Elizabeth Paton

<h1>LONDON — You would think that after years of press calls and premieres, luncheons and prize ceremonies, the whole red carpet shebang would get easier for most movie stars. You would think — particularly for nominees in the running for major awards — that being photographed and judged and assessed would eventually become par for the course.</h1>

You would think that for someone like Olivia Colman, nominated for best actress for her role as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite” (and already a winner in that category at both the Baftas and the Golden Globes), choosing what to wear would long have been a pleasurable exercise. You would be wrong.

“I have never felt confident having to do any photographs or red carpet,” Colman, 45, said this month. “Being someone else is easy; being me is torture during those events.” The interview took place in London, where she is filming the latest installment of Netflix’s “The Crown” (she plays Queen Elizabeth II in middle age).

“To wear something that makes you feel like someone else, or at least makes you feel powerful and confident, up for the fight — I’ve discovered that is necessary. In Mary, I have found my enabler.”

That Mary would be Mary Fellowes, a fellow Brit and a stylist who has worked for 11 Vogue titles and has dressed actresses Tracee Ellis Ross, Liv Tyler and Amy Adams, among others, over the course of almost two decades.

She and Colman were introduced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the writer and actress behind television series like “Fleabag” and “Killing Eve,” while Colman was preparing for junkets for “Murder on the Orient Express” at the end of 2017. They quickly struck up a rapport.

“Olivia is a strong woman, a working mother and an independent thinker. She also has a real woman’s body. These have always been major considerations when we are thinking about how she should dress,” said Fellowes, who also said that personal style in the public sphere was ever more important for actors in the aftermath of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements.

But initial calls to big-name luxury brands for ready-to-wear outfits in the early stages of their partnership “did not get what I felt to be a satisfying response,” Fellowes said as she sat at her kitchen table in London, immaculate in polished black leather and oversize cat’s-eye spectacles.

“Throughout my entire career, I have been frustrated by the fact that fashion, both editorial and on the red carpet, largely exists in a bubble,” she said. “These size-zero bodies, the fairy queen gowns: They don’t look or feel real, nor do they have anything to do with the lives of real women. Of course, a woman wants to feel good in the hot glare of the spotlight. But plenty can be done via a game of proportions and smart tailoring, styling tricks and knowing how to pose.

“Fashion should enhance and empower women; it shouldn’t shrink them.”

In the beginning, Fellowes contacted Deborah Milner, the former head of the Alexander McQueen couture studio, to make a series of bespoke looks that would make Colman feel comfortable, while also delivering the requisite impact (see the black wraparound gown with bejeweled shoulders that the actress wore to the “Murder on the Orient Express” global premiere). But as their relationship progressed and Colman’s star rose in Hollywood amid awards fever (she has long had celebrity status in Britain), the fashion industry did something of an about-face.

Suddenly, the balance of power had shifted, and the two women found themselves able to pick and choose. So they raised the stakes. They decided that if Colman was going to endorse a brand by wearing it on the red carpet, it should have associations that mattered to her. It should ideally be, for example, family-owned; make efforts toward sustainability; and maybe involve another working mother (Colman has three children).

Hence the structural ivory and black Emilia Wickstead gown worn by Colman when she won the best actress Bafta this month, and the caped black Stella McCartney dress (made with recycled bamboo) that Colman wore to scoop up the Golden Globe in the same category in January.

“Mary really listens when I say when I don’t like something and takes the time to commission pieces that flatter me or make me feel strong,” Colman said.

When it came to the Oscars ceremony dress, Fellowes said, there was one house in particular that she believed would check all their boxes: strong, intelligent voice; distinctive visual codes; and shared values. So what did she do when that brand called to say yes, it would make a bespoke gown for Colman for the Academy Awards?

“It sounds ridiculous, but when Prada rang, I was so thrilled I nearly cried,” said Fellowes. “It felt like the stars had aligned.”

