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Eastern lore, Western allure
By Mimi Avins (Times)
Updated: 2005-12-09 10:24

In period films, costume designers wrestle with the sticky problem of making historical accuracy and theatricality compatible. To create the costumes for "Memoirs of a Geisha," Academy Award-winning designer Colleen Atwood also had to understand and portray an exacting culture.

"In Japan, there are rules for everything," she says, "so what you wear in a particular season is very well-defined."

For months before production began on the film, which is based on the bestselling 1997 novel by Arthur Golden and which opens Dec. 9, Atwood flung herself into research. She pored over archival photos from the 1920s through the 1950s, studied esoteric textile techniques and became conversant with rules for proper dress �� the Japanese equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day.

"There's no such thing as getting it all right," she says. "Everybody has a different idea about what's right and what's wrong, and what pleases some people doesn't please others. Luckily, I had a few advisors who had a sense of humor and said, 'Just do it.' "

Doing it, designing costumes for dozens of principals and hundreds of extras, required taking artistic license. For example, Atwood concluded that the subtlety of actual geisha dress wouldn't have the right impact on film.

"We were taking an art form that is a huge part of Japanese culture, but it was important to remember that we were making a movie, based on a book of fiction, written by a guy, about a geisha," Atwood says. "It's not a documentary film. I'd worked with [director] Rob Marshall before on 'Chicago.' His vision was that this movie is a grand story about a woman's life, a sort of 'Gone With the Wind' set in another time and place. His vision freed all of us to create a theatrical world together." (Marshall's approach was reflected in the casting of the film, which created a flurry by awarding the key roles to Chinese actresses.)
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