Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Costumes by: Eiko Ishioka
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
This movie may be for you if: your wardrobe is infinitely more impressive than your home decor, you like your fantasy fantastical, and you really just love horny vampires.
Where to watch: Netflix, YouTube TV
The costuming for Bram Stoker’s Dracula was done by Japanese art director and designer Eiko Ishioka, earning the film the 1993 Oscar for Best Costume Design. Ishioka was only the fourth Asian nominee to win the award (women of color make up less than 2% of those to even be nominated), and is the first Asian costume designer to be featured on the 100 Fashion Films Project.
Ishioka’s brief acceptance speech concluded with a thank you to former MGM art director Cedric Gibbons for his design of the Oscar statuette in 1928, which she described as “the most beautiful designed man in this planet.” Dracula also took home wins for Best Makeup and Best Sound Editing.
When Dracula director Francis Ford Coppola was given a much smaller budget than he hoped for the film, he declared that the costumes would be the set.
“I was going to lead with the costumes, I was gonna put most of my money in the costumes,” said Coppola in the documentary about the film’s costume design, The Costumes are the Sets. “And I was gonna diminish the sets, I was going to have the set be more highly imaginative use of space and shadow… and let the costume be the jewel of the set.”
Ishioka had been an incredibly successful art director and designer for decades before expanding her career into costume design. Her bold and provocative concepts made her a force in advertising and Japanese media, challenging the country’s conservative ideals and shifting the way brands appealed to female consumers.
In 1979, Ishioka was hired to design the Japanese movie posters for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The director was already familiar with her work from Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) - it was Ishioka’s film debut as the production designer, and Coppola was one of the executive producers.
He would later describe her as “a weirdo outsider with no roots in the business.” Coppola took a risk and trusted her to be a driving force in the making of Dracula, seeing Ishioka’s lack of experience in costume design and movie making as a strength instead of a weakness.
Ishioka was given much more creative freedom and had more aesthetic influence than is often typical for someone in a costume designer role. Recalling the process, Ishioka said, “He hired me as a costume designer, but his feeling was like ‘Eiko, create entire visual concept.’”
She seamlessly directed her creative vision to fashion, strongly influencing the direction of the film’s characters. She described her Dracula, one of the most iconic on-screen portrayals of the character (by Gary Oldman) as “male and female, old and young, ugly and handsome, animal and human.”
Hair and makeup designer Michèle Burke said she also drew inspiration from Ishioka’s designs. The film’s Oscar-winning cosmetics combined Ishioka’s Japanese influences with angelic and biblical imagery from Burke’s Catholic upbringing. The movie features an array of extensive wigs, acting as a sculptural extension of the body that completed Ishioka’s aesthetic vision.
Most of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in the late Victorian period, taking place between England and Transylvania. Coppola wanted his retelling of the classic tale to subvert expected tropes. He insisted on a version of Dracula that wasn’t the formally outfitted figure that the public had grown accustomed to since Bela Lugosi’s Dracula in 1931.
“Dracula has a very Christian style,” described Ishioka. “And a long, long, long film history. Francis wanted to completely throw away this Christian look to create our own vision.”
To break from the buttoned-up vampires of Hollywood past, Coppola’s 1992 vision relied on dramatic and purposefully inaccurate period costuming, with strong influences from Ishioka’s Japanese culture.
Coppola asked Ishioka for “weird,” later saying in an interview: “‘Weird’ became a code word for ‘Let’s not do formula.’ Give me something that either comes from the research, or that comes from your own nightmares.”
The first step in creating a new Dracula was simple: more costumes. The old Dracula had one look, a single outfit that he had seemingly worn for hundreds of years. The new Dracula was a shapeshifter, and his many personas requiring what Ishioka described as “endless transformation.”