The two women then drew pictures of dream dresses in the car on the way to the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Fellowes had brought along a file of Prada dresses, fabrics and embroidery from years gone by. Colman said she knew she wanted simple, with a big bow on the back. The Prada atelier set about making their shared vision a reality.

“The Prada team are so bloody lovely, it’s like getting ready for your wedding,” Colman said. “And Mary knows what I want to hide and what I hate about myself.”

Thus was born the long, sleeveless A-line turtleneck gown in emerald green silk radzimir — plus a smoky-gray silk organza cape with puffed sculpted sleeves — that Colman wore Sunday. Designed to be draped around the shoulders, it was gathered into a giant bow at the back that cascaded into an embroidered train covered in Swarovski crystal flowers. A team of eight in the Prada atelier worked on it for a total of 120 hours in the run-up to the Oscars; the embroidery alone took a dozen artisans more than 300 hours.

“Clothes, ultimately, are at the service of who wears them and what they want to portray of themselves, so to be part of this special moment for Olivia is very exciting,” said Miuccia Prada, the brand’s lead designer.

Many years ago — early in Colman’s career, during her bachelorette party in Paris — she and her friends stumbled into a Prada boutique. At the time, she remembered, she declared: “One day, when I have finally made it, I will wear a Prada dress.” By any measure, that day has come.

This article originally appeared in <a id="0cc68e22-79c4-4e25-be7d-7a7823efdff6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/fashion/olivia-colman-oscars-gown.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Story Behind Olivia Colman's Oscar Gown

You would think that for someone like Olivia Colman, choosing what to wear would long have been a pleasurable exercise. You would be wrong.

The story behind Olivia Colman's Oscar gown

His family said in a statement that the cause was cancer.

Regularly acclaimed as one of the most talented British designers of his generation, with a distinctive approach that fused sharp Savile Row-honed tailoring with a quirky East End streetwear sensibility, Casely-Hayford alternately embraced and rejected the norms of the fashion establishment over the course of a four-decade career.

Working as a black designer in a largely white industry “definitely dictates my approach to design,” Casely-Hayford told The New York Times in a 2014 interview. “I designed from an outsider’s point of view. When I first started, there were no role models for me. I was very interested in creating a cult for the individual, for outsiders who wanted to make their own expression without shame.”

His early collections presented sportswear, made from surplus World War II tents, for his label Kit, and he later had a three-year tenure as creative director of Gieves &amp; Hawkes, the 200-year-old Savile Row label. In 2009, he asked his son, Charlie, to join him at Casely-Hayford, inspired by life in contemporary London but produced by cutting-edge factories in Japan.

Each stage of his career was marked by a charming yet steely determination to shape and project a new kind of British culture, one that would be particularly pertinent in an era when diversity was largely absent from the fashion power structure.

“We come from the same time,” said Edward Enninful, the British Vogue editor-in-chief, after reports of Casely-Hayford’s death. “Joe was a talented pioneer, filled with integrity, and the first of his kind: a black designer who represented London on the world stage.”

Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford was born in Kent, England, on May 24, 1956, one of four siblings. He was a grandson of J.E. Casely-Hayford, an eminent Ghanaian author, editor, lawyer and politician who supported Pan-African nationalism.

Joseph Casely-Hayford studied at the traditional Tailor and Cutter Academy and later at St. Martin’s School of Art, from which he graduated in 1979. His subdued yet quirky tailoring, exemplified by a shirt that opened both at the front and the back, brought him global recognition and made him a favorite of 1980s rock stars. In 1984, alongside his wife, Maria, whom he had met at St. Martin’s and married in 1980, he established a fashion house for both men and women.

From a studio in East London (long before the hipsters took over the neighborhood), Casely-Hayford developed a style, which he identified as “new conservative dressing,” that was shown on the runways of London, Paris and Tokyo and that pushed the accepted boundaries of formal suiting.

