package, he sent me a package of scientific explanations for the chemical workings within the human body or within an animal body that actually would mean that somebody would become enlarged, enraged and have that super power. He sent me this [laughing] scientific document and it was so realistic that I read it late at night and I thought oh, so that’s how it happens, oh I see. [laughing] And I woke up in the morning thinking that it was absolutely real. In other words, he takes things to the nth degree and you know, he was interested in the science and in the dark side of that sort of energy force that propels a person from the normal to the para-strong, superhuman kind of thing. And his wife of course is a scientist and so he, you know, he’s very interested in the scientific aspects of it as well as the dark side of it and so on. So although you know, it may have appeared to be just another comic book story, Ang brought something very different to it and I don’t in fact think it was something the audience was expecting either. But it gave it a dimension that I would never have imagined and it made it interesting sort of beyond words, you know. So then one can connect to a project because of the interest of the director himself.

I mean that film is obviously very different from most of the films that you’ve worked on, because you’re not dealing with the past as such, you’re not even dealing with the present or even perhaps the future. You’re dealing with a different world in a sense.

Yes, exactly.

And you know, what are your starting points for that? I mean obviously you’ve mentioned the area of science that Ang Lee was interested in.

Yes, that’s right, but I mean to get into the reality of it. I mean it was talking about two scientists, you know, the relationship between those two scientists are what carry the story through. So, and his wife is a scientist and her first edict was that there would be no white Marit Allen Page 119 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] lab coats, no white lab coats. [laughs] There are no white lab coats. And you know, so I went to various different scientific laboratories, went to the, in Pasadena, to the most suitable kind of parallel kind of working laboratory and observed people and watched them and tried to get as close to reality as possible.

And, do you prefer the challenge of having to work in a film that’s about you know, the future or about another time, another place, rather than something which existed?

Ah well I don’t like to work in the future. I suppose that one of the reasons for that is, is that I saw how futile that whole concept was in the sixties when Courrèges was designing for the future. And I think Stanley Kubrick made a very, very clever point when he did 2001 and I can’t remember the date, but it was the early seventies I think, wasn’t it? [drilling noise in background]

Might have been a bit earlier.

No, it was earlier. It was in the sixties, that’s right. And it was at the time when people like Courrèges were doing stage costumes and although Stanley had the sort of helmet, bubble helmet designed and that the air stewardesses were a little like Courrèges, the real people in the story were dressed by Hardy Amies I think and it was…

That’s right.

…very, very real life, it was just completely classic. And that stunned me and I thought that that was so intelligent because in fact, clothing is timeless and we all have the requirements of covering ourselves in a relatively elementary way, and so the future will be there, not be in some kind of fanciful uniform I think, other than the technical requirements of people like astronauts. Or, if we ever go to live on another planet, there will be technical requirements that will prescribe exactly what we have to wear. Whereas you know, it seemed to me that for instance, in the sixties when they were doing that kind of clothing, it was fun for a while, but it didn’t kind of stick or relate to the next particular move in social acclimatisation of you know, who we are, what we’re doing, what the requirements of our daily lives are. Marit Allen Page 120 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11]

I suppose it brings us back to that point about the believability of clothing and the way it can be situated in a reality.

That’s right. And that applies whether you’re dealing with sixteenth century Kazakh peoples or whether you’re dealing with people, you know, in the twenty-first century. It has to relate to the things that were available to those people at the time and what their way of life was. But that is completely outside the realm of fantasy, which is another wonderful aspect and I mean I think that you know, that’s great fun, but it seems to me that the things that I have been required to do so far have been getting closer and closer to a reality of some time or another, rather than you know, a fantasy. Drilling.

[break in recording]

…now how much more sort of juice there is…

Okay.

… if you know what I mean. [laughs]

Well, you just mentioned, very interestingly there, that the reality of clothing in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, you had the opportunity of working with Kubrick much later on, on a film which is based about, I suppose reality and fantasy at one and the same time. Could you just say something about your experience of working with him?

Well he was probably the most over-researched person in the history of film and the universe as a whole, that when he was designing the apartment that this couple were going to live in, he, I understand he had the floor plans of every one of those magnificent mansion blocks in New York on that particular street that he remembered but he hadn’t revisited since 1958, he had the floor plans of every single apartment there so that he could model his apartment to the millimetre on the plan that he chose, having looked at every one. And everything for that apartment and for the street that we, he constructed on the back lot at Pinewood, the hardware for instance for the door handles and the window Marit Allen Page 121 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] fittings for the shop fronts that people would walk past, every single, every single bracket, every single handle, fastening, piece of hardware of every description was sent from New York. And his research included employing a young student to stand on the same corner in Greenwich Village every Friday morning at I think a quarter past eight and a quarter to nine, to photograph between that half hour period, every single person who crossed at that particular corner in New York, so that he could have those pictures – for a year, she was employed, to photograph those people in New York so that he would refresh his memory and update himself as to what people looked like in New York at that particular moment in time.

Unbelievable.

It is unbelievable, unbelievable. And I mean you know, I heard sort of crazy figures like thirty-three thousand pounds had been spent pre-production, just in research stills. So you know, you put that into the pot when you’re talking about making a movie and you’re up against something that’s phenomenal, you know, his questions and his needs and his expectations of one stretched far beyond anything that I think anybody else would actually require. And I suppose working with him was more like a life experience than a work experience, because he took over my life. He employed me and I was devoted to him and I would do anything that he required of me and that included being on call, literally twenty- four seven. And he would call me at eight o’clock in the morning on a Sunday to ask me a particular question about whether Tom could wear the overcoat on top of the cloak when he was coming in through the door, and that was a scene that we were supposed to film six months away, but that was the question that was on his mind at that particular moment, and so that would be the call. And it therefore was an extremely intense kind of commitment rather than a design project. The design project part of it was, it was on screen very elementary, behind the scenes, unbelievably complex to get to the bottom of what it was he wanted and to go through the hoops that he needed for one to jump through in order to establish exactly which piece of underwear it was going to be for that particular moment in time. So it was an intense and - it was a question of stamina as much as anything else. Commitment, humour and stamina I think [laughs] were the three requirements more than anything, to be able to withstand the storms of Stanley.

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It seems interesting that you say that he over-researches a project, I suppose, to under- researching or just researching to the correct degree. Do you think that it over- complicates?

There’s no doubt about it, but because he’s Kubrick everyone will do everything for him. And so if that’s the way he chose to work, then I’m sure that in his mind it was required. And you know, when working with him then that’s the mind that you’re serving so you – but he would renege on his own decisions frequently and it wasn’t all tense and dreadful, there were some light moments and there were ways of working within the relationship with him that would be fun to approach him in certain ways. I mean he had, he would never come to a fitting ever, past the first fitting with Tom and Nicole, and I would have to take photographs for instance of the small part characters, or even the big part characters, take a photograph of a fitting and I would say for instance, there was a day when Jennifer Jason Leigh was going to be in the story and she eventually was never in the story, but it was a sudden development because a girl had refused to strip naked and we were suddenly stuck with nothing to shoot for a day or two within his schedule. So he wanted to bring forward this sequence with Jennifer Jason Leigh in a hotel room and he called me in to the caravan to discuss it and I said, well how would you like her to be? What would you like her appearance to represent and what are we talking about at that moment in her life and what would you like? And he said, ‘Well, find a dress made of cloth’. And that was my brief. Find a dress made of cloth. So, I spent a day or two and gathered together every possible permutation of clothing that could relate to that particular girl living in New York at that moment, and what we wound up with was a pretty soft blouse with a pair of rather tight, scraggly jeans and that was a very, very long way away from the definition of what he’d asked for. So it was that kind of thing working with him, where you just had to sort of bob and weave through a morass of stuff and give him the choice of absolutely everything and see if he would come up with anything that you had presented to him. There were times when he’d say to me, ‘A dressing gown on that character at that time? What on earth gave you that idea?’ ‘Well it was in the script.’ ‘Well, what’s the point of taking any notice of the script? Who said you should do that?’ Well, okay. So, ‘Well maybe because it was two o’clock in the morning and he’s leaning out through a window, would that make sense that he was wearing a dressing gown?’ ‘No, I don’t know what gave you that idea.’ ‘Well, what would you like to see him in?’ ‘Well, a shirt and some Marit Allen Page 123 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] trousers.’ So you know, I photographed probably twenty-seven different permutations of everything that went from shirt and trousers, cowboy western dress and finally five or six absolutely wonderful dressing gowns, one of which I really liked and thought would be the best for Radia Savaja, for the actor. And I learned by this time that when I put them, all the photographs, stuck them with Sellotape in sequence on a piece of hardboard and put it outside Stanley’s office like a fairy in the middle of the night, and he would then look at them in the middle of the night and put them back on my desk with ticks in the morning, the ones that he thought were appropriate. Then I learned the sequence I think of the ones that he was likely to choose and I put my favourite things in the sequence of the whole image that he was likely to gravitate towards and in this case it worked and he chose the dressing gown that I most wanted. So it was a question of trying to just keep on working with him until something happened. And it was very unpredictable.

