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A Dress Code for the Ages: Christie’s Old Master Paintings Specialist Jonquil O’Reilly Talks With Royal Ballet and Opera Costumier Amanda Hall

How many hands did it take to create the noblewoman’s embellished velvet gown depicted in a particular 17th-century painting? Or to make the leading soprano’s costume for the stage? Two experts — from two adjacent worlds, painting and opera — compare notes

Christie’s Jonquil O’Reilly hosts an event for London’s National Gallery’s Young Ambassadors and Royal Ballet and Opera Young Philanthropists in October 2024

‘Looking at paintings through a fashion lens can tell you so much,’ says Jonquil O’Reilly, Christie’s Old Master Paintings specialist. ‘The contemporary audience looking at these paintings in past centuries would have instantly understood all the codes and clues, all the messages being transmitted through the image.’

In October 2024, O’Reilly treated the Young Ambassadors of London’s National Gallery and the Royal Ballet and Opera Young Philanthropists to a tour to uncover some of the secrets that the intricate embellishments and textiles reveal about the wearers in well-known Old Master works hanging in London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The group then made their way across the street to explore the costume studios at the Royal Ballet and Opera in Covent Garden. ‘I started with The Ambassadors (1533), a portrait by Hans Holbein at the National Gallery,’ O’Reilly explains. ‘I knew everyone would be familiar with it, but the reason I wanted to start there was because of the textiles in it.’ Combining expertise as a specialist in Christie’s Old Master Paintings department and her penchant for period fashion, O’Reilly offered a style breakdown of Renaissance dress, told through some of the most famous paintings of the period.

La Traviata costumes in the costume revival workroom, The Royal Ballet and Opera, London. ©2024 Kirsty McLachlan

‘Consider the overgown on the left,’ she says of the Holbein. ‘Just setting up the loom to weave that swathe of fabric would take months. Then it would take weeks to weave the first meter of fabric. And if you discovered a mistake, the whole thing would have to be unpicked, with thousands of threads under tension.’ The number of hands involved in the process of making garments like the ones seen in The Ambassadors is astounding. ‘And that’s before you get to the embroiderers, the embellishers, the tailor,’ she notes.

The painting was the perfect introduction to what the group would see when they entered the bustling costume workshop of the Royal Ballet and Opera, led by Elizabeth King, head of costume production, and Amanda Hall, head of the costume revivals department. O’Reilly and Hall convened to talk about intricacy of period fashion, from how to sit elegantly in a crinoline to how to stand out onstage or at court.

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. © The National Gallery, London. ‘Wearing black might seem very formal and reserved to us today, when in fact it was a grand and intentional display of wealth. Black dye was very expensive to produce,’ says Christie’s Jonquil O’Reilly. ‘All of these signals would have been immediately clear to people looking at the portrait at the time. Now you need a certain amount of historical knowledge to be able to understand what people were saying about their social status, their hierarchy or political standing.’

Jonquil O’Reilly: ‘We’ve become so far removed from the making process in clothing today — particularly with fast fashion. When speaking about historical fashion, I try to instill an understanding of the number of hands involved — dyers, weavers, embroiderers, gold beaters — before it even gets to the tailoring process. How involved is the process of costume making from start to finish in the Royal Ballet and Opera workshop? How many people are involved in each costume?’

Amanda Hall: ‘I manage the revivals team of the Royal Ballet and Opera costume department. We look after costumes for our repertory productions. These are costumes that have appeared on stage in successful shows that are now being revived. I have a permanent team of 18, but we staff up with casuals when we’re particularly busy. For each costume, a production manager starts the process, overseeing the budget, sourcing fabric and deciding how much to buy. They also have an eye on the future and will plan if we need to make different sizes of the same costume. They usually have an assistant. There’s also a fabric buyer who will sample different fabrics. For a costume like the Floria Tosca dress, there was a machine embroiderer. A cutter from the production department cut the fabric for the dress and make a toile. So we are up to five to six pairs of hands. There could well be up to ten people involved in creating the dress. In an ideal world, a performer would fit straight into an existing costume we are reviving. We check for any damage, clean it, replace sweat pads. It can take a day or up to one week if we need to replace the organza.’

Floria Tosca’s dress in the costume workshop of the Royal Ballet and Opera, London

Elena Stikhina as Floria Tosca in Tosca, The Royal Opera, London. ©2021 ROH. Photograph by Tristram Kenton

JOR: ‘In previous centuries clothing was padded, stiffened, and boned, such as in the 16th- and 17th-century portraits we looked at in the National Gallery, which affected the way the wearer moved and held themselves. For performers, presumably comfort and freedom of movement are critical. How do you take that into account when creating costumes, particularly stiff historical dress?’

Jonquil O’Reilly points out a prominent ruff and stiffened stomacher to the group of RBO Young Philanthropists and Young Ambassadors of the National Gallery. ‘They would obliterate the natural form, eradicating any sense of movement and restricting the way the wearer held themselves and moved. It’s such a contrast to the way the Royal Opera House team must address costume, to allow for ease of movement,’ she explains. 

AH: ‘Opera and dance are really different beasts. For opera you can corset people — some singers actually like to have something for their diaphragm to push against. Similarly with collars, most singers like them loose, but some like them tight. But no ruffs. And they don’t like hats because the sound can bounce off the brim. Sometimes we drill tiny holes in a felt hat so a performer can still hear correctly. If you see opera singers carrying their hats, it’s because they refuse to wear them for acoustics.