“The construction of a Casely-Hayford suit is a feat of engineering — from the prominent chest with special internal darting to the shaped sleeve with high underarm point and natural sloping shoulders,” said journalist and friend of the family Mark C. O’Flaherty. “Joe’s lighter fabrics and ingenuity of cut let the wearer move in ways tailoring hadn’t allowed before, whether that was on the street or on the stage.”

Casely-Hayford was nominated for a string of prestigious awards, and became the designer of choice for high-profile bands such as The Clash and U2. When Bono became the first man to appear on the cover of British Vogue, in 1992, he did so wearing a Casely-Hayford design.

In 1993, Casely-Hayford became the first designer to collaborate with the mass-market retail giant Topshop; in 1995, the Princess of Wales sat in the front row at one of his runway shows.

As his star rose, Casely-Hayford became a role model for other young black men on the British fashion and arts scene, including Enninful, now of British Vogue; fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; artist Chris Ofili; and architect David Adjaye, the lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

“Joe was one of the most extraordinary fashion designers, entrepreneurs and inspirational characters in London during the 1980s and 1990s, and was a source of deep admiration and impact on myself as a young man looking to find his place and understanding of self in the world,” Adjaye said. He called his late friend “a generous and gentle soul.”

“He had an incredible talent, and as a global African man with roots in Ghana, he helped me to understand how to negotiate the different terrains that I would need to deal with,” Adjaye added.

One of few black fashion designers to gain international notoriety, Casely-Hayford solidified his position in the industry in 2005, when he put his namesake line on hold to become creative director of Gieves &amp; Hawkes, the tailor famous for its handful of royal warrants and with a reputation for dressing the white establishment. He held that position for three years, bringing the two-century-old stalwart into the 21st century. During that time, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion industry.

In 2009, having left Gieves &amp; Hawkes, Casely-Hayford started working with his son on a luxury line, Casely-Hayford. It was the first time a father and son in modern fashion had actively collaborated at a creative helm, and the pair (who shared the same birthday) re-established the brand’s avant-garde aesthetic as “a comfortable sit between English sartorial style and British anarchy.”

To address a growing demand for custom suits, for celebrities as well as little-known clients, Casely-Hayford offered a made-to-measure service. Last fall, the label opened its first stand-alone store on Chiltern Street, in the Marylebone neighborhood of London.

Although the father-and-son duo had stepped outside of the traditional fashion schedules and cycles, which Casely-Hayford saw as a redundant mode of marketing and selling, his death just days before the start of London Fashion Week Men’s cast a shadow over the shows.

“His clothes were studiously street, like graffiti with tailor’s chalk,” his friend Ofili, the artist, said by email. “In these times, when visibility is by no means a measure of quality and creativity is measured financially, I cherish his rare and incisively experimental spirit.”

Casely-Hayford is survived by his sister, Margaret, chairwoman of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater; his brothers Peter, a film producer, and Gus, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art; his wife, Maria; his son, Charlie; and his daughter, Alice, the digital editor of British Vogue.

“It is impossible to believe that our beloved father is gone,” Alice Casely-Hayford said. “He taught us kindness, integrity, generosity, a strong work ethic and to always put family first. Though it was an unconventional upbringing, growing up in our parents’ studio, it was incredibly exciting to see them build an empire, bring a bold vision to life, and inspire and ignite passion in so many people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/obituaries/joe-casely-hayford-dead.html" id="cfac7cb3-3e83-3024-ab7e-d8c62e908bac">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — Joseph Casely-Hayford, one of the first black British fashion designers to win international acclaim, whose clothes were worn by Michael Jackson, Bono and Drake and admired by Diana, Princess of Wales, died on Thursday. He was 62.

Joe Casely-Hayford, Pioneering Fashion Designer, Dies at 62

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Elizabeth Paton

Articles written by the author

The story behind Olivia Colman's Oscar gown

Joe Casely-Hayford, Pioneering Fashion Designer, Dies at 62