When I think about visual communication and art, I tend to think about things like camera angle, color choice, layout, and editing speed. Sometimes, if I am being particularly nerdy, I’ll be really attentive to the less appreciated visual elements of a work, like when filmmakers go out of their way to make the subtitles in a movie fit the action on-screen (like in Night Watch, the Russian fantasy flick some of us caught this past weekend, which had vampiric whispers dissolve into smoke, half-heard echoing voices flickering and moving, and quickly-spoken quips slide offscreen with camera movements—a series of efforts which ranged from interesting and appropriate to distracting and frustratingly illegible).

I’ve never designed costumes before, though, so I’ve never really given much attention to costume design as a visual element. I mean, sure, if you’re making a movie or a graphic novel or something, you want to make sure that everyone’s dressed appropriately for the period. But it never occurred to me that costume design might also involve removing the padding from suits to give a “sacklike appearance”, for example.

Now that I know about this, I think it’s ingenious, and I’m suddenly irritated that this kind of costuming doesn’t get recognized at the Academy Awards. Not like they’d need to offer more awards to distinguish between period costume and really clever contemporary costume design, but am I the only one who would be really fascinated to learn about the minutia of design choices like the one mentioned above? On the one hand, I’d say “no” because that’s the stuff all that ever-in-demand DVD bonus footage is made of; on the other hand, I’d say “yes, I am the only one,” because my previous sentence contained the word “minutia.” Oh well.