Let’s get dystopian! The ever-melancholy Blade Runner demands your attention, sartorialists. The majesty of the film is how costume designer Michael Kaplan captured the essence of the neo-noir genre and reimagined and reworked it for a distant, charmless future. Cast in sensuous pigments, the ambiance is hypnotic and eerily intimate, which gives the viewing experience a voyeuristic element. It’s a trip, and one with cryptic, perplexing undertones. Let’s explore the luscious style of our two Replicant heroines, Rachael and Pris.
R a c h a e L
She’s a dystopian muse for the rest of us. With her delicate bearings and frosty maquillage, she certainly strikes an alluring figure. She is complicated but without pretense, vulnerable without histrionics. She’s an ice princess on first gaze but upon closer inspection her eyes belie a mystifying warmth. In so many words, she’s an ethereal thing to behold: breakable like fine china. A Replicant on paper, but an enigma through and through, Rachael’s brazen, angular silhouette might feel androgynous on another but she endows each look with a coquettish dreaminess that renders them utterly femme.
My favorite scenes of Rachael occur when smoke obscures her face, casting her contours in a preternatural glow. She’s a vamp with a bewitching composure, her refinement the product of engineered memories and nostalgia.
P r i s
Fortune favors the bold, no? Back alley beauty has met its match in Pris. She’s provocative, daring and totally uninhibited. A studded choker and sooty eyes suggest her bad intentions but her baby doll pout and raggedy bearings suggest a capacity for innocence and playfulness. She has a transfixing quality, a manic pixie before her time. But her old school punk leanings give her an unsettling edginess.
