English costume designer Jenny Beavan is nominated for her work in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Ms. Beavan is used to these awards, she been nominated (and winning) since her very first Oscar for A Room With a View in 1987, which she shared with designer John Bright.
With a degree in set design from Central School of Art and Design in London, Ms. Beavan stumbled into costume design first in theater and later in television. It wasn’t long before she moved on to films, initially with Merchant Ivory productions.
Prolific and in demand for her sense of historical accuracy and detail, Ms. Beavan has designed costumes for The Bostonians (1984), Howard’s End (1992), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Gosford Park (2001), Sherlock Holmes (2009), The King’s Speech (2012) and the list goes on.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a futuristic post nuclear war story set in a desert wasteland. Shot in Namibia in southwest Africa, the challenges for Beavan et al were many including extreme weather and limited local expertise in movie making.
Ms. Beavan says, The only tragic thing for the Namibians was the distressing of costumes: we’d work from brand new army boots, because obviously the stuntmen had to wear something solid on their feet, and then you’d see them grating them and scratching them and burning them, and almost weeping, because to them, it was a brand new pair of boots, and we were just wrecking them.
Congratulations to Jenny Beavan for her Oscar nomination and her recent BAFTA win for Mad Max: Fury Road.
Tune in tomorrow for the next Oscar nominated costume designer profile, Jacqueline West.
OverDressed for Life 
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