But it seems, as you said before, that you know, you worked in an intuitive way towards the directors concerned and wishes, you know, in realising the film. And this is a practical question, obviously if you need to get as many different dressing gowns as you can as quickly as possible on to set for the director to choose from, is it the fact that you have to source all of these dressing gowns and pay for them?

Well in this case I was lucky because I have a certain amount of my own collection and I happen to have some interesting dressing gowns within that collection and it was one of mine, one that I’d bought in Oslo a very long time ago that was a really old 1930s dressing gown that he picked. And I had another one that was an interesting sort of pressed felt one from the United States from the fifties and they were things that I thought that he would be interested in anyway, and…

But, I just wanted to ask you, when you say my collection, this isn’t the clothes that are in your personal wardrobe?

Yes. Clothes that I own.

Right.

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Not necessarily that I wear, but clothes that I own. Because it has been pretty irresistible to buy things at certain, you know, when I see something wonderful it’s very hard not to buy it. The difficulty is where to store it. But I did have things within my own collection that I could pull up in that case. And it was just as well I had, because it very often happens on a Friday night when the costume houses are closed, with him. But as a rule, you know, I mean if working in England then one would go immediately to the costume house and source things. Like for instance there was another time when he wanted Father Christmas costumes. Well obviously, I did have time at that point to go to Angels, even if it was a question of keeping them open on a Friday night or a Saturday morning, and photograph all their security guard uniforms or their Father Christmas outfits, because he didn’t want a choice of one, two, five, he would like every single security outfit that they had for rent to be photographed in sequence in different colours and the same thing with Father Christmas and so on. So it was a question again of quantity of choice.

Right. And how amenable are costume hire companies in working with you in that way?

No, well, for the most part not at all. But for Kubrick they, and maybe because they’re kind to me because I’ve worked with them for a long time, they would sort of bend the rules a little bit. But it’s tough for them too, so they’re not very happy about that kind of thing. But there are moments when you’re really up against it when the costume houses will really pull the plugs out and – the stops out, I mean. I remember being in Africa and the director suddenly wanted four nuns walking along the street – it’s always nuns and they’re never in the script [laughs] – and I remember calling Angels in a complete panic and saying, ‘I need six nuns’. And they flew them out for me.

The costumes rather than the nuns?

The costumes, not the nuns, exactly. And another appalling moment when I was in Russia in the middle of a snow blizzard and I’d arrived with the costumes for Harrison Ford as a naval captain, submarine captain in the 1960s and beautiful fabric that I’d been to Yorkshire to buy myself, it was just the most perfect wool and marvellous, we’d done research at Angels and everything was just on top, it was just great. Got the costumes to Russia, showed my supervisor in Russia, who’s a wonderful man I adore – and he loved Marit Allen Page 125 C1046/13 Tape 6 Side A [part 11] the costumes, absolutely wonderful. Just one small problem he said, through the interpreter, ‘They have six buttons and they’re supposed to have eight’. So, deep breath, go out there, it’s a snowstorm, I’m trying to get through on a mobile phone to Tim Angel [laughing] in London and say to him, whatever you do and whatever it takes, you have to make another one. You have to make a costume now for me with eight buttons. And they did, and they pulled the stops out and they made it. Meanwhile I used the Russian one, which was a really hard and nasty wool which I’d had made in St Petersburg by the official Russian military makers, and I had to actually front Harrison Ford with the fact that he was wearing a jacket that had six buttons instead of eight. And because I confessed, he was wonderful. He said, ‘Okay, we’ll see if we can do this one in close-up then’. You know, sometimes they really do sort of cover your back if you confess and if you’re in trouble, then it’s wonderful to see who runs out of the woodwork to help you, even as I say, Harrison Ford. And Stanley Kubrick did it on another occasion, which I will never forget. So you know, there are inevitable problems that really come up and hit you in the face.

Mm. It’s, I think, about being as responsive as you can be to any situation at any given time.

Yes. That’s right.

[End of Tape 6 Side A – Side B no recording]

Marit Allen Page 126 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12]

Tape 7 Side A [part 12]

[whispers] He has this painting that I absolutely adore and it is from here to the end of the windows, that scale, the painting, and it’s probably 1910 and it’s called Turning the Plough and it’s four or maybe six carthorses and a man sitting on one of those wonderful sort of elementary metal ploughs and a man turning away and into the sunset, golden light all over the place, golden fields, little glints of gold, another man turning the horses this way. It’s mag-nificent, I mean I think it’s breathtaking. It’s right up my street. Gorgeous, really heavy and powerful and full of light and dark and beautiful. Ah! Bernard, where did you get that unbelievable painting? Oh well I bought that for seven pounds ten shillings [laughing] from such-and-such estate in 1958 or sixty-two or whatever. I said, I don’t believe it. Yes, yes, yes, yes. He said, it caused a bit of a stir. Professor at the Royal College buying this painting. Now of course it’s worth seven hundred and fifty thousand.

My goodness.

But it’s something to see, you know, it’s really great.

And is he still buying things?

I don’t think so, and I said, but you don’t have any of your own textiles. I mean you have all these magnificent furnishings everywhere and none of yours. Oh no, I don’t like new things. I only like old things. [laughs]

Okay well, we should make a start. This is the Marit Allen interview, tape seven and it’s the sixth of October, 2005. Marit, we’ve just been speaking about Bernard Nevill and his wonderful home, so you still obviously have a strong network of friends from your time in fashion and indeed in film costume. Can you just say something about how you keep in contact with people that you once worked with?

Well it’s very difficult to keep in contact when you disappear for a year at a time, practically a year at a time. I sometimes wonder that anybody remembers I’m around at all. But the great thing about friendships isn’t it, that you find people to be so much the Marit Allen Page 127 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] same even if it’s twenty years since you last saw them and that the contact that you’ve established with them, no matter how long ago it was, it’s still strong and the mutual feeling is still the same, so the years go by and if anything, the stories get stronger and the interest gets deeper and the connection remains. It’s a very nice feeling to be able to reconnect with people that you’ve known for a long time. I saw Marion Foale this week as well and she’s an old friend from the fifties and it’s a wonderful thing suddenly to be able to catch up a span of years and you’re still interested in the same things, the same things make you laugh and you can have gone through great traumas with children and grandchildren and family histories and problems and even sicknesses and still come out with a strong friendship and kinship. I think having established friendships in the early days, it’s the easiest thing to slip back; it’s like putting on comfortable shoes, you know. You go back into the friendship and you have all the history and you’re much more prepared to be sort of mellow with each other and the things that might have upset you about the people before no longer seem to be a trouble and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to progress through life and to keep on hanging on to, or revisiting friendships from the past.

Well Marion Foale is like yourself in that she still continues in her career.

Yes.

Selling [inaudible] nowadays. Hand-knitted garments.

That’s right.

What, d’you know what’s happened to Sally Tuffin?

Sally Tuffin I’m very close to and I have been all through the years, and she segued into pottery design, because she and her husband were connected to Moorcraft for a long period and she did some wonderful things for them. And then they parted from Moorcraft and started their own pottery in Somerset, and they have their own kilns and their own paintresses and workshops and potters and it’s a wonderful project and it’s very successful. They’ve opened a shop in Ilminster and they sell from their home every now and again, Marit Allen Page 128 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] they have open days. And she’s embraced a completely different discipline of designing for the shapes and the contours of pottery, which is a very different prospect from the contours of the body. And she’s found it very challenging and she’s come up with some wonderful things and she has a sort of same fresh spirit when she’s going into animal design or plant design, conceptualising shapes and forms around the edges of a pot or a cup or huge vase or whatever it is they’re making. So she’s been very successful and she’s had her own segue in somewhat the same way that I’ve had a segue from costume into film, which is sort of parallel in many ways.

Mm. I think you could add Celia Birtwell to that list…

Yes.

