The thousands of teenagers who idolised rock star Joan Jett and her first band The Runaways did so from the pages of the NME and Circus, cutting out and sending away coupons for look-alike elephant foot flares, glittery halternecks and kohl
The thousands of teenagers who idolised rock star Joan Jett and her first band The Runaways did so from the pages of the NME and Circus, cutting out and sending away coupons for look-alike elephant foot flares, glittery halternecks and kohl eyeliner.
So the crinkled backs of vintage music mags were the first place costume designer Carole Beadle looked when recreating the band’s iconic wardrobe for the forthcoming biopic starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning.
“It was the research that they did themselves,” she says. “Stuff wasn’t in your face in that era, you really had to dig and look around for it if you wanted to create an image for yourself.”
The 20cm wide jeans, self-sprayed band t-shirts adorned with safety pins and artful rips, the creakingly sonorous, wide-lapelled jackets that provide a backing track to almost every conversation in the film; the mega-platforms that Fanning (who plays singer Cherie Currie) rather poignantly falls off during a key scene. Each element of the 70s glam aesthetic that Beadle has reconstructed so painstakingly seems intensely familiar, recognisable, prescient even.
“It feels so modern because it’s been copied so much,” she continues. “That rock and roll Balmain look was so huge while we were filming, it was funny to see a new generation getting excited by it. It’s a style that has the power to become a massive statement when you’re young. Sure, if you buy into when you’re 40, maybe that’s a bit sad. But when you’re 18 or 20? It’s the coolest.”
The four-piece girl group formed in Southern California in 1975 before embarking on four years of head-spinning touring, recording and partying, irreversibly changing the patriarchal rock scene in their wake. Jett (played by Stewart) then went on to form the Blackhearts and record one of the best-selling albums of the decade, and is still known, loved and listened to far and wide.
“Anyone from a certain time or place would have known who they were and what they looked like,” says Beadle. “Whoever saw them was influenced by them.” Building the band’s costumes took Beadle and her team to the downtown vintage stores of LA (“the real vintage stores, not those so-called ‘modern vintage’ ones”), onto auction site Ebay and had them trawling through Tinseltown’s many costume houses.
“We did a lot of rummaging at first and the specifics came later,” she explains. “The director [Floria Sigismundi, who has directed videos for David Bowie, The Cure and Björk] was very insistent about keeping everything authentic.” Cherie’s red jumpsuit was a perfect replica of the one she wore at a gig just prior to the band’s signing by Mercury records. “I thought, should we just call Pam Hogg?” laughs Beadle.
Likewise the boned corset and suspenders that Fanning wears for The Runaways’ legendary Japan gig sums up her hyper-sexualised rock doll look perfectly, and was, in Beadle’s words “a complete knock-off,” made exactly as it would have been thirty years ago.
The Runaways themselves of course were pure originals, musical innovators and boundary breakers, with a wardrobe every inch as raw and fierce as their guitar chords.
Text by Harriet Walker
The Runaways will be released on Friday, September 10.
