OTHER ARTICLES 1. Production Information 2. “If you don’t get bruised playing Bond, you’re not doing it properly.” – Daniel Craig 3. “Vesper is not the classic Bond girl, wearing a bikini and firing guns.” – Eva Green 4. “He’s ice cold.” — Mads Mikkelsen 5. “I’m drunk with power.” — Judi Dench 6. “She has great sex. Then he’s gone!” — Caterina Murino 7. “It is a great story and a great thriller.” — Ivana Milicevic 8. “Life is made of obstacles and challenges.” — Sébastien Foucan 9. “A different Bond in every way.” – Martin Campbell 10. “CASINO ROYALE will be a classic Bond.” – Michael G. Wilson 11. “Because of Daniel’s more muscular physique, the evening suit is a new shape.” — Lindy Hemming 12. “Bond literally brings the house down ’round about him.” — Peter Lamont 13. “I spent eight hours a day in the water and two hours underwater.” — Chris Corbould 14. Locations for Casino Royale

“Because of Daniel’s more muscular physique, the evening suit is a new shape.”
— Lindy Hemming

Costume designer Lindy Hemming, a veteran of five previous James Bond adventures, collaborated with director Campbell and Craig to get just the right look for the newest 007.

In addition to addressing the director and star’s desire for a more realistic, less stylized wardrobe for Bond, Hemming says the clothes Craig wears throughout the course of the film reflect the arc of his character. “In the script, Bond has to go through many down and dirty undercover experiences. At the beginning of the film he’s undercover, so he has to blend in with his background. The result is that he doesn’t look like the traditional Bond at all. But as soon as he goes off to the Bahamas, we see him dress up more. He becomes more elegant, and, by the time he appears at the Casino, he’s wearing his tuxedo, which is the established Bond look. As he becomes more comfortable with his 007 status, he dresses more stylishly.”

Hemming also took heed of Craig’s off-set style of dressing when designing Bond’s costumes. “Daniel is interested in clothes, and he dresses really well. He wanted to go with the classic look, but keep it looking real rather than costumed. For example, for the evening suit, he was happy to go with Brioni, the Italian design company we’ve used on the last four films, because he knows and likes their style. But, because of Daniel’s more muscular physique, the evening suit is a new shape, so he looks modern in it. It’s fashionable to wear suits at the moment, so it doesn’t look anachronistic, and Daniel likes the tailored look.”

One outfit likely to attract attention is the short, form-fitting swimsuit Bond wears when he emerges from the sea outside Solange and Dimitrios’ Bahamian home. The scene pays lighthearted homage to unforgettable moments from two previous Bond films, explains Hemming. “We’ve obviously done that scene slightly tongue-in-cheek, following the Ursula Andress and Halle Berry bikini scenes in Dr. No and Die Another Day. Daniel’s wearing brief swimming trunks, which are very fashionable now, and are a much more European look than the baggy things that everyone has been wearing for ages. Not every man would suit these, but Daniel looks fantastic, so I think the audience will love it.”

Of course, audiences are likely to pay at least as much attention to the attire gracing the film’s female characters, and Lindy Hemming takes care to dress the actresses in appropriately glamorous style. “Ideally I’d like to design all the dresses and have them made, but physically that’s not possible. So I thought we needed to involve highfashion designers to get a buzz going about the clothes.”

On dressing Vesper, the Treasury official who becomes the first real love of Bond’s life, Hemming says, “Eva’s a gift to dress. She’s got a fantastic figure and she loves clothes. We decided to go a little bit retro, with nods to old movies, especially in her first two suits, which we wanted to remind people of Katharine Hepburn’s look. One suit is Armani, and the other I designed. Italian designer Roberto Cavalli was very helpful. We looked at his collection, from which he gave us a lot of evening wear, and discussed what we wanted for her first dress at the Casino. Roberto made the purple evening dress for us in a hurry, and I had to send an assistant to his factory to ensure it all went to plan and on time.

“And of course we had to have five of them,” she continues, “as Vesper goes through quite a lot of physical stuff in the dress. In the script, that dress was bought for her by Bond and given to her when she gives him the tuxedo, so the art department has included a Cavalli boutique in the hotel set to tie it all together. Her other Casino dress, the black gown, was made for us by Versace. I designed the dresses she wears in Italy -- at the sanatorium on Lake Como, and the red dress she wears when Bond follows her in Venice. We made sure that none of the extras wore any red, so that we could see her as Bond catches glimpses of her through the crowds in Venice. It’s a small homage to Don’t Look Now.”

Bond’s other conquest in the film is Solange, played by Italian actress Caterina Murino. Says Hemming, “We first see her in her bikini, a La Perla piece, in sea green, which reflects the sea in the Bahamas where she is riding along the shore. Caterina is dark and sultry and, in contrast to Vesper, she has a tough, sexy look. Her evening dress is from the collection of English designer Jenny Packham, who made it up in a peachy orange color for us. It has a laced back, which looks great against her naked skin as she makes love with Bond, still wearing the dress.”

Ivana Milicevic, who plays Le Chiffre’s girlfriend, Valenka, was outfitted almost entirely in fashions from Roberto Cavalli, according to Hemming. “In contrast to the other women, she’s blonde and her character is edgy — a villain’s girlfriend and possibly an assassin, with model looks and lots of confidence. She wears clothes which I describe as almost not clothes. She begins in a beautiful blue Versace swimsuit, underwater among the fish and the coral, and always wears clothes that are almost falling off her, in very vibrant colors, which emphasize her poise.”

Breaking from the tradition of flamboyant Bond baddies such as Dr. No and Blofeld, Martin Campbell decreed that the Bond villains in CASINO ROYALE should not look like obvious villains. “No men carrying cats or wearing riding breeches,” says Hemming. “Le Chiffre is a menacing man who lives in a twilight world. He’s not flashy, he’s secretive. He isn’t a man who is much interested in clothes, but what he wears is expensive and luxurious. His Brioni evening suit is velvet, to emphasize richness.”

The rest of the poker players are dressed to portray the idea that Casino Royale is a “new money” gambling palace, explains Hemming. “Brioni offered to make suits for the men around the Casino table for the big game. Infante, the African dictator, is wearing an African version of an evening suit for gambling, the Russian has a mink collar, and the Argentinian has a suit with real gold threads running through it. Even Verushka, who plays the German heiress, is dressed by Brioni, as they started a new women’swear company this year.”

Hemming says one of the biggest challenges for the wardrobe department was dressing hundreds of extras to look as though they are inhabiting a location far from where the shooting actually took place. For example, Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition at the Miami Science Center was shot in a mausoleum in Prague in February. “The extras arrived in fur boots and big parkas. We had to strip them off and make them wear shorts, sandals and T-shirts to look like Miami tourists. They thought we were torturing them. Then we filmed a Madagascar shanty town in the Bahamas.

Even though we bought all the clothes and shoes brand new, everything had to be broken down to look sun-bleached, dusty and dirty, and the extras had to look like inhabitants of an African island rather than the American-friendly island they live on. That’s the magic of Bond films, transforming somewhere into somewhere else. We seem to do that every day.”