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia, c. 1530-33. © The National Gallery, London

‘Sometimes we try and replicate a historical production exactly as it happened in the period. Contemporary performers must understand how to work the costume and present themselves in an elegant fashion while maneuvering around a stage, such as with the white dress from La Traviata. Often you must train performers how to sit in a crinoline, otherwise they pull up at the front!’

Pretty Yende as Violetta Valéry in Richard Eyre’s La Traviata. ©2022 ROH, London. Photograph by Tristram Kenton

‘Costumes affect your movement especially with dance. We’ve had Lycra since the 1970s, so contemporary dancers are used to rehearsing with stretch. If you put them in a tutu, it can be quite restrictive: it’s scratchy, it prevents you getting close to your dance partner and you can’t see your feet in it.’

JOR: ‘That reminds me of the wide skirts of the 16th and 17th centuries, before crinolines, when women’s gowns were stiffened with bents and hazel to create a similar shape — first conical, then drum-shaped farthingales, and eventually panniers and the guardainfante. Part of that was about keeping people at a distance from the wearer. On the one hand, you’re restricting and controlling a woman’s movements, but on the other it gives her a certain power — she’s taking up space, and people can’t get close enough to touch her.

Crinoline dress from Richard Eyre’s La Traviata (2022) worn by soprano Pretty Yende as Violetta Valéry. ©2022 ROH. Photograph by Tristram Kenton

Yende’s dress in the costume revival workroom, The Royal Ballet and Opera. ©2024 Kirsty McLachlan

You would think costume and fashion would be quite similar. But they are really different. — Jonquil O’Reilly

Jonquil O’Reilly with costumes from the revivals department of the Royal Ballet and Opera costume workshop

‘In portraits, the sitter projects myriad messages through their clothing — their place in the hierarchy at court, their social status, wealth, political reach and so forth. Amanda, you must start the opposite way, with a blank canvas. How do you create a persona through clothing? What messages do you try to project through costume on the stage?’

AH: ‘The designer will have many conversations with the director about the vision they want to bring to life. You would think costume and fashion would be quite similar, but they’re really different. What looks great close up can fall flat when seen from a distance. But now more and more we are filming the productions, so they also have to look great close up as well. When we’re really lucky, we work with people like Gareth Pugh, who really gets it. His costumes for this season’s production of MADDADDAM are just fantastic. You have to know how to choose the right embellishments to suit the choreography. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet was first performed sixty years ago. Those costumes from the 1960s are so old fashioned, they’ve come back around.’

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs William Hallett (‘The Morning Walk’), 1785. © The National Gallery, London

Floria Tosca’s dress from Tosca in the costume workshop of the Royal Ballet and Opera, London

JOR: ‘You point out that costume must resonate at a distance on stage. That’s similar to court dress: if you were a duke or duchess, you would need to dress to be seen from afar in a crowd of well-dressed courtiers. You would need the immense luxury of your clothes to be visible, hence the heavy use of gold and dramatic contrasting patterns. For stage, you often use crystals and sequins and embellishments that pick up light. That was important in the Renaissance too. Imagine a candlelit ballroom where many are wearing black or muted tones, and then the duchess comes sweeping in wearing white and gold.

AH: ‘I was talking to a soprano who recently performed at a royal event, and she said that in the blacked-out theatre all she could see in the dark was the twinkling of diamonds from the Royal Box.’

Today, we’re thinking a lot more about sustainability and the environmental cost of fashion. Historically, people very much understood the value of clothes.— Jonquil O’Reilly

JOR: ‘You often see jewels that have been directly applied to textiles in the Renaissance. Later on, you then start to see broad bands of applied decoration, as these can then be more easily removed and reused. Today we’re thinking a lot more about sustainability and the environmental cost of fashion. Historically, people very much understood the value of clothes. Even at the highest level of society, clothes would be worn until they wore out. They would be gifted to ladies in waiting or to churches and when they wore through, they would be cut up and made into new garments, even repurposed into bible coverings and kneeler cushions. Surviving garments from the 17th and 18th centuries are quite often a bit of a patchwork for this reason.

‘How do you approach the reuse and sustainability of costumes in the revivals department? How do you adapt existing costumes to new productions and new dancers?’

Studio of Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of the Infanta Isabella, c. 1615. © The National Gallery, London

Studio of Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of the Archduke Albert, c. 1615. © The National Gallery, London

AH: Firstly, people change shape. When I first started making costumes for dancers in the 1980s, gym bodies were in and physiques were quite bulky. We noticed a return to that through Covid. We keep all the scraps of fabric and add patches when needed. Dancers are in general bigger today than they were in the 1970s. There’s less of a generic look to the dancers now; there are all shapes and sizes. Often we remove sleeves and mount them onto a Lycra body, so the dancer has full movement.

Giovanni Battista Moroni, The Tailor (‘Il Tagliapanni’), 1565-70. © The National Gallery, London

JOR: ‘That makes me think of 16th-century doublets and jerkins. Sometimes the sleeves and bodies would be intentionally mismatched, and the bodies would be padded to give a specific silhouette. Armholes would be cut farther back to pull the chest back and make the posture straight. Bodies didn’t need to do the work because the clothes would do the work for them.’

ML Staff. Content/image courtesy of Christies. Click here for the latest Christies auctions

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