Exclusive: See How Daniel Day-Lewis and Phantom Thread‘s Filmmakers Created an Entire Fashion Show From Scratch
No matter how big the house or how experienced the designers, fashion shows are inevitably chaos backstage—which is why it seems utterly mad that Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson, and their costume designer Mark Bridges would even try to stage a full-on couture show for their film Phantom Thread, which stars Day-Lewis as a midcentury London couturier named Reynolds Woodcock. What’s more, they pulled it off beautifully. Anderson shot the fashion show in a single day, with time to spare to allow it to be documented for The Women of Woodcock, a new book of photos on the set of the film taken by Laura Hynd and published by August Editions. “It looks frantic, but because it was a rather confined space, it was actually very well choreographed,” Bridges explained. “The women would get dressed, get their pearls, and then Reynolds would do the final adjustment.” Bridges’s biggest concern, in fact, was what would happen once the women made it onto the salon-style runway: He was also responsible for dressing the ’50s era audience, which meant studding the front row with looks that mimicked the chic style of a seasoned editor like, say, Harper’s Bazaar famed Carmel Snow, or a movie starlet like Rita Hayworth, decked out in a mink coat and sunglasses. That was all, of course, while dealing with other technicalities like creating a dress made from a swath of real, highly prized 17th-century Flemish lace—which Bridges had to do à la minute after waiting for Day-Lewis to shoot a crucial scene with the unaltered lace. See how it all went down behind the scenes, here.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Behind the scenes of Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
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Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, as seen in The Women of Woodcock, photographed by Laura Hynd and edited by Sophie de Rakoff.
