How the West Was Worn
The Movie: “The Horse Whisperer”
The Setup: Tom Booker (Robert Redford), a sort of horse shrink, rehabilitates an injured horse and its teenage rider, Grace (Scarlett Johansson), after her mother, Annie Maclean (Kristin Scott Thomas), transports them all to his ranch in Montana.
The Costume Designers: Judy L. Ruskin, whose credits include “Waiting to Exhale,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Born on the Fourth of July.” Bernie Pollack, who designed Redford’s costumes, has worked on 21 Redford movies including “A River Runs Through It,” “The Natural” and “Ordinary People.”
In Case You Didn’t Notice: There’s an unmistakable American fashion essence. Characters wear clothes from blue-chip American companies, including Levi Strauss,Wrangler, Woolrich, Carhart, as well as Bailey hats and Justin boots. (Well, Thomas veers off course in a pair of Italian-made J.P. Tod ankle boots.) So when Ruskin says Calvin Klein approached the production requesting to dress Thomas (“He’s a big fan of Kristin’s”), Klein’s refined American tailoring fit right in. Still, the words “off the rack” do not apply here. Annie’s wardrobe, culled from Klein’s fall ’97 Calvin Klein Collection, cK Calvin Klein and the label’s jeans line, was custom made (“They milled sweaters at the speed of light,” Ruskin says) in order to accommodate changes in color, fit and sometimes line. A few items were added by Klein that didn’t exist in the collections at all.
Her Look: Annie transforms from a hard-edged New York magazine editor to a woman of the land, and her clothes make the same slow turn. At work, she dresses in shades of charcoal and black trousers, suits with a high V-neck and crew-neck cashmere sweaters. Even on a Saturday dash to the office, she’s maddeningly chic, substituting a perfect white cotton T-shirt for the sweater to wear with charcoal flat-front wool crepe trousers and black cashmere car coat. However, beginning with the car ride to Montana, the dark, minimalist wardrobe goes, along with her cold, silver wire rim granny glasses. On go tortoise-shell sunglasses, a puffy cream down jacket (not available in the Klein collection), a buttery tan suede jacket and beige cashmere sweaters. By movie’s end, the cashmere has been shelved in favor of cowboy shirts and unwashed indigo jeans to suggest that Annie is not entirely relaxed.
Moment of Truth: Before the trip west, the Maclean family spends a typical, picture-perfect night at home where their bathrobes--neither fuzzy nor frayed--are worn like armor and tell the story of their values (expensive) and relationship (chilly). Annie’s is navy cashmere, husband Robert’s (Sam Neill) is black and white check (Zegna) and Grace’s is a deep blue plaid.
His Look: The key to Tom’s look is his approachability, says Pollack. For him to get close to others and vice versa, he needed “touchable” fabrics, starting with unstarched shirts. “I washed the heck out of them,” says Pollack of Tom’s Western shirts, which are almost entirely blue to complement Redford’s eyes, hair and skin color. Levi’s 501s were processed to be as soft as a baby’s bottom. “I did so much stone washing, you have no idea.” Even the standard, working cowboy’s canvas Carhart jacket (“It’s like iron at first”) was broken down with heavy stone washing. Then there were his chaps, which had to tread a fine line between tight--after all, Redford is a matinee idol--and touchable. Still, you know it’s a movie when one pair is brown, the second cream.
You Should Know: While Tom wears light tan and off-white cowboy hats to avoid the long-held, heavy symbolism of darker ones, Pollack explains, the shape of his hats was also fashioned with great care. Pollack decided that the typical 4-inch brim not only made the actor’s eyes hard to see, but simply looked too big for his head. He instructed the Rocky Mountain Hat Co. of Bozeman, Mont., to shave off one-half to five-eighths of an inch. “I’m a silhouette kind of guy. You just look at the stature of a person and you can tell what looks right.”
Trivia: Tom wears three belt buckles, whose beautiful details are difficult to appreciate. Two are “trophy sized,” meaning they are the size of buckles won as trophies at rodeos. However, Pollack avoided the typical bucking bronco imagery, which represents to some people mistreatment of a horse. Instead, he opted for a sterling silver horse head with halter, now known as “The Horse Whisperer” buckle and available for sale through the Bohlin Silver Co. in Los Angeles. A second trophy buckle features a steer’s head “with nobody roping or tying.” The third is a simple etched silver buckle with matching silver tip and keeper attached to a horsehair belt woven at a Montana prison.
