Descending from the grey London skies on her umbrella, Mary Poppins makes one of the most iconic arrivals in cinema. As an entrance, you might say it’s practically perfect, and the clean lines of the magical nanny’s Edwardian travelling ensemble – the long black coat juxtaposed with her crochet scarf and that funny little hat – play no small part in making that first impression so memorable.
And so, when three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell started to work on the costumes for Mary Poppins Returns, the all-singing, all-dancing sequel starring Emily Blunt, one thing was clear: that Mary’s first outfit had to be simple, yet instantly impressive.
“You know that the entrance is going to be out of the sky, so [the costume] had to have a good sharp, strong silhouette.” To find that silhouette, she looked to another, equally iconic British export. “I look at contemporary references all the time, because there’s always something useful, whether it’s a colour combination or a style,’ the designer explains. “The idea for the cape on Mary’s shoulders came from something that Burberry were doing about the same time – a little jacket which had a cape shape on it, and that gave me the idea. I wanted to change the silhouette [from the original film] and to have a bit of movement, as well.”
It’s fair to say that Powell is the MVP of the costume design world. Aside from the small matter of those three Oscars (won for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator and The Young Victoria, which also starred Blunt) she is Martin Scorsese’s go-to costumier; theirs is a collaboration that has lasted over 15 years, from Gangs of New York to The Wolf of Wall Street. She has dressed a Disney princess (in the live action Cinderella) and designed the dreamy ‘50s outerwear worn by Cate Blanchett in Carol. Despite all this, the prospect of re-imagining the nation’s favourite nanny was a “daunting” one – though Powell says she “didn’t think twice about saying yes to the project.”
“Mary Poppins was the first film I ever saw as a child,” she explains. “When you’re brought up with something like that, you realise that you know it really well, the tunes, the characters.” To prepare, she chose not to get too caught up in the original, re-watching it just once, preferring “a fresh start” over painstakingly adhering to the Disney classic. “I didn’t really reference the [1964] film specifically or rather obviously apart from tiny things like the robin in her hat,” she says. “I took that from A Spoonful of Sugar… but then I thought, ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to think it’s the dead robin from Spoonful – it’s just inspired by that!” she laughs. You might also spot another of Powell’s subtle homages to the older film in the outfits worn by the grown-up Jane Banks (played by Emily Mortimer). “The mother in the original was a suffragette, and Jane as an adult is a campaigner for workers’ rights,” she says. “So I put her in trousers, in that Katherine Hepburn sort of way – that’s a nod to her mother.”
Instead, Powell looked to the period as a starting point. Mary Poppins Returns takes place in Depression era London, which provided the designer with an initial frame of reference. “It started with a conversation with the director – ‘has Mary Poppins changed? Has she moved with the times?’” she recalls. “We decided yes, she definitely has. So it was finding the 1934 version of how Julie Andrews would have looked – that was the starting point, really.” Old Vogues and old fashion plates became a source of inspiration because, as Powell points out “actually, [Mary] is quite fashionable, albeit in a quite conservative way. Her style looked towards the fashion of the time.
Period realism couldn’t account for Mary’s entire wardrobe, though – what would a Poppins sequel be without some colourful flights of fancy? One the film’s magical animated sequences features Powell’s favourite group of outfits. These designs were inspired by another catwalk reference point – Alessandro Michele’s tromp l’oeil S/S’16 collection for Gucci. “They’re all handed painted to look as if they’ve been painted by the animators – people probably will think they were,” she explains. “They’re 3D costumes, painted to look 2D – like Gucci was doing with those drawings of very graphic bows and decorations on things.” It’s a piece of meta-fashion that took “months” of testing to pull off, Powell’s team experimenting with “different techniques using different kinds of paints, different ways of painting – until every time you photographed it, it looked really 2D.”
Though Powell had already dressed Emily Blunt (“so easy to work with”) for The Young Victoria, this film marked her first encounter with Meryl Streep, who plays Mary’s bohemian cousin, Topsy. “Of course it was like, ‘Oh, I’m doing Meryl Streep, finally!’” she laughs. “She was absolutely lovely – very enthusiastic, great fun. Her character is an eccentric, and I knew her home would be a complete jumble of a myriad of different objects. She fixes things, she works with her hands so she’s got to be artistic, creative. I looked at bohemian eccentrics from the early 20th century – characters like Edith Sitwell, or Nancy Cunard, the heiress. We did a combination of those, so she’s wearing something inspired by an Art Deco pyjama set.”
Mary Poppins Returns is out in cinemas now.