Everything the fashion in Saltburn tells us about class and desire
Saltburn, the new psychological thriller by Emerald Fennell, up-ends the idea of the period film.
Emerald Fennell, who won an Oscar in 2021 for her debut film Promising Young Women, returns with her second feature, Saltburn – a lush and lurid story of class, feverish desire, obsession and immense, absurd wealth.
The story centres on working-class Oliver Quick (played by Irish actor Barry Keoghan), awkward and ambitious, who has won a scholarship to Oxford University. With his college scarf and completed summer reading list (including the King James Bible), he is determined to make an impression.
On his arrival however, he realises that most of his fellow students already know each other, or at least they speak the same language – that of similar schools and holidays and rituals, and their parents are friends.
It is a world mostly impenetrable to outsiders, or at least it is until Quick meets Felix Catton (played by Australian actor Jacob Elordi with a truly impeccable aristo drawl). Handsome, charming, his life one easy win after another, Felix draws Oliver into his orbit.
When tragedy strikes Oliver, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his sprawling family manor, Saltburn (the real-life Drayton House, a Grade 1 listed private home in Northamptonshire that until now had not been seen on screen).
The tale of the outsider invited in has attracted comparisons to Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley. It’s something Fennell acknowledges when Felix tells Oliver that his family inspired half of Evelyn Waugh’s novels.
The captivatingly beautiful Saltburn and those who dwell in its orbit – including a truly glorious cast that includes Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant and Carey Mulligan in a perfect cameo as a tragic aristocrat clinging on to scraps of glamour – are revealed in one heady summer to be not all they seem.
With a few scenes that may well be burned into your retinas forever, the film pairs intense beauty with gleeful gruesomeness. It’s both grand and pulpy. It’s also weepingly funny.
Felix’s mother, played to wafty, cut-glass perfection by Pike, is a former model said to be the inspiration for the girl from Greece in Pulp’s Common People. She says conspiratorially to Oliver when he arrives at Saltburn that she has “a complete and utter horror of ugliness”.
It is also, in a way, a period film. Set in 2006 it is “period accurate” to the mostly awful fashion of the era. This was the time of indie sleaze and black footless leggings with everything, of popped collars and posh boys with armfuls of Livestrong bracelets. As Fennell (who offered up some pieces from her own mid-aughts wardrobe) described the aesthetic in British Vogue, “At the bare minimum, you will be needing a headband, dingly-dangly earrings, and a thousand long necklaces draped between your boobs, which have been hoisted up with a super, super padded bra, probably in a neon colour, that peeks out of your top.”
For Saltburn costume designer Sophie Canale, it was a kick to recreate an era of fashion not typically looked on fondly (and, indeed, potentially triggering to a certain demographic of ageing millennial). More pertinently, in a film about being a close observer and where every little detail counts, fashion is one of its biggest giveaways – the too-long sleeves of Oliver’s rented tuxedo that show he doesn’t fit in; dressing for dinner in a grand old house; the piles of Kate Moss for Topshop and jangly belts worn by university girls on a night out.
“There were so many elements of 2000s clothing that were completely pointless – the wide belts that had no reason and didn’t really do anything apart from just sit on your hips,” Canale says during a Zoom call from Wales, where she is working on her next project, Dope Girls, set in 1918 London.
Essential to Canale was that the characters, especially the family members at Saltburn, looked comfortable while Oliver, on the outside looking in, was always a little too buttoned up.
“It’s only 15 years ago but fashion has changed so much in the last 15 years … The beauty of working with Emerald is there’s such a realistic element to everyone,” Canale says.
For the character of Felix Catton, the boy everybody wants to be or be with (or both) Canale looked at what Prince William and Prince Harry wore during this period.
“Felix is the key character within that university group, admired, and in the styling of his clothes on him there’s the unbuttoned shirts and polo shirts and occasional pop collars, but it’s not overplaying things and it’s making him look as relaxed as possible in his costumes. Whereas some of the other boys, they’re trying to emulate that because they’re looking up to him,” she says.
The combination of the grand beauty of Saltburn and contemporary clothes was something Canale found interesting.
“The juxtaposition of contemporary clothes in a period house is also really interesting,” she says. “I think that’s why Saltburn is quite fascinating … There’s a homely element to it, but because of the grandness of the house, having Felix walk through in this pale yellow, it’s so light and airy and the shirt out, the buttons undone, it eases you into the house, even though everything he’s saying is about rules and about the aristocracy who lived there, the king’s bedroom.
“Visually you are looking at him and he’s so relaxed. It is quite confusing, it’s a lot.”
When it came to dressing the exquisite, and exquisitely disconnected from normality, Elspeth, her daughter Venetia (played by Conversations with Friends actor Alison Oliver) and Mulligan’s tragic Pamela, Canale collaborated with luxury fashion houses such as Christopher Kane and sourced archive Chanel for Pamela. Elspeth wears a lot of Ossie Clark, and British designer Jenny Packham, a favourite for that particular set (and the likes of Catherine, Princess of Wales), features regularly.
To heighten the differences between Oliver and the Cattons, Canale kept Oliver looking awkward in too stiff, cheaper versions of what Felix was wearing. She wanted to give the sense that his clothes were box fresh, bought to fit in with the crowd.
“There was always a slight awkwardness, that it just wasn’t really working in comparison to everyone else’s clothes,” says Canale.
All of it expresses in the film the class differences in these worlds that can seem opaque. The rules are known only to those who know them innately, and who also are the only ones allowed to break them.
“I think from the moment they’ve been born, they’ve had a privilege,” Canale says, noting the ease with which certain echelons of society move through the world.
“They’ve always been part of the popular gang in their schools. And now they’ve gone to universities. They probably all know each other prior to their first uni because they work in those social networks. They’ve been at the same parties, their parents are friends. They’ve all been to Harrow or Eton or Marlborough College. So within society in England, there very much is still that.
“And I think that’s how I wanted to portray it, these rich boys, rich boy fashions that Oliver can never really sit into socially and visually,” she adds.
The film, which undergoes many twists and turns, includes an hedonistic party scene. It has a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme (“I can wear my armour!” exclaims Grant’s perfectly dim Sir James, Felix’s father). Like much of the film it is layered with coded messages and subtexts in what the characters choose to wear.
“I think the Midsummer Night’s Dream ball was really fun … Oliver’s suit for the Midsummer Night’s ball is very special to me. We were looking at folk costumes within England and Ireland and came across these suits that had floral designs, and then looking at the acorn and the oak leaves, which were very poignant in power and victory and often used in the military.
“So using those as this kind of powerful symbols … unknown to everyone, but that’s his armour maybe. And hidden moths within this of Oliver, the moth to the flames,” she says.
Saltburn is in cinemas from Thursday.
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