…too, in that she has made that transition for textile design for fashion into textile design for interiors.

Yes.

D’you think it’s something that’s particular to people of your generation?

That we move from one aspect to another?

To another, this idea of a segue.

I think it’s going to be progressively more and more the case. I really feel that people are going to be able to leapfrog if you like, from one area of the arts or in any way, careers I think. I don’t think it’s going to be a lifelong thing any more, I think it’s going to be that people find another outlet for their interests and that they’re going to move from one thing to another. I think there should be no barriers, personally I think people should be, they should be entitled to express themselves in any form that they can get their hands on.

I think career flexibility is ever more important today, but in your own case there was another reason why that shift happened in that you had children. Marit Allen Page 129 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12]

That’s right.

And you’re quite open about that fact.

Yes, for sure.

In that you know, you’ve never wanted to hide that aspect of your life in relation to your career.

That’s right.

Could you say something more about that?

Well yes, I mean I was lucky at the beginning of my film career in that it was much more manageable somehow and it happened that by pure coincidence that my pressure work would happen during term time, the children were away at school, which they didn’t particularly like and they like better on reflection later on [laughs], as I did. That the high pressure work and leaving the country, if I had to, happened during term time and then at Christmastime or in the summer time, that I had free time and I could be with them. And as they grew up it became easier for me to slacken the ties a little bit and move off into a sort of a deeper connection with my work. And I think my son finds it much easier than my daughters do. They are still a little apprehensive about the closeness that I have to my work and people who are involved in my work and my son is very generous about it and he loves the fact that I have my own life and my own career and he’s very proud of it. I’m sure the girls are too, but [laughs]…

Well, I think film is quite a demanding career…

Yes.

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…and I’ve always found the people that I know that work in film tend to socialise with people who work in film, in that there’s something about a network of connection that’s important.

That’s right.

Can you say something about that?

Well, I can, I have no network at all. [laughs] I have none at all and what happens in fact is that when I’m working I’m totally absorbed, totally involved, and that I only see people I’m working with and when I’m not working, I only see my family. So it’s kind of feast or famine as far as my family are concerned. Either they get all of me all the time, or they get nothing at all except telephone calls as often as I can. So really I don’t network and I know that it’s crucial within my business and people do and people are seen and go out and continue relationships and so on. I mean I continue relationships with those closest to me on past movies, but I don’t have any kind of networking skills, or any interest actually to go out and about, I’m much happier at home.

Is that because your reputation precedes you in the industry?

Erm… I wouldn’t say that. [laughs] I never think of myself as having any kind of reputation and I don’t consider that I have any achievements, I consider that I’ve been unbelievably lucky to have done the films that I’ve done and to have been approached by the people that I have been approached by and to work with people that I have the greatest regard for. I think that’s my good fortune.

That’s very well said. We were speaking earlier this morning about the possibility of you reflecting upon achievement and I just wanted you to say something about that ‘cos it ties in with what you’ve just said really.

Well, I have absolutely no feeling about achievement. I think that I don’t feel as if I’ve achieved anything, I don’t have any particular regard for achievement. However, I feel that on a daily basis, if I’m working on a project that seems to be going the right way and Marit Allen Page 131 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] if I’m contributing to the project up to my own standards, and if I feel that my work and my team’s work is actually hitting the mark that it should be hitting, then to me that’s a source of incredible pleasure, I mean that’s a real buzz, it’s a joy and I don’t know if that’s the same as achievement. I don’t think it is, I think achievement is something that demands the admiration of others and I think that at the end of the movie, if I feel that I’ve achieved something with my team, then I feel that that is something that, I need I think, I need the feeling that the people for whom I’ve done the work, that those people feel that they’ve been satisfied with what I’ve done and then I feel that that is a job well done. And I think there’s a slight difference there.

One of the things about film is that it’s obviously open to a lot of scrutiny.

Yes it is. [laughs] It’s very big up there. [laughs]

And of course you can be satisfied in the work that you produce for a film, for a director and for a team, but it then goes through a series of filters or processes which I suppose might start at a crew screening and then move on to you know, critic screenings and then it moves on to reviews and so on and so forth in order to a general reception towards a movie. Can you, could you just talk about that process and your feelings towards it?

Yes, of course I can. When - I’m very often not at the crew screenings because I’m very often not in the place where they have those particular screenings – as crew screenings are nerve racking, or the first time you ever see a film it’s a very profound involvement that one has had with the visuals up in front of you and very big, and of course there are parallel emotions. There are the emotions of the self-criticism and the visual impact of what you actually have done, the piece of work that you’ve been involved in. Also the emotional and physical business of the days when you were actually there doing that and all that that implies. And then there’s the whole aspect of taking in the impact of the film itself and how you understand or how you enjoy the unfolding of the story and whether or not you feel that, you know, that the other component parts of the film that you worked on are what you hoped or expected that they would be, and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. So it’s an intense experience when you first see the film that you’ve worked on, extremely intense. You have to take on board the music, the editing and all the other Marit Allen Page 132 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] attendant things; the storyline and the things that have been cut out, the things that you worked on [telephone ringing] that have completely vanished. Oh sorry.

[break in recording]

Start the tape again. We were just talking about those kind of, the…

Screening.

Yeah, I suppose I was just asking you about the responses that a film gets and how, you know, a film is subject to a lot of scrutiny really…

Yes.

…and it’s defined by many trophies of achievement I suppose.

Yes.

And I just wanted to ask you to expand upon that really.

Yes. Well now. The reviews I suppose, are the first thing and sometimes costume’s mentioned, very often it isn’t mentioned, and very often it’s more important. I remember for instance doing White Mischief, the costumes were extremely important in that particular instance because they helped to define the glamour of the moment of the times, it was such a glorious moment in Africa, early 1940s, and the people were so gorgeous and I had to define in costume terms the different women. So the costumes were noticeable and that was considered to be something that helped, if you like, to define the picture itself. And I suppose the same thing to some extent with Little Shop of Horrors where it was, the costumes were all part of the fun. And with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels where the costumes again were part of the story, it was all interwoven, and the same with Mrs Doubtfire where the costumes helped to completely define the character which is a very interesting part of the process. I mean it’s great fun to be able to bring that kind of thing to the table, you know, to take it to Robin Williams in his house, to talk about the fat suit, to Marit Allen Page 133 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] develop the character with him, to open a suitcase that I brought from London that day and for him to look at it and squeal and say, ‘There she is! There’s Mrs Doubtfire!’ [laughs] Then put it all on and do a twirl and to be part of that creative process, it’s a huge buzz, it’s a great excitement. Then the films that I’ve been doing more recently have been much less identifiable in terms of costume. I think that I’ve learned to submerge, if you like, any kind of glamour or any kind of obvious detail, any kind of flamboyance of any description and to be able to make the costumes – which I always try to make the costumes serve the story, that’s what our job is defined by – but in fact to make them completely subliminal, so that in, for instance, Brokeback Mountain, which I love to pieces, that the costumes are, they serve the landscape as much as the actors and they’re part of the story but in a way that it just tastes the same as the rest of the feast, if you like, and that it has a flavour that entirely belongs to the setting and to the story and that there’s no appearance, if you like, of costume, costume with a ‘c’ doesn’t exist, it’s just people in a landscape and progressing through their lives within the story. And in All the King’s Men the director had a very definite – he had a certain loathing I think for costume and that was difficult to, it was difficult to negotiate his dislike and distaste for anything that smacked of costume and the Louisiana of the 1940s and fifties, because that has a definite sort of resonance and people have a definite recall of what things looked like in those days in that place. So the question of being able to relate those costumes in all honesty to their times, so that the audience feels comfortable and knows where they are and at the same time serves Steven Zaillian who wanted the words to be the uppermost part of the experience, that was a challenge and that was something that we’ll see now, whether that worked. I don’t know if that answers that question. Maybe it answers a different question.

Well I suppose – do you read all of the reviews?

I don’t. I mean I read the reviews – I get the reviews and I read them. But the reviews and, the reviews and the audience reaction are maybe two different things and I don’t suppose I get much of audience reaction, but I suppose my love of a film has much more to do with my relationship with the film and the director of the film than it ever does with the reviews and the audience reaction. So my very favourite film can be a film that few people have seen and that maybe it had very little success, but I think that in maybe creative and Marit Allen Page 134 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12] collaborative terms it was a huge adventure for me and I had a tremendous experience. And those are the films that are dear to my heart.

