A biography for Colleen Atwoodhasn’t been written yet.
“If you want someone to feel warm, you dress them in a warm color and put a warm light on them and you get the picture. Sometimes, all that needs pushing a little bit to help tell the story.”
“I don't design my own clothes. It's so not what I think about.”
“Each simian had a much different body suit, so besides trying to define class across species, there was a definite attempt to dress each group in different styles.”
“As a designer, you have to solve a lot of problems. Even though people are wearing clothes that are supposed to look beautiful, they'll have to do all kinds of things.”
“In real life, a lot of people at that level will have their kimonos made especially for them.”
“Costume design allows you to do a different type of research and create characters, whereas in fashion, you create an image and clothing for the masses.”
“I can create clothes for so many different time periods. I've always tried to avoid being pigeonholed. Plus, everything I learn about design and costume from one movie somehow works its way into something else.”
“It's fun conjuring what people will be wearing in the future. We exist in this world today, and yet there are people walking around who still look like they're in the '60s.”
“Inspiration comes from everywhere: books, art, people on the street. It is an interior process for me.”
“One of the challenges with period costumes is, on a technical level, making the scale of different periods work on contemporary bodies. We're much bigger than what people were in older times.”
“As for futuristic costumes, I loved doing 'Gattaca' because I'm a minimalist at heart, and it's a very minimal film. Plus, with Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, how could you go wrong?”
“The designs were based on quite a lot of research of what a movie musical is, filtered through the eyes of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement would have been impaired.”
“I like the architecture of lingerie.”
“I get more distracted by hair or a really bad wig than I do costumes any day of the week.”
“For contemporary fashion, I'm a huge fan of so many of the people out there. I think Azzedine Alaia holds up through three generations of very specific, beautiful design. I think Jean Paul Gaultier also is very interesting with a long span.”
“The thing that's great about being a costume designer is you never know what's going to be next; you never what world you are going to enter.”
“When I do period work, I really like to read about the period as much as I like to look at pictures because sometimes the written word is much better at conveying what their lives were really like and how much they had and where their clothes came from. Because, a lot of time, people dressed in their Sunday best to pose for a picture.”