For the final installment of Bond Week here on the Esquire.com, we decided to go straight to the style source. Costume designer Jany Temime has worked on everything from Harry Potter to Children of Men, but for her first Bond wardrobe, she had Daniel Craig, Tom Ford, and those suits to contend with. A lot of those suits. We spoke with her on the phone from London just now.
ESQUIRE.COM: Was it difficult working with such an established, iconic character?
JANY TEMIME: Yes, it was. Because you think of something like Bond, which has fifty years of success, and you have to give it a new look — you have to update it for 2012. But you can’t change too much, because people have expectations about Bond. So the changes have to be very subtle, and at the same time very efficient. And I think I succeeded because things just look different. It’s actually a great suit or a tuxedo, but they look different in the way they’re cut, the way they fit the body. They look so adapted to his body that you hardly see them. We establish them, and then you sort of forget them, because they fit so well that when you’re watching, you just look at Bond.
ESQ: Speaking of suits, how was it working with Tom Ford? I remember hearing that there were many multiples of each suit made.
JT: Yes, yes. Tom Ford was very nice to work with. I told him what we wanted — because Daniel and I had sort of put together the ideal suit through fittings and trying different types of jackets and trousers — and he produced the suits. He was very respectful of my choices. Being a director himself, he understood that suiting can be trouble for a costume designer, and the suits that he produced were absolutely amazing in quality and in cut. We had three fittings for each suit. Tom Ford sent his tailor, and the suits were made for Daniel, in a very traditional, old-fashioned way. They were the same sort of quality that you can find on Savile Row: hand-made, hand-finished. And the quantity was gigantic. For the opening sequence, with the light gray suit, we had sixty of them.
ESQ: Sixty? Six-zero?
JT: Yes, I know! [Laughs.] But we had thirty for Daniel and thirty for the stunts. Some suits were new, but some had blood on them, or were dirty. And we had extra length in the arms for the motorcycle sequence…
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