So is it normal to get feedback from a director once a film has been made? No, not really. Once the film’s been made, if the director feels that he’s made the film he wanted to make, then that’s about as much feedback as you get.

Do you wish sometimes that there was more feedback?

No, the best possible feedback is that someone asks you back.

Right.

That’s the only feedback that really counts. If somebody wants to work with you again, and that’s all the feedback you need.

Right. I understand. And do you think, what do you think about that kind of transformation that’s gonna happen to a film where it wasn’t received that well at the time it was released and then as years go by, it you know, critical opinion changes about the nature of that film. Have you ever experienced that in relation to some of the films you’ve worked on?

Well yes, in fact it’s happened very much with Nicolas Roeg’s work and it probably will continue to happen with his work, ‘cos there are some films of his that are relatively undiscovered even now and I think that he’s been such a major influence actually, in the British film world, I think that young British film directors today do refer directly back to Nicolas Roeg and what he was doing in the early seventies and I think that it must be deeply frustrating for him that he has sort of become an icon without having the success that I think that he deserved at the time. So yes indeed, that has happened.

Right. One of the things I think that’s happened to film costume is that it’s become more noticeable. Do you agree with that at this point in time?

Marit Allen Page 135 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side A [part 12]

I wonder if it’s more noticeable or if there’s more interest in it, therefore more press about it than there has been. I think that people have begun to see it, maybe become more aware of it because of interest and because of newspaper, magazine articles and so forth. The fact that it’s become more noticeable is I don’t think really a compliment because I think that it shouldn’t in fact be noticeable. I think that the greatest skill in fact is to be part of the whole and to be unremarkable. I think if it serves the story to be flamboyant, then it’s because the story requires it to be flamboyant and therefore it’s part of the composite of that whole. However, I’m becoming more and more aware of the fact that the less people know of what we do, the more successful maybe we are.

Seems to me that there are two aspects of film costume design that make it noticeable; one is period dress and the other is I suppose, costume inspired by fashion or that inspires fashion. Could you talk about the distinctions between those two areas of film costume?

Well, very often fashion is inspired by period costume. It’s not inspired by contemporary film I don’t believe, unless, I mean I suppose I could imagine an example where Ingmar Bergman maybe in the sixties had such a clean and defined way of looking at red for example, that I can imagine that that might have influenced a designer at the time, Marimekko or I don’t know, I’m just imagining. And then I think Fellini’s movies in the fifties very much had an influence on contemporary design at the time. I think that he must have absolutely blown a huge hole in the imaginations of people who were designing contemporary clothing, because everything that he did in 8½ and his films at that particular moment were just magnificent and larger than life, and to me it sort of put Italy on the fashion landscape. But then again, other Italian films, when I think of The Leopard or of Death in Venice, then those both being period films, I think that people very much lean towards the romance of those, that type of movie when they’re interpreting contemporary design and it very easily translates into delectable dresses for today. So I think that there are wonderful cross-pollinations and I think that period film very often does sort of kick- start a feeling, but I don’t know how really deeply that gets into the High Street. I think that it’s something that it’s fun for designers to put in their press releases, but whether it gets from the press release to the street is something that I wonder.

[End of Tape 7 Side A] Marit Allen Page 136 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13]

Tape 7 Side B [part 13]

I mean you mentioned Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and I think that’s had quite a profound impact upon ideas about European style, or in particular Italian style…

Yes, Italian style.

…and there’s been a rush of publications recently about it and Valentino recently made some remarks about how awful it was that certain female actresses were happy to be photographed in their jogging pants, walking to the shops and this is no way to carry on and he cited La Dolce Vita as being the way that stars and actresses should carry themselves. And it seems that there is this kind of cross-pollination I suppose, between reality and fiction in film. Just going back to those two ideas of film influenced by fashion and the other way round, and this idea of period costume. I suppose what they both do is they make film costume noticeable and you’ve stated earlier that you’re interested in making film costume unnoticeable, so how do you go about that? How do you shake off those indicators?

Well, you have to whittle it down to its purest form, if you’re going to try to indicate a period without too much hullabaloo. I mean I do think that Jacqueline Durran did that beautifully in Pride and Prejudice and I do think that it’s a possible, it’s a choice of a way to go when you’re dealing with a period. I think… Isn’t that… let me restart that idea. I don’t know… put me the question again.

I was just saying that there are two aspects to film costume that make it noticeable; one is when you try and make it look like it’s been inspired by fashion and the other is when you have to make film costume set within a certain period. So I suppose it’s the idea of a costume drama and the way that costume is central to the recounting of that story.

Yes, yes.

And you state very clearly that you’re interested in making your film costume designs unnoticeable and it seems to me that there are certain indicators in those two types of film Marit Allen Page 137 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13] costume design that you have to shake off in a sense, in order to achieve what you’re trying to do, so I suppose the question is how do you go about that? How do you resist costume with a capital ‘c’?

[laughs] Yes. Well I suppose that really it’s tailored, isn’t it, by the kind of project that you’re working on and by the whim or the will of the director that you’re involved with. I mean if I were required to do a big musical for any reason and it required extravagant and intricate costumes a lot of glitter and sparkle, then obviously what I said before doesn’t relate any more, so I suppose that each time you come to a project you come to it with the needs of the project in mind. So it isn’t a passepartout, it isn’t a direct rule at all, it’s just that I think that it’s a really interesting thing and it can apply to either a period or to a contemporary film, that it can be invisible but still have its own feeling and still have its own direction and still have, if you like, even a sense of style that works within the project itself, you know, that it still has to have an identity. You can’t walk away from that and you can’t walk away from the shape of the time that you’re talking about. But I think if you’re true to the shape and you eliminate the unnecessary, if you like, and just stick with the very, very basics from that timeframe and you work within a certain textural and colour palette, then I think you can be true to both somehow. You can find your own truth, the truth that belongs to that particular project.

I mean just going back to this hypothetical musical, would the director in employing you have an understanding that you would be interested in perhaps resisting that idea of costume with a capital ‘c’ that would be expected of you?

Well that would be up for discussion I think. That’s something that needs to be talked through very early on, because obviously you have to be quite sure that you’re both going in the same direction and working on the same kind of project. So that’s the very first discussion that you ever have, you listen to the requirements, if you like, of the director who’s making the very first conversations with you and you get a sense instantly of whether that person is interested in the clothes looking realistic and dirty, or whether they want a refined and even a flamboyant representation of the characters. That’s something that you sense right away and it’s not that you have to dig a little, but you have to get there on the first meeting. Marit Allen Page 138 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13]

I suppose another way of asking the question would be, do you think that directors have an understanding of your particular approach to costume?

No I don’t. I don’t think so. What I do think is that if directors look at my CV, they, if they know the films that I’ve worked on, then they’ll realise that it’s a very, very catholic palette [laughs] and that there are films of very many different types there and that I think that if they know the films that I’ve worked on then they’ll realise that I’m happy to turn my hand to anything and that I’m happy to do a big musical that’s very loud and bouncy, I’m happy to do a curious and obscure period drama and I’m happy to do something that is about a lot of boys who are very dirty on some very fast horses.

It’s interesting that you used the word catholic there.

[laughs]

What did you mean by that, what are you referring to?

What I mean is very varied. Extremely varied, from the most colourful to the most black and white.

Because obviously when you receive a script, a film is proposed to you, you obviously have to make some decisions. You have to decide whether or not to work on that project. Are there certain criteria that you will only work within?

Yes.

Could you say something about that?

Very definitely. Yes, there are many criteria that I work within. First of all, I need to know the director and what he’s done before. When I read a script I will not do anything that’s about, I don’t like violence, I don’t like murder, I don’t like serial killers, I don’t like – without in any way meaning to be puritanical – I mean I’ve done films about war and Marit Allen Page 139 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13] disaster, but the human spirit is the subject of the story rather than the actual conflict, that’s more interesting to me, it’s what happens during the course of the story to the characters involved in the story and if I feel it’s fascinating for a series of different reasons, then I would love, you know, I would love to approach that subject. But if I feel that it’s, I don’t know, trifling or – I mean I don’t mind comedies, obviously, I like comedy very much indeed, but it’s got to have something of interest and have some sort of depth for me to be involved really. I don’t think I can approach a project unless I respect the project I’m involved with, because I commit too much, I give too much of myself. You know, I give maybe six months of my life to the project and I count every day as extremely important, so I’d like those days of my life to be involved in a project that I’m going to be very happy to go and see and be proud of.

