With garments old and new, costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini transforms Angelina Jolie into the ultimate icon of arias.
You can’t tell the story of a diva’s life without the right gowns — wardrobe and jewels are essential to our idea of the prima donna, one of many tools these formidable women use to transmit mythos and majesty. The songbird’s soul is what matters most; it’s her interiority that creates the magic, including the grit and beauty that pour out from the lungs and onto the stage. But the armor counts, too. And in filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s Maria, about the life of opera soprano Maria Callas, the clothing tells the tale of a complicated woman navigating the winding turns of a dramatic existence. “I re-created her entire wardrobe with extreme passion, trying to put myself in the shoes of the [icon],” says Massimo Cantini Parrini, the film’s Oscar-nominated costume designer. “Clothing is a status symbol, a nonverbal means of communication. I wanted Maria to appear true. I wanted her immortal distance — between being a woman and a diva at the same time — to shine through her clothes.”
That distance — between the public power she conveyed onstage and the private pain she felt in her Paris apartment — is the crux of Larraín’s film, which features one of Hollywood’s own lofty titans, Angelina Jolie, as the titular star. The film centers on Callas’s final days in the 1970s, but we time travel through the 40s, 50s, and 60s as well to witness the highs and lows of her own particular hero’s journey. The clothes change along with the decades, from the prim and cinched waists of her glory days to the blacker shrouds of her later years. “In the 50s and 60s, I wanted to emphasize how the diva was at the height of fashion, wearing the biggest names and choosing who created her dresses, hats, gloves, and shoes,” says Cantini Parrini, who utilized a darker color palette to punctuate a later, more reflective period of Callas’s life. “The biggest challenge for me was to be as close as possible to her thoughts in the 1970s, and therefore imagine what she would have liked to wear and have in her wardrobe.”
A sketch of Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas
I’m a maniac in my work — and I truly believe that detail makes the difference.
Massimo Cantini Parrin
A sketch of Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas
He was utterly comprehensive in his efforts, creating around 60 outfits for Jolie to wear throughout the movie. “I presented my work to Angelina at our first meeting in Los Angeles,” he says.
“I showed up with suitcases full of drawings, fabrics, prints, and vintage inspirations. It was a beautiful day creating the character together with her.” But there was also some remarkable serendipity that lent the film authenticity: Cantini Parrini collects rare vintage dating back to 1640, and he happened to own some of Callas’s actual garments, including a dress and evening coat that he used for a scene.
“Maria Callas, like all the ladies of that period, gave away a lot of clothes once they were out of fashion,” he says. “In Italy, she was dressed by Biki [Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure], a very important Milanese designer. I was lucky enough to come across a beautiful brown dress many years ago at a flea market. Inside I saw that it was signed ‘Biki’ and only at home did I notice that on the hem there was a cotton label that said ‘Maria Callas’ with a sequential number, as if it had been catalogued. I was shocked!”
A sketch of Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas
Even with some of Callas’s own garments in the film, it’s actually a white robe that Cantini Parrini created himself, and that Maria wears at home, that becomes something of the marquee piece in the movie — a symbol of her essential duality, a cloak that conveys both barefoot Hellenistic glamor and reclusive frailty. “It’s a pure wool dressing gown that I had made in Rome by hand based on my design. I wanted something ethereal but with an aesthetic importance,” he says. “I wanted it to echo an ancient Greek past in color and shape, like [it was made for] a sort of priestess. It’s like her second skin, the thing that protects her and envelops her in the domestic sphere.”
It’s at moments like this that Cantini Parrini’s joy in conveying character through clothes becomes our own; for two hours, in a dark theater, we feel we’re able to see Maria Callas unfold in front of us, one hem at a time. “Being able to re-create past worlds is a dream. It wasn’t difficult for me to immerse myself in this adventure,” says Cantini Parrini. “I’m a maniac in my work — and I truly believe that detail makes the difference.”
