Stephanie Collie, the acclaimed British costume designer whose work on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Peaky Blinders moved past the display and made its approach into mainstream tradition, has died. She was 60.
Collie died Saturday at St. Christopher’s Hospice in South London following a terminal most cancers prognosis six months earlier, a publicist introduced. Her husband, director of pictures Hubert Taczanowski, died in June at age 63.
Collie’s résumé additionally included Michael Winterbottom’s The Look of Love (2013), starring Steve Coogan, Anna Friel and Imogen Poots; London Has Fallen (2016), starring Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman, and its 2019 sequel, Angel Has Fallen; and Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017), starring Samuel L. Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Salma Hayek, and its 2021 sequel, Hitman’s Spouse’s Bodyguard.
Collie had a profession breakthrough with the British gangster movie Lock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), directed by Man Ritchie and produced by Matthew Vaughn.
“Anyone old enough to remember when Lock, Stock arrived will remember just what an incredible influence its Mod-inspired costumes had on the world of fashion,” Christopher Laverty of Garments on Movie wrote in 2021. “You could possibly not decide up a males’s journal of the time with out seeing some man in slim trousers and a jersey polo shirt.
“Stephanie Collie invented this look, thus providing one of the clearest examples of how costume design can transcend a movie and become something more. We would go so far as to say Stephanie Collie helped define an era.”
It was a return to the British legal underworld with Stephen Knight’s 1919-set Peaky Blinders that cemented Collie’s standing as a famend costume designer. She based mostly the look of Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby and his Birmingham avenue gang seen on the BBC collection on precise legal mug pictures of the interval.
The selection of white membership collar shirts, tweet waistcoats, flat caps and baker boy hats ushered in a revolution in up to date British menswear.
Collie had fits made for Murphy by London-based tailor Keith Watson. Over time, so many individuals would write to her in search of recommendation on find out how to obtain the right “Peaky Blinders look,” she created masterclass cheat sheets on find out how to costume the half.
“You need a good three-piece suit,” she stated in a 2021 interview with Esquire. “I’d suggest that you get the trousers narrowed and shortened … a good pair of lace-up boots that go above your ankle … pick the right six-piece section cap (baker boy), and I think you’d have a great outfit.”
The eldest of 4 daughters to Scottish dad and mom Peter and Elizabeth Collie, Stephanie Elizabeth Collie was born on Nov. 16, 1963, in Warrington, Cheshire, England. Her maternal grandmother was a gifted seamstress.
Collie attended Pates Grammar College for Women, Cheltenham Arts School and the London School of Trend, then began out within the stitching room at the BBC with costume designer Susan Coates, whom she had met at the London School of Trend.
Following an introduction through Coates to David Parfitt, who based the Renaissance Theatre Firm with Kenneth Branagh, she served as a wardrobe assistant to Branagh on A lot Ado About Nothing (1993) and as a dressing up designer collaborating with Coates on Peter’s Pals (1992), additionally helmed by Branagh.
After Lock, Stock, Collie reteamed with Vaughn on his directorial debut function, Layer Cake (2004), creating one other memorable search for Daniel Craig’s lead character.
She paired him with a darkish brown, Alfred Dunhill leather-based jacket; a lightweight grey, short-sleeved T-shirt; medium-dark wash blue Levi’s denim denims; and R.M. Williams Chelsea boots, in response to the lads’s trend weblog BAMF Type.
“I love dressing men. I love it,” she advised Garments on Movie. “Right from the boys on Lock, Stock — I’ve always just loved dressing men. They can look so good. And not even just vintage. I just think men have lost the art of dressing themselves. It’s all too casual. I just think that people don’t look in the mirror anymore and really look at themselves.”
Director Susanna White, who teamed with Collie on Girl Walks Forward (2017), starring Jessica Chastain, stated the costume designer “had a real originality about her sense of design — there was by no means something obtained about what she did.
“Her work on Girl Walks Forward was extraordinary — she went again to main sources and discovered references for the clothes the Lakota individuals and Jessica Chastain wore, which each made her costumes completely truthful to interval element but gave the movie a really up to date spin.
“She told powerful stories through her work, but like her personality, her costumes never shouted ‘look at me’ — she was always at pains to make sure that what she did fitted seamlessly into the aesthetic of the whole creative endeavor. No matter how stressful a day was, she treated everything with her characteristic humor and grace. She will be greatly missed.”
The spy thriller The 355 (2022) reunited Collie with Chastain alongside a solid that included Penélope Cruz and Diane Kruger.
Collie additionally designed costumes for Coky Giedroyc’s The best way to Construct a Woman (2019), starring Beanie Feldstein; Ritchie’s Wrath of Man (2021), starring Jason Statham; and Vaughn’s Argylle (2024), with Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jackson, Dua Lipa and Sam Rockwell.
Collie labored on the Amazon interval drama collection My Woman Jane, which dropped this 12 months. Her remaining undertaking, Stunt Nuts: The Film, one other collaboration with Vaughn, is in postproduction.
Survivors embrace her siblings, Fiona, Alison and Nicola; her nieces and nephews, Holly, Lucy, Amy, Sam, Connor and Ethan; and her stepmother, Julia.
“Stephanie and I worked together for 30 years and made seven films,” Vaughn stated in a press release. “She was always a beacon of good taste and positivity, and no matter how hard the task, she would never give up until it was accomplished to perfection.”