Now, just for clarity, could you describe the process of how you get to hear about a film or how people approach you with projects and you know, what comes first – is it the script or is it a conversation or are there any other people involved in the process apart from you and say the director and producer?

Oh yes, well my agents are involved too and I have an agent who has an office in Los Angeles and in London and they know about films that are coming up and if I hear of something and I need to have more information, then I can call them and say, oh will you scoop this out, or will you find out what’s happening on that, or is this going or not going. And you know, sometimes it’s something that you read in the newspaper or in a trade magazine, sometimes - more often than not - it’s friends, it’s – although I say I haven’t got a network – I do have a long-term partner who is involved in the business too in America, he lives and works in America as a rule and he has a large network of other friends who work on interesting and to me exciting and worthwhile projects, and he very often will know through his internet connection, if you like, with others, things that are coming up. And then if not that, then it’s people who know my work and have worked with me before who approach me about things. That’s more often than not been the way.

And how many – I mean just so we have an idea – how many projects would come through to you in a year, let’s say? A very rough…

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Well, not as many as you might expect. I suppose maybe five projects would come towards me in a year, maybe more, and of those five maybe two are interesting to me and maybe three I would reject out of hand. I wouldn’t go for an interview on something that I wasn’t interested in. So I mean I’d rather not eat than work on a project I have no respect for.

Fair enough. So, can you just talk me through the idea of having selected a film that you’re interested in, and I don’t know how you, does this conversation go through your agent or do you talk to directly to the director – can you talk about that and about you know, how many other people might be up for interview and what the interview process might be about?

Well, my agent is, they are the people who set up the first meetings. And they never tell me how many other people are up for the job, I’d rather not know I think, but I suppose that you know, maybe on average about five people might be up for the same job, are being interviewed at the same time. And the process is that I go for an interview, wherever that is, and then the meeting takes place and then my agents are the ones who hear. I don’t then get directly back in touch with the director or the producer, but as a rule the producer then will have spoken to the director about all the interviews that he’s undertaken and he will then tell the producer the people that he wants to work with, the producer then will get in touch with the agent and the agent will get in touch with me. Then I’ll either jump through the ceiling or not, and then we proceed, then the agent will make the deal. So it’s entirely up to her from then on to actually negotiate the deal and the next time I talk to the director is when everything’s been ironed out and the project’s in hand, and then we have more meetings and then we discuss the nitty-gritty of how he wants to approach, or her, how they want to approach the subject and where we go from there.

So is your suitability to the project primary to a discussion about budgets, fees and the like?

Well everything’s negotiable, you know. So I mean if, I mean I’m always saying that really the size or the budget of a project is not what influences me, it’s the actual project Marit Allen Page 141 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13] and the director of that project that interests me. And you know, I’ve worked within the framework of the project rather than within the framework of my usual salary or…

I suppose it was just to get clarification on if let’s say, hypothetically, there were five costume designers going to interview, do they come along to the meeting with five different fees?

No, the fees aren’t discussed at the first meetings. No, no. It’s purely a question of the relationship that might exist between you and the director and whether the director is interested in you as a person and thinks that you can actually accomplish the task on their behalf, you know.

And would you take along evidence of inspiration or…

Oh a lot of people take along tapes, you know, they have promotional tapes of themselves and their own work. I don’t have that. As a rule, if it’s about a particular period, I will sometimes take along some signatory images of that particular period that I think relate to the script as I’ve read it and understood it. And I, just to give a flavour of what that character might look like or what at that period in time, let’s pretend it’s say for example in the twenties, that someone who’s impoverished in the twenties might look like this, as opposed to the general sort of, the sort of Vogue type image of somebody in the twenties. And discuss it, just periphery, on that sort of basis, but really the initial discussion is a question of getting to know each other and getting to see whether there’s trust and respect and those sort of things going on.

I suppose it is also about offering an indication of the strength of your knowledge base and your capacity for research?

Yes. I mean before now I remember when I went for the first meeting on All the King’s Men with Steve Zaillian, I’d come across one book that I thought was really indicative of the kind of feeling that the script portrayed, the atmosphere that was around and about during the course of the story and it was a book that appealed to Steve Zaillian very much and you know, he wrote down the publishers and so on and immediately ordered a copy. Marit Allen Page 142 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13]

So that was an indicator for him that my mind was on the right track, that I was actually looking at it from a perspective that he could appreciate and that he liked the perspective. And for instance on Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee and Ridrigo Prieto, the DP, and I all arrived at our very first meeting with the same book. And that was again, it was a wonderful signal that we were all completely synchronised in terms of the look and feel of the film.

Could you say something about the film costume design field, I mean it must obviously be international firstly, how many people are involved in it, I mean how many actual film costume designers who are titled so are there in the field?

Yes, very many. Internationally, I mean Spain has its own area and Italy too, they have very strong costume design sections and people. Wonderful, wonderful people. France too. I mean I belong to a union in California and they have very many costume designers, but then their costume designers cover a great spectrum of costume design too, not just film costume design, but also television, cable, commercials and so forth, you know. So to answer the question, how many costume designers there are, would be very difficult because there are very many different levels of costume design. But I mean in England we have a number of the very best, I think, costume designers in the world. So the competition is intense and lamentably there isn’t a strong industry here any more, because of the way the Government has structured the tax and because of the expense, not just of materials but also of the labour costs in this country, it’s become prohibitive, and so it’s impossible for foreign investors to come here any more. So the bottom has really fallen out of the big time film business in this country. And even English directors go abroad to make their films because then they can make co-production deals and they can get money from everywhere, because we don’t have the investment to give and because the Government is not in the slightest interested in the movie business. It’s a very unpredictable business, of course we all know that, but in general, if you’re going to make three hundred films a year, you’re going to have a percentage of successful films. And I think that rather than making the industry more desperate, I think that DVDs and videos have made it actually much more interesting and more viable because there’s an extended life now of film, rather than you know, when DVDs and videos started to appear, people were already ringing the death knell, you know, they were already saying that that’s the Marit Allen Page 143 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13] end of the film business as we know it, and it’s quite the reverse to be true. And now, as I say, it gives an extended life and many more people see films now than they ever did, because they can see them at their own convenience. And I think that you know, that small films that are being made in this country, they somehow, as far as I can see, they don’t have the same energy or the same honesty of endeavour that the films of the sixties did, when things kick-started. I’m talking about small independent films. When they were making This Sporting Life, for example, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Alfie. Those films, when they were made, they were not made on a big budget and they were very reflective of what was happening socially and on every level in England. You know, it embraced costume, it embraced music, it embraced lifestyle and it was very dynamic and earthy and gritty; you could taste it, you know, it wasn’t always comfortable but it was always relevant. And it seems that we’ve completely lost that knack now and what we have now are films that are playing to the least common denominator of guts and excitement and car chases, which we can’t do properly anyway, Hollywood have always got us beat, because they can spend more money on it and they’re more clever and they have more special effects and the availability of cars to crash or people to hit, or whatever it is. And it seems to me that we’re entirely mistaken in trying to go into that field when – or the gangster field – I mean it’s absurd, you know, when you consider what Coppola did with the Mafia and you know, we’re trying – and even what we did in the sixties about the gangster world or the underworld of England, there are so many more interesting things that we could be making films about that might relate to today’s society that seem to be, you know, it either has to be high comedy and about kinky boots, or it has to be about East End gangsters and there’s no social relevance there as far as I can understand it. And I think that people are today, if you like, more interested in that than they ever were. I think they’d be less surprised to be given a film today that was relevant socially than they were in the sixties. In the sixties it came as almost like a body blow that people were fascinated and went to see it and embraced it as a part of what was happening within their own lives, you know.

D’you think it’s because people are not really so interested in seeing that relevance?

I don’t think that’s the reason. I think that things like The Killing Fields, you know, that if that were being made today and it related to today, I think that people would be fascinated. Marit Allen Page 144 C1046/13 Tape 7 Side B [part 13]

I don’t see why they wouldn’t.

[End of Tape 7 Side B]

Marit Allen Page 145 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

I mean, I was just going to ask you Marit, that in recent years there’s been the return of the documentary, particularly American documentaries and they’ve had a particular impact. I’m thinking of some of Michael Moore’s movies and also the controversial documentary about McDonald’s, Supersize Me. D’you think that’s also happening in British film or d’you think it’s not so in evidence?

