Connector OUT & ABOUT Field Notes Behind the seams with Sandy Powell. Keeping unsheltered Atlantans warm. The Hawks’ fan zone returns. Powell, a three-time Oscar winner known for her work on The Favourite and Shake-speare in Love , is the subject of an exhibit at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, on view through March. “Sandy Powell’s Dressing the Part: Costume Design for Film” displays her iconic creations and offers an im-mersive look into her char-acter-driven creative process. “Featuring the work of Sandy Powell has been a goal of ours since the mu-seum opened nearly a decade ago,” says Rafael Gomes, cu-rator and creative director for SCAD FASH. In 2021, the 02.25 Costume Designer Sandy Powell at SCAD FASH BY TYRA DOUYON Sandy Powell sewed her first bold creation at five years old: a pint-size bikini, the start of a remarkable career in costuming. After four decades in the film indus-try, she’s still transforming fabrics into unforgettable characters, each with its own story to tell. Clockwise from left: Sandy Powell with costumes she created for Orlando (1992); works from Caravaggio (1986), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). SCAD Savannah Film Festi-val honored Powell for her outstanding achievements in film costume design, spark-ing a relationship that ulti-mately led to the exhibit. The show is designed cinematically, following a timeline of Powell’s life and highlighting the films that inspired her most iconic work. Each costume is on display from within an elevated black box that “mimics larger-than-life film cells,” says Gomes. Lit from beneath, they replicate the feeling of watching a movie in a theater. While curating her exhi-bition, Gomes was struck by Powell’s attention to the col-ors of each piece of clothing. “I noticed a recurring use of a particular shade of blue-green throughout Powell’s films,” Gomes explains. “A great example is the train-in-spector costume worn by Sa-cha Baron Cohen in Hugo , which Powell designed in this specific shade so that the audience would visually gravitate to this character in crowded scenes.” Powell’s use of visual storytelling is apparent in Todd Haynes’s 2015 film Carol , where she blends her designs into the characters’ narratives. In a documentary that accompanies the SCAD FASH exhibit, Powell delves into a tan fur coat she cre-ated for Cate Blanchett, who plays the titular character as she grapples with her sex-uality and failing marriage. “The one we actually used was pieced together by old bits of vintage coats, simply because I was determined to get the right color for her— because it’s Cate,” says Powell in the documentary. “It was very fragile. It split every single day of the shoot, so every day the costumer was underneath, sewing or tap-ing up the splits.” This “sad coat,” she explains, exempli-fied Carol’s unraveling life. To Gomes, such details are what make Powell a true vi-sionary in the film industry and bring her creativity to life in a way that extends be-yond clothing. The impact of her costumes is monumen-tal, he says: “Her work in and of itself can be used as a source of fashion history.” When Temperatures Drop BY RACHEL GARBUS For Atlantans experiencing homelessness, living on the street has its share of dan-gers. But it’s on the coldest nights that the city’s unshel-tered population becomes acutely vulnerable. A 2024 investigation by The At-lanta Journal-Constitution found that over the previ-ous three years, at least 32 people who were confirmed homeless died from cold ex-posure in metro Atlanta. And the number of unsheltered people is growing: The 2024 20 Atlanta • February 2025 COURTESY OF SCAD
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