Words Eloise Hallo
Coppola’s rendition of Dracula contends with a long list of relatives. The tale of a blood-quenched Count has shadowed cinemas, theatres, pages, and the like, relatively commonplace since the conception of its namesake, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. I would argue, however, no such replica has done so with the flare of our Francis Ford’s; in many moments the film’s garmentry far pales in its aghast than to those vignettes of true horror, and — as I watch and re-watch the work — I still find myself distracted by the mastery of characters’ costuming, in scenes where pig blood spouts assertively from their necks. And, this mastery is multitudinal. Rippling through the vast and calculated themes of its story, fashion forms its very own anima — representing lust, desire, betrayal, and love — a kind of condensation forged on our window into the plot. A gambit, therefore, of substance and richness, the film’s fashion is most certainly a character of self-accord.
One of our first examples comes in the shape of Dracula’s brides — or the weird sisters as they are sometimes referred to — a nod to the trio of matching titles of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and an ode to our long-held misattribution between female companionship and the occult. In them, we have our first run-in with the film’s carnality and, as they gnaw at Keanu Reeves’ testicles, one could scarcely reason otherwise. Yet we have known this would come. Sheathed robes leave little to the imagination, while archaic draping reminds us of the old world they belong to, and the two disobey the pious order of the film’s Victorian costuming until this point. It is this very foreignness that adds to their fearsomeness, and it is foretold balefully in their dress, representing not any-old-horror but daemonic horror, sexually transgressive, violent, and contrarily female, as man becomes meat.


Lucy Westenra broadens our study. Her character — who travels from a naive tendency for lust as she lives to a creature corrupted wholly by un-death — raises an important suggestion about a woman’s predisposition for immorality in Bram Stoker’s imagined world. Eiko Ishioka, the film’s costume designer, who worked under Coppola’s instruction that ‘the costumes be the set’, flexed her muscles perhaps most formidably in the question of Lucy. When we meet her, fashioning is used to form a complete picture of Lucy’s behaviour in compared to her peers. Bold colours, accentuated décolletage, and ceinture represent the harmless flirtation to her nature — a pre-Raphaelite incarnation — highlighting her femininity, a tool which she uses to seduce. In the acts to follow, it is this very infirmity that lures her to the garden, where she will be turned by Dracula. And, escaped from her coffin, seemingly not quite so well-placed, she will be killed by her fiancé in the dress she was to marry — the final punishment in a lesson that has taught the dangers to the fickle fairer sex, all the while hinting so through its garmentry.
In all our leading ladies, female lust is animised as not only a betrayal of womanhood, but to the structure of humanity itself, and, in all its camp and fanfare, I believe this to be a critique. Coppola plays into the fears of priggish men — who have happily enjoyed the ease of domesticated women — and who, in his film, try desperately to reckon with the treason of such women liberating themselves, from gender roles, gilded waists, and, ultimately, the realm of the living; all three of which smilingly slap the face of comfortable Victorian virtue and, cunningly, raise a mirror still to our own. As such, their fashioning — sensual and empowered — becomes the physical state of their insult to morality and, in many ways, a message to reject submission — a set I’m certain Ishioka knew she was building.

Winona Ryder’s character, Mina Murray, works to affirm concerns that femininity exists in an inherent state of either object or abject. In her we witness a shift from relative purity to, as with her comrades, lechery of both soul and wardrobe. One of the key moments in her styling surrounds the illicit meeting with Dracula, a long-lost love she does not entirely understand, having lived many lives through his unorthodox tenure. And, it was imperative that her dress emulate this impassion, which comes to her, in many ways, as weakness; a lustfulness improper of her sex and unfitting to her nature — unaware to the supernatural that has hummed, and hums still, in both since the pair’s bygone matrimony.


It is unsurprising that the dress be red — red, and blood more particularly, exist as a motif of desire throughout the work — what interests me is Ishioka’s interpretation of ‘bygone’, utilising a similar technique as with Dracula’s brides by antiquating her silhouette. As in her sketch aside, tulip-like sleeves and a plunging neckline work to ostracise the dress from both Victorian norms and Murray’s typical tailoring. In harking back to past lives and prior selves, through costuming, the film maintains its simple sentiment that we are all a sum of distant parts. In many ways, her dress in the scene prophesies her ultimate return to her lover, a fate that was set before her time, and an identity she unknowingly imitates in his presence.
Rather excitingly, and as is seldom true of this series, our male protagonist’s garmentry pales perhaps that even of his starlets. When we meet Dracula, he is not Count, but a nobleman, having returned from war to find his young bride dead by her hand, love-mad and mistakenly of belief he had died in battle. The armour, impersonating sinew and muscle, situates him swiftly as beast, and, fresh-out-of a betrothed, this is what he becomes, as he renounces God and invokes the forces of hell. Ishioka’s armour fames and defames human anatomy, and the promise of his wolf-head mask tells us he will exist liminally between person and thing for the film’s duration.


Yet, as the following scenes boast, he is capable of dipping his talons in both. As ‘The Count’, his amorphous robe spotlights defiance of natural law; shadows move without him, pouring formlessly like the blood its sanguine satin emulates. In his day-form, who we will meet when Dracula leaves the continent for 19th century England, a dashing Gary Oldman sports chameleonic cutaway coats, cut still with reds we have come to character-associate.
In both the film’s (and Dracula’s) final acts, costuming comes full circle. In a playing out of the flayed form his armour foretold, he must be killed — wittingly beheaded — by the woman who has kept whatever parts of him lived alive. In all its Shakespearean gore, the film’s crying taut of tragedy comes in this moment, a truth mirrored by Ishioka’s choice to swap his customary cloak for a new — gold and opulent — inspired by Klimt’s most ardent, The Kiss: a nobleman once more, in true death now freed, by undying love.

Coppola and Ishioka’s collaboration on Bram Stoker’s classic is, to me, one of the shining examples of union inherent to cinema and costume. Film, as a medium of narrative — and when done correctly — is and should be inseparable from the design of its characters, and it is no surprise that, amongst other commendations, the film won Best Costume Design at the 1993 Academy Awards. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, fashion rightly exists as an extension of its plot, in-so-being a character entirely of its own.
All imagery accessed, unless otherwise noted: Bram Stoker’s Dracula dir. by Francis Ford Coppola, prod. by Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, 1992.
https://www.giantbomb.com/lucy-westenra/3005–12824/ https://hum101vancecvcc.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/the-women-of-dracula/ https://x.com/peterseepeterdo/status/1290888484891365376 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)