I don’t see it. I don’t see it all, which is distressing isn’t it? I think that we should have more comment in film and I don’t know why there isn’t a young generation of filmmakers who have got things to say. It should be easier now than it ever was, you know, with video cameras we know that, you know, that it can be done for peanuts. I don’t know why there isn’t social comment or social interest, I really don’t know why.

Yes and you know, the average teenager in this country has the technology to produce a film in their bedroom.

That’s right.

On their computers, but it – I don’t know, perhaps we need to wait a few more years for a newer generation to come along. But I agree with you, it is depressing. So, if we have a diminished film industry it seems strange that we’re known for producing some of the very best film costume designers – why d’you think that is?

Well I think that started with the BBC. I think the BBC was the best training ground there ever was for costume designers and some of our very best costume designers came straight from the BBC and developed their craft there. And they were required to do everything, to have a huge imaginative input into the projects, like Dr Who for example, in the early days and the early historical BBC productions. I mean I think that was where the authenticity of the costumes really got back to where they should have been in the first place and where authenticity began to mean something and costume design became something that was respectable and accurate and interested in its historical relevance. I think that people like John Bright and Jim Acheson actually made a huge impact and both of those people came Marit Allen Page 146 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14] from the BBC. And I think that it’s been one of those things where one has been able to follow their lead if you like, I think that then the relevance of research and careful detailing and commitment to fabric research and to using fabrics that related to the period and to the class of people, that those things suddenly became I think important. I think that they’d been largely ignored before and there’d been a nod towards Victoriana and there’d been a nod towards the mediaeval, but very often, the actual intricacies and the real true detailing had been largely given a wide berth and people had just gone off and sort of made you know, a big feast of it, a big pudding out of it all, rather than an actually detailed and wonderfully researched documentation of the time within the story frames.

At our last meeting you spoke about beige costume design.

Yes. [laughs]

So can you just say where those costume designers would fit into that – did they liberate costume design from its beige period or were they part of it?

Well, I think that there was a certain aspect, no there was a certain beige period that I think English costume design had to pass through, because it was, if you like, it was the segue between the technicolour of Hollywood interpretation of period and where we are today, which is a much more realistic view of how it was in times gone by, and I think we needed definitely to pass through a sort of sepia stage where everything appeared to be seen through that sepia lens and that helped it somehow to settle back into real costume, into the real clothing of the periods that we were talking about. So it was a very good transition I think, from sort of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and that was glorious in its day, but it didn’t have much in the way of actual relevance to where they were. Maybe that’s not a fair example because it was a fun musical, but anyway, the Hollywood costume dramas that took place in 1840, 1860 on the western plain, it was a very, very sketchy period feeling that they had, whereas once it came I suppose back through that sort of sepia filter, it became much more realistic and much more true to its own time and we were able I think to move on from there to a less beige, more detailed, more in-depth coverage in terms of fabric texture, style of the various periods that we go into today.

Marit Allen Page 147 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

You mentioned that the BBC was an important breeding ground for costume talent.

Yes.

Your career path into film costume design is fairly unconventional.

Yes.

Is there a conventional route into it? As such, is there an educational path?

There is. There are wonderful courses at the colleges in and around London; Wimbledon, St Martin’s and so on, that do deal with film, theatre costume design. I know that I get CVs from people all the time who have those qualifications. It’s very difficult to go from there directly into costume design. It’s much more usual that they would go, that a student would go, having qualified well from one of those courses, would go and work in a costume house. That’s generally the way it happens, although the BBC do run their own course now to try and help to place people. And working in a costume house is, although it’s extremely arduous and it would appear to be I think, very mundane work, it actually does help. It helps people to see how the structure of making a film happens, how the procedure is involved, that a designer will come in with sketches, with ideas, with needs and that the costume house will then help to service those needs to make those costumes, actually to create them, or to assemble a series of costumes that relate to that project within the costume house. And they will learn much more intimately about period and about the construction of clothing and the definite shapes of shoes and accessories and so forth. So I think that to go into a costume house, it’s a very – although it’s hard work, I think it’s a very decent way through and a lot of people do go from costume house then, they become acquainted with designers, designers can spot a million miles away somebody who has an agile mind and a committed soul, you know, and who really wants and has the enthusiasm to be involved in the kind of work we do for the kind of hours that we work. And you know, are delighted then to take those people with them if they can, if it’s possible, on to a film set and then of course the difficulty in England particularly at the moment, is maintaining work for those people. So you know, I mean I love to take in trainees, absolutely love it. I love to have people coming on as trainees on to a picture and to work Marit Allen Page 148 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14] alongside and to observe and to help where possible, to go shopping or picking up buttons or whatever it is, just to get a foot in the door and to see how the process, how it all takes place. But it’s surprisingly difficult to get a production company to let you take on trainees. And of course there are all kinds of – I don’t know – there are problems there too, so with the best will in the world it’s hard to take on people and there’s nothing I like better than to teach, but it’s hard to actually make it happen.

So, let’s say you have an archetypal person who studied on a course at one of the colleges and, or has worked in a costume house for a number of years and caught your attention and has been brought in as a trainee – what would they move into, what role might they take in terms of being…

Part of the team?

…actually employed as part of the team?

Well, as my assistant would be a good way. Or even just starting out, if that person doesn’t have any knowledge of film, then it’s hard to get them involved as an assistant, depending on the size of the project. If it’s a small project, then that’s feasible, but if it’s a big scale project it’s very difficult, because film obviously has a language of its own too and to know how the timeframe of the piece is structured in terms of the schedule for the film. I mean to know when what needs to be ready and how long ahead and what the process of actually you know, assembling all the clothes for a film, that’s something that takes a certain amount of knowledge, you have to know about film to be able to make a plan and to be an assistant you need to be able to help in that area. So as a runner I suppose, as the runner in a costume or an assistant in the costume department to the costume designer would be probably the stepping stones.

You just said you’d expect them to have a knowledge about film, but this is a knowledge of working practices as opposed to…

That’s right.

Marit Allen Page 149 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

…knowledge of film as a viewer.

That’s, right. Exactly. Working practice.

Do you think that confusion between those two knowledges often occurs?

I think that for people to have a knowledge of film is important, but only in that it shows interest. And that it gives them as a frame of reference. For instance, I know on, I was working with a local crew in Calgary and I had a young woman working for me who was really skilled on the computer, she was an ace, fantastic. She could access anything, find anything, any buckle, any boot, anything you wanted she could find. But when I said that I thought that the shape of the shirt ought to be really close to the body like Steve McQueen and found that she didn’t know who Steve McQueen was, it was a real wake-up call for me. So in other words, it’s important to know, not just how a film actually is made and how the structuring of the process goes from A to B, that’s terribly important. That is something that you, obviously you access more of that and acquire more of that as you go along during the course of seeing how a film happens. But it is awfully important to know who Steve McQueen was. To have a history of film, just because without that it’s like never having read the Bible, if you don’t know who Joseph and the many coloured coat was, well it puts you at a disadvantage if you don’t know who Shylock is, then how do you approach that. You know, it’s just part of the vernacular of what you’re doing.

Yes, certainly. I’d just like to ask you Marit to reflect on how your career in fashion journalism has impacted upon your career in film costume design. We did speak about this before, but it seems to me that the skills that you’ve accumulated over your career path have actually been quite important to the development of the career.

Yes.

Can I just ask you to expand upon that as an idea?

Yes. I think that the most obvious link for me is being able to trust my own instinct. So that whether it was looking at a fashion collection and having an instinct for what was the Marit Allen Page 150 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14] thing of the moment, what was the thing that had a truth and a resonance about it that made it relevant to its moment in time and that made it exciting and interesting, vibrant, new or a thing of extreme beauty, that that instinct, being able to trust that instinct and being able to recognise it and have a sort of seventh sense about the way that, it sort of impacted if you like, on fashion. I suppose that then having the same instinct with regard to a character within a film and being able to sense and listen to my own instincts about the kind of person that that character is within the story, within the time period within the framework of the story, and within that person’s relationship to others. Whether that’s a flamboyant character, whether that’s a modest character, whether that character feels comfortable wearing black or not. Those are things that you can only presume in a way and to be able to listen to your instinct is to me the safest and surest way to go forward. So I think that that’s the clearest link for me. And I think it probably applies to very many things, creative things, that if you have a real belief in your own feelings about something, your own instinct, that it doesn’t need a great deal of intellectualisation, it needs a great deal of sort of quiet listening and belief, self-belief and an awareness of the things around you. Absorbing things about space, about sound, about character, about emotion and being able to translate those into visual and tactile things.

