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Film Club: The Breakfast Club

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This is the first post of a new series on the blog: the Film Club.  The idea is to share movies I love and I find inspirational because of their aesthetics but especially because of the costumes.

So, for those of you who haven’t seen The Breakfast Club
(and I recommend that you do) it’s about five teenagers who are forced to spend the entire day together in detention. Each one of them represents a high school stereotype: the princess, the athlete, the brain, the criminal and the basket case. At first they hate each other, because that’s just what high school is all about, right? Brains and athletes aren’t supposed to be friends, right? But, of course, they are deeply transformed by the experience, they become friends and by the end of detention we even have two new couples.

The movie starts with them arriving at the school and ends with them leaving, while the brain (Brian) reads the essay he wrote off screen. The last part of the essay sums up the main idea of the movie: “we think you are crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest words and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess and a criminal.” So, yes, the plot might be a bit of a cliché but I think that’s why it’s become such a classic movie. It just never gets old. And it’s quite an accomplishment to make such a great movie with so few characters and such a simple story.

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You might be wondering why I chose The Breakfast Club
to start this series, since it doesn’t have a lot of spectacular costumes. The entire movie is set on the same day and place, so the characters only wear one outfit, and there are very few characters. But that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much, it shows the power of costume in a very simple way.

The Breakfast Club‘s costume designer was Marylin Vance-Straker, the same great mind behind the fashion in Pretty in Pink, Pretty Woman and more recently the new Bonnie and Clyde series. She was even nominated for an Academy Award for her work on the film The Untouchables en 1988. So this probably isn’t the last we’ll see of Marylin’s work on the monthly Film Club.

Every character’s outfit is chosen to represent that person’s stereotype. They each have a different accent color, and everything is quite simple. But it’s beautiful and you don’t need anything else. From the first scene of the movie you get the stereotype idea just by looking at the character’s clothes. And by the end of the movie you can also see the transformation in their look. John starts as a “criminal” wearing bright red flannel, chains and boots but by the end of the movie he’s wearing a diamond earring. Claire arrives to school as a princess in pink and leaves holding a red scarf in front of her. Brian, the brain, ends up taking off his green sweater and wearing wayfarer sunglasses. Andrew gives his blue sweatshirt to  Allison. And of course she is the one who changes the most, going from black clothes and heavy eyeliner to wearing white and a flower on her hair. Ok, it’s might not be a great transformation, personally I think she looses the style that made her so cool in the beginning. But she looks less closed off and more sociable, it’s true.

allison-breakfast-club

That’s why I love The Breakfast Club, even if it’s very simple I think it shows how powerful style can be showing one’s personality. And Molly Ringwald’s (Claire) outfit, is so beautiful. It’s just 80′s fashion at it’s best. I can’t get over that oversized leather jacket and the midi pencil skirt with tall boots combination. It’s as timeless and classic as the whole high school stereotype angst thing.

breakfast-club-sunglasses

 

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