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Emma Stone’s 47 costume changes in Cruella chart fashion history: designer Jenny Beavan checks Dior, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen looks in Disney’s stylish 101 Dalmatians prequel

STORYChristian Barker
Emma Stone in a scene from Cruella, the costumes for which were designed by Oscar-winning designer Jenny Beavan. Photo: Disney via AP
Emma Stone in a scene from Cruella, the costumes for which were designed by Oscar-winning designer Jenny Beavan. Photo: Disney via AP
Celebrity style

  • The anti-fashion designer collected her Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road wearing not Louis Vuitton or Dior but Marks & Spencer
  • Costumes were inspired by Christian Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier – as well as the parody film Zoolander

Jenny Beavan, the costume designer for Disney’s new live-action movie Cruella, is the first to admit that “fashion isn’t my thing”.

The two-time Oscar winner – who caused controversy when she collected her most recent Academy Award wearing not Louis Vuitton or Dior but Marks & Spencer – once said she uses clothing purely as a storytelling tool, approaching her work as if costume is part of the set. This approach becomes clear when you consider that her two Oscars (among 10 nominations in total) were for 1986’s A Room with a View and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

Left, a seamstress works on a costume for the film Cruella, and right, Emma Stone wears that same costume in a scene from the film, which featured costumes designed by Oscar-winning designer Jenny Beavan. Photo: Disney via AP
Left, a seamstress works on a costume for the film Cruella, and right, Emma Stone wears that same costume in a scene from the film, which featured costumes designed by Oscar-winning designer Jenny Beavan. Photo: Disney via AP
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Cruella – Disney’s prequel to 1996’s 101 Dalmatians – is another affirmation of that thinking, as several of the garments worn by the titular character are utterly architectural in scale and construction. One particularly impressive gown, so voluminous it’s able to envelope a car, is embellished with more than 5,000 handmade petals, painstakingly affixed by an army of seamstresses.

Emma Thompson as the Baroness and Andrew Leung as Jeffery in Disney’s live-action Cruella. Photo: Disney/TNS
Emma Thompson as the Baroness and Andrew Leung as Jeffery in Disney’s live-action Cruella. Photo: Disney/TNS
Despite her personal aversion to the F-word, Beavan and her team have created some of the most fabulous fashion seen on film for Cruella – a movie in which style is central to the plot. Its narrative follows the generational clash between arch establishment couturier Baroness von Hellman, played by Emma Thompson, and young upstart designer Estella Miller, the future Cruella de Vil, depicted with a serviceable English accent by American Emma Stone.
The storyline begins in the grim post-war London of the 1950s, then runs through the hippyish 1960s, but things really get swinging in the 1970s. This period setting provides the opportunity to contrast the avant-garde punk stylings of ascendant fashion rebel Estella/Cruella with the demure designs of the Baroness, whose frocks are based on the elegant “New Look” pioneered by Christian Dior in the 1950s.