When you’re working as a film costume designer, do you ever happen upon moment where you’re suddenly reminded of an earlier time in the world of fashion? Is there anything that sparks a memory?

No, because I don’t think they’re as closely related as that. I don’t think so. In fact, most people in film have very suspicious feelings about fashion. Fashion’s very dangerous within film you know, because unless it’s classic it becomes ridiculous very quickly. And a lot of ridiculous things can happen in fashion that disappear very quickly, you know, after the first flush of collections they vanish and it’s all been part of the show folks, and we don’t think about it any more. But those things are considered to be mistakes and they become very visible if they translate on to film, so even when doing a contemporary film that is supposed to have an edge of fashion, unless it’s supposed to be humorous, which then you can get away with all kinds of ridiculous nonsense, but if you’re actually doing a film that’s supposed to stand the test of time, then you’re always going to be looking for something that’s not necessarily safe, but if you think about Hitchcock and you think about Marit Allen Page 151 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14] what he did and the way he defined the women in his stories, it wasn’t always safe. It was always beautiful and it was always classic and you can always look at it. So it’s a question of finding, I think, the truth of the character and trying to get as close to real people within film as you possibly can. I mean my closest moment with an actress is when I can show that actress something that relates from my heart, if you like, directly to the character that she’s going to portray and if she recognises the same thing in it and then we know that we’re on the same page, then the trust is born and the character is born and we proceed from there. So it’s a question of trying to find the real soul of the character and that’s very different from fashion. Fashion’s always moving very quickly.

It’s interesting that you say that actually because it means that you’re not, you’re unconcerned with the instability I suppose, of fashion and what you’re looking for is something that perhaps might be considered more enduring.

That’s right. More enduring in terms of the look of the clothing that you’re talking about, and also more realistic and more human in terms of what is acceptable for that person, or what will reflect something about that person’s character and state of mind. I mean I can think of films that are very concerned with reflecting the moment. There was a film made not long ago called Thirteen with Holly Hunter and it was about a mother’s relationship with her thirteen year old daughter, and the mother and daughter were almost indistinguishable. Well that does happen in Los Angeles, in America as a whole, you know, if you get a sparky young mother and you can almost not tell the difference between the mother and the daughter and that was reflecting a certain area and a certain problem. However, that’s a very, that was reflecting that moment’s fashion for its own reason, for the story reasons, and therefore it’s important in that sense because it’s reflecting their conflicts and their, you know, their very difficult lives. But that’s where the fashion of the moment relates to contemporary film. But as a rule, films are telling stories that are more enduring than that and if that’s the case, then what you’re looking for is clothes that reflect a more enduring look at that person’s life.

It seems as if there’s a difference between what fashion reflects and what costume within a film reflects upon – could you say something about that?

Marit Allen Page 152 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

Very definitely. I mean fashion depends on so many different layers of a look for example, that it requires that the boots are the right boots, that the accessories are the right accessories, that there are seven long jangling necklaces that go with that particular look and a huge handbag as well and the whole is a very important thing within fashion, that it’s something that is instant, is needed for that particular moment in time by people who want to be seen and photographed. And the current obsession has a great deal to do with that aspect of fashion I think. Whereas in film, even if you’re dealing with somebody who is an icon of the moment, that person will only wear a certain kind of shoes or boots, you know, I’m talking about a contemporary look now. Or they, you know, you can’t give them a handbag like that because it’s going to be far too big within the scene and it’s awkward for them when they come in through that door or when they’re trying to open a car door. So the actual requirements of the action of the film very often preclude things. You can’t put seven jangling necklaces on an actress because the sound can’t operate, because you can’t put a microphone, you can’t hear what they’re saying if they’ve got all these necklaces on. So you know, there are certain sort of actual limitations that are set by the whole process of filming. And then there are the other limitations, which are the fact that the producers and the director particularly, they know that they want their film to have shelf-life, and so what one has to do then I think is to refine the look of the moment and to take the silhouette and to use the silhouette and the colour and the texture to tell a contemporary story if that’s what you’re after, and to pare it down so that it has an element of the moment that you’re talking about, but also an element or the elements that you’re left with are elements that are going to endure.

Very well put. I think it’s very, it very clearly defines I think a difference between the two fields.

Good. See, fashion is never afraid of being ridiculous, never afraid of exaggeration. I mean I think of Gaultier’s evening dresses and all Galliano’s, I mean they’re absolutely extraordinary. But then if you see what an actress will choose to go to a premiere and she will go to Gaultier and she’ll go to Galliano and she’ll choose the most refined, the simplest, the most statuesque dress within the collection. She’ll never go for the wild one, because she knows that the wild one, it stands to be ridiculous when you’re walking up there and millions of people are watching you. Marit Allen Page 153 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

Yes, I mean that’s the strange thing in a sense, that the biggest catwalk that exists in the world…

Is the Oscars.

…is the Oscars, it’s the red carpet of the Oscars.

That’s right.

It’s not an actual catwalk presentation.

No, that’s right.

And it seems to contradict somewhat this idea that there is an actual distinction between the fashion world and the film world. Can you add anything to that?

Well, as we do, I mean we sit glued to those dresses and there are pages of reports afterwards and one after another after another, the ones that are successful are the most simple ones. The simplest in terms of colour and shape and scale and the ones where people push the boat out and take a chance are the ones that are ridiculed, by everybody, you know. So I think that actresses have become very savvy about that. And I think the other thing about celebrity and about people lamenting that you know, we now see actresses are beautiful women walking around in tracksuits, it’s not their fault, it’s our fault. If we have to see them at every moment of the day, then it’s our fault for whatever it is we see them wearing. It’s not their fault, they’re entitled to live their own lives and they put on a show when they have to. They go to the Oscars and get dressed up. You know, they spend a lot of time and effort putting themselves forward in the way that the public wants to see them, when they’re paid so to do, but when they’re on their own time, on their own dime, then I think if we want to look at what they’re wearing, then whatever it is, it’s our responsibility not theirs.

Marit Allen Page 154 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side A [part 14]

Quite true. You mentioned that actresses are quite savvy at picking out these classic dresses. How is it, you know, do they pick that up when they’re being fitted for a costume or do they give you a call to ask your opinion?

No, I think it’s become a huge business in Hollywood now. I think that people who are stylists who style the actresses for the Oscars, they are very, very highly paid, they are very, very within the business, that is a network of people who have – that is a whole career niche if you like, that’s developed over the last few years. I don’t believe it ever existed, you know, twenty years ago. I think it’s something that’s happened with this huge celebrity rush that’s happened, it’s coincided. I mean I’m sure that there were days gone by when people like Hepburn who were associated with Givenchy would never make a false move, but today actresses put themselves in the hands of stylists very often, there are very few who don’t.

And are these stylists, do they work purely for actors and actresses?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I suspect that they might work for – I should imagine that have a sort of coterie of actresses that they work for and go shopping for essentially.

It seems that their definition is quite different from what a magazine stylist might be, for example.

Yes.

For a fashion magazine. I suppose I’d like to ask you a question which is self-reflexive, but I think I’ll turn the tape over first.

[End of Tape 8 Side A]

Marit Allen Page 155 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15]

Tape 8 Side B [part 15]

Yes, I’d just like to ask you how you feel about being reflective on your own career in a, perhaps in a more direct way. I’d just like to ask you how you found the experience of being interviewed?

Well, I think it’s very useful actually. It’s been an interesting experience for me and I think it’s a good moment in my life for me to look back at my career and I’m very pleased that I’ve trodden the path I have trodden. I’m very delighted to have, you know, to have done what I’ve done. And there’s been quite a lot of pain involved, in fact. The pain of learning about loyalties and about how to protect oneself within a very dangerous business, if you like, and how to work within different groups of people in different countries, always under pressure, always with the most heavy and overbearing restraints, restraints of time and finance and materials. You know, how to keep my balance as a person and as a responsible designer, as a responsible part of a team, how to keep that together. That’s always, it’s always a challenge and I love the idea of getting older and being able to use my experience every time I approach a new project. I have much less fear now. And to have reflected on it and to have seen the things that have collaborated within my life and within my careers if you like, collaborated in order to give me the confidence and to help me to trust my own feelings and my own instincts. To reflect on it has been very interesting.

I think that’s the link between the two careers that you’ve had, they’re both collaborative mediums.

Yes, that’s absolutely true.

And they’re about dealing with people in order to get the job done.

