It’s the talk of the web, it’s raging on social media, and it’s in theaters right now: Luc Besson’s new film, Dracula - Love Lost, released Oct. 29 in Italian theaters, pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s famous Dracula of Bram Stoker, a 1992 masterpiece that revolutionized vampire cinema by combining visual elegance and narrative tension.
Coppola’s cast remains memorable: Gary Oldman plays Dracula, oscillating between fascination and disquiet; Winona Ryder stars as Mina, a young teacher captured by his spell; Keanu Reeves is lawyer Jonathan Harker; and Anthony Hopkins is Professor Van Helsing, determined to defeat the count. Among the elements that most impressed audiences were the costumes, designed as true narrative tools. With a limited budget, Coppola declared that the costumes should serve as a real set and entrusted their creation to Eiko Ishioka (Tokyo, 1938 - 2012) Japanese artist, graphic designer and art director whose poster for Apocalypse Now (1979) had already impressed him. Although with no experience in vampire filmmaking and little precedent in feature film costumes, Ishioka turned her inexperience into a creative force.
The clothes Ishioka made for Coppola’s Dracula, so striking and surreal, mixed Eastern and Western influences, drawing inspiration from insects, lizards, armadillos, and even blood corpuscles, evoking haute couture, superhero attire, and formal Japanese fabrics. Indeed, Coppola described the designer as a strange outsider with no roots in the business, and it was precisely this freedom that allowed the costume designer to blend cultures and symbolism in original ways. But which costumes directly recall works of art or draw obvious inspiration from them? Below is an analysis of the garments designed by Eiko Ishioka that draw on well-known works of art.
Among the Dracula costumes, Lucy Westenraris bridal costume is among the most memorable, inspired directly by the fringed Australian lizard, which opens a leather collar when it feels threatened. Eiko Ishioka transforms this natural feature into a lace collar that gives the impression that Lucy’s head is almost separated from her body. The jewel-studded choker focuses the gaze on the neck, areacentral to Dracula’s desire.
On an iconographic level, the costume recalls both some Elizabethan paintings and the Portrait of Margarete Brömsen by painter Michael Conrad Hirt, known for the headdress that may have inspired the bridal collar pattern. The luxurious fabrics and seductive lines reflect the character’s wealth and sexual freedom, creating a stark contrast to the more restrained costumes of Mina Murray played by Winona Ryder. In this way, Ishioka visually emphasizes the difference between the two female characters, underscoring the duality between sensuality and social control.
The peppermint green dress designed by Eiko Ishioka for Lucy (referred to in the film by the girl herself as “the dress of temptations”) decorated with intertwined snakes alluding toeroticism and its progressive metamorphosis, can be read as a refined link to some famous representations of sin and female seduction inSymbolist and Pre-Raphaelite art. Although there is no official source attesting to its direct inspiration, the most obvious reference, in our opinion, is Franz von Stuck’s The Sin (1893), in which a woman’s body emerges from the darkness, enveloped by a serpent that amplifies its ambiguous and threatening sensuality.
Another relevant echo might come from John Collier’s Lilith (1887): the first wife of Adam, transformed into a symbol of independence and desire, surrounded by serpents that enhance her seductive power and primordial freedom. As in Stuck’s and Collier’s canvases, in Lucy’s costume beauty is linked to menace, and eroticism is tinged with an omen of death. The serpent, an archetype of knowledge and corruption, thus becomes the figurative medium through which Ishioka translates into material form the tension that unites purity and sin.
During their first meeting, Francis Ford Coppola showed Eiko Ishioka a series of Symbolist paintings, dwelling in particular on Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. He asked her if it was possible to turn that pictorial vision into one of Dracula’s costumes. Looking at the work, Ishioka immediately grasped an Eastern sensibility concealed within a Western pictorial language and decided to translate it into textile form. Thus was born a golden, fully embroidered tunic that echoes the geometric patterns and luster of the textiles depicted in The Kiss and The Embrace. Moreover, the reference to Byzantine art, so central to Klimt’s poetics, emerges clearly: the gold, ornamental motifs and hieratic static nature of the costume evoke the mosaics of Ravenna, which Klimt himself had admired and studied. In the creation, Ishioka thus fuses fin-de-siècle decorative taste with the sacred elegance of the Far East.
As Robert Rodriguez (Federal University of São Paulo, Department of Art History) notes in Blood & Couture: Dracula by Eiko Ishioka, the helmet worn by Dracula may refer to a model well known to the designer. Indeed, the concept of the warrior devised by Ishioka seems to draw onJapanese aesthetics, particularly the figure of the samurai. Although configured as a hybrid of man and wolf, the helmet has clear affinities with the kabuto, the traditional samurai headgear, especially in the layered structure that develops at the back, inspired by the shikoro, the ornament with overlapping lamellae intended to protect the neck. Such a fusion of oriental suggestions and Gothic iconography helps to redefine the image of Dracula.
According to Rodriguez’s evidence, one of the most complex requests made to the costume designer concerned the representation of Dracula’s three brides. Ishioka conceived them as sensual and primal embodiments ofArt Nouveau, drawing inspiration from the female figures idealized by Alfons Maria Mucha. The costumes evoke an aura suspended between eros and death: the fabrics, translucent and floating, hint at vibrant, moist bodies, perpetually traversed by an invisible breath. However, the choice of faded hues and threadbare drapes introduces an eerie contrast, turning grace into decadence. The fabrics, resembling worn-out bandages, hark back as much to mummification rituals as to the Holy Shroud, merging the idea of eternal beauty with that of the body’s corruption.
Aiming to radically renew the image of Dracula, Eiko Ishioka subverted one of the character’s most recognizable symbols: the traditional black cloak, an emblem of mystery and occult power. Instead of repurposing the element, the Japanese designer chooses to eliminate it altogether, replacing it with a broad crimson red kimono that sways behind Gary Oldman. In this way, Ishioka introduces an aesthetic inspired by Japonism, blending Eastern suggestions and Western sensibilities.
Dracula’s white wig also contributes to the cultural fusion: hairstylist and hair designer Stuart Artingstall studied the traditional hairstyles ofKabuki theater , incorporating their complex shapes into his elaborate designs. Each wig was constructed with painstaking work, fitting each individual hair onto a base by hand, following techniques used in traditional Japanese opera companies. On the chest of the kimono, the embroidered figure of a golden phoenix, a symbol of rebirth, power and the feminine principle, introduces an additional symbolic layer.
When Elizabeth’s helpless body is shown, the arrangement of the tail immediately recallsJohnEverett Millais’s Ophelia, but it also introduces an additional symbolic layer elaborated by Ishioka. The artist ties the reference to the Chinese phoenix, the Fenghuang, a mythological creature that combines the head of a pheasant with the tail of a peacock, an emblem of beauty and rebirth. As Rodriguez notes in Blood & Couture: Dracula by Eiko Ishioka, the Fenghuang embodies the female and opposite counterpart of the dragon, a figure associated with Dracula, and, together with it, forms a sacred pair in Chinese tradition. Both animals, auspicious bearers, represent harmonious union and romantic love.
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| From Besson's Dracula to Coppola: the works of art that inspired costume designer Eiko Ishioka |
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