Yes, exactly.

Is there anything that you could say about that?

Marit Allen Page 156 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15]

Well I suppose it’s a question of chemistry isn’t it? And understanding your own chemical balance within the framework that you’re given. I mean on Vogue it would be about assembling an interesting cast of characters for a photographic sitting and making sure that the photographer and the fashion story that you were going to do and the models and the location and the hairdresser and the make-up person, they were all going to be people who were going to spark off the same engine, so to speak. So that what you’re going to get was a collaboration that was going to be exciting and interesting and productive, rather than a damp squib. And then being able to process that through the art department and the editorial department and you know, with the editor to realise your vision, so to speak. And within a film, the editor is the director obviously, and the actors and actresses, they require very different things from models, very different approach. However, just dealing with people and being able to communicate as best you can and listen as hard as you can and to listen between the lines I think, has always been something that has carried me through from one career to another. Listening between the lines I think is very important.

The other thing I’ve just thought about is that both of those careers are about unmoveable deadlines.

Oh yes, pressure. Pressure. Well when, in journalism you learn to live with pressure and I think you thrive because of it, I think that deadlines are very exciting and the adrenaline rush that you get before you have to go to press, knowing that you have to go to press, knowing that you have to write that copy by six o’clock that evening, it’s a great boost to the whole system, the creative pulse, if you like, it really gets the creative pulse going. And very often the same thing happens in film. The creative pulse quickens when you realise that you have a time constraint and that you have, oh, a meeting with an actress coming up and you’ve realised that you just absolutely have to assemble those things or those parts of the puzzle to be able to present and to make that first initial thing, or to be able to get something ready for it to go on to the set the next day. You know, the sense of collaboration that you get from people who are on side with you is just extraordinary and that’s really the joy, you know, it’s amazing when you know that somebody – oh my goodness, that they’ve managed to cut that pattern and it’s exactly right and there really wasn’t enough fabric to make that coat, but if you ease it this way and you take a tiny fraction from that and you move the cuffs up a little bit, and can we do it, can we do it? Marit Allen Page 157 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15]

Yes, we can, we can. And we’ll be there all night long if it takes that long and we’ll get it ready for the morning and it will be there. And that sort of collective drive that you have because of deadlines, I think it helps to get the job done. It is exciting.

Would you describe it as stressful?

Oh very stressful. [laughs] It is very stressful. But in a way, I think that there’s something of a confusion between stress and adrenaline. I mean there’s something positive as well as negative about that. And I think that if stress produces adrenaline and if in dreaming at night about what you’re working on you actually can conceive of something within your sleep that is going to help you in the morning – it’s happened to me over and over again when I’ve not been able to come up with an idea or I’ve been searching and searching and searching for something else, something else – and I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and written one word down by the bed and bingo, that was it. And you know, so of course I’m worried about it in my sleep, of course I’m stressing, of course – and working in my sleep, and actually producing an idea in my sleep. I mean what can be better than that, you know, it’s wonderful. So I think it’s the positive side of stress that is actually keeping you moving when you’re doing a film.

If you had the chance to do it again, would you have changed anything?

[laughs] Well maybe there are a couple of projects that I would have chosen to sit out, but that’s a long time ago and I’ve always learnt something from every project, whether it was a way of dealing with people or whether it was a way of getting my work done or dealing with the stress involved, then I’ve always learned something so I think that’s the best thing of all, is to be able to learn and to move on from everything you do.

Now, one of the reasons why you’re being taped and interviewed is that this will become a resource that will be available to those who want to come along to the British Library and listen to the National Sound Archive’s resources.

Yes.

Marit Allen Page 158 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15]

It seems that most of the people that we’ve interviewed for this project have found that the industry that they’ve found themselves in isn’t, the industry isn’t terribly reflective. I mean fashion particularly is not interested in people being reflective…

No.

…about what’s happened before. They’re only interested in what’s to come or what can be pushed forward. I’m not sure if film allows people to be reflective, as an industry. I’d just like to ask you about the process of being reflective and how purposeful it is and how appropriate it might be?

I think it must be. I think it has to be. It’s like history relating to politics. I think that it’s very important, I think, to absorb as much as you can of the past, whether it’s the recent past or whether it’s actually, whether it’s historical reference. I mean it seems to be an integral part of film work anyway, that you have to research. Is that what you mean? You don’t mean actual research do you?

No…

You mean reflecting on other films that have been, or…

Well I suppose that you’ve mentioned, you’ve just mentioned that your career has been about learning and about the acquisition of experiences and knowledge. I suppose this offers you the opportunity to define that and I suppose it’s a question of asking how you hope to hand those experiences on, or is there an opportunity for you to do that within your industry?

Oh, I would hope so. I mean there are certain experiences that I would love to be able to pass on that I think, that would take too long to explain, like the use of various different fabrics for various different cuts and purposes and how on screen you need to balance very, very carefully the weight and the texture of the fabrics that you’re using and to make sure that they’re really going to work with the shapes that you’re cutting. Those are things that you – it would take too long to explain, but a certain lightness that you must have for Marit Allen Page 159 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15] things that float and how and why and how they respond to rain or to snow or to blood or to whatever, whatever the script is going to require of those particular clothes. But in a way, everyone has to learn for themselves those things. But what I can say is that whenever anyone’s trying to cut a dress or cut a coat to make it for an actor that it has to do a series of important things during the course of the story, to be very, very careful about the choice of fabrics, to make sure that if you want it to float that it’s light enough, to if it’s got to maintain its rigidity or its shape during the course of a series of very difficult adventures, that it has the body to withstand that and that if you’re choosing a wool, think about all the different weights of wool that you can choose. If you’re thinking about a diaphanous cotton, think about whether it’s going to disintegrate under those circumstances or not. I think that kind of practical advice I can definitely offer. To always consider the shape and the feelings of the person that you’re dressing, rather than what you want it to be. It’s not so much what you want it to be, it’s what that person’s going to feel when wearing that costume and if it’s going to be something that that person is going to absorb almost as if it’s part of themselves and the character, but to think about that over and above your own feelings or your own likes and dislikes I should say.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that although there are academic books that offer ways of studying film costume design as a viewer, there are no ‘How to’ books out there about how to become a costume designer or the kind of things that you need to know about in order to be one. Can you tell me why there isn’t that book?

I wonder if it’s because everything depends on personal experience. So, and every film that you ever do and every director and actor that you ever work with is different from the one before. For example, I would advise somebody who wants to be a costume designer to consider this – there is a principal actress and she is a very defined character, both as a personality and in the story that you’re approaching. And you have this concept of what she should wear for the most important part of this film and you create this costume together with a seamstress and cutter and with the actress herself and you are completely convinced that this is the ultimate, this is the signature dress of this particular film. And the director is a friend of yours and you feel as if you’re empathetic and you feel as if this is all going to just swim along, and you start shooting on Monday morning and this is a Thursday night meeting. And on Thursday night you have the actress and the director Marit Allen Page 160 C1046/13 Tape 8 Side B [part 15] together and he takes a look at the costume on the actress and he says, ‘I hate it. I hate it’. ‘Now why do you hate it? Can you tell me why you hate it?’ ‘I never want to see it again, I absolutely loathe it.’ ‘Well, is it the shape, is it the texture, is it the colour, is it… can you explain to me what it is about it that you hate?’ ‘No, I hate it, I never want to see it again.’ And we start shooting on Monday morning. So anybody who’s going to want to be a costume designer has to be able to take that moment and consider, now what do we do? What do we do next? We’ve got Friday and Saturday and we rely on other people’s goodwill and skill to get us from that position to Monday morning, the perfect dress. So it’s that kind of situation that you have to be able to deal with and to move away from and so, in other words, your own idea of something, your own pride, your own, what you thought was your own synchronisation with the project, suddenly all gone out of the window, everything’s disappeared and you have to start afresh. And you have to be able to bring, you have to be able to drop whatever it was you liked, whatever it was you thought and approach it completely new and fresh as if nothing ever happened. And not to carry with you any resentment, any upset, any pride, any hurt – never mind all that, that’s completely irrelevant. In the world of movie making, you’re on a new page and you’re in a hurry and you have to bring the energy and enthusiasm as well as the resources within yourself to the next day to be able to make the next thing happen. So I suppose that’s why it isn’t written. [laughing] How could you write that down?

[laughing] I don’t think you can. I think you can speak it. Very good.

[End of Tape 8 Side B]

[End of recording]