To honor Aretha Franklin (Jennifer Hudson) in director Liesl Tommy’s musical biopic “Respect,” costume designer Clint Ramos took a deep dive into the Queen of Soul’s psychology.
This enabled him to understand the complex emotional, spiritual, and political forces that drove her musical genius.
As a result, Ramos created an aesthetic of heightened realism and glam naturalism with more than 80 costumes custom-made for Hudson.“Aretha was not a slave to fashion, and she wasn’t also a mannequin,” said the Tony Award-winning Ramos.
“The best way to describe her was that she was an independent dresser.
For me, it really meant that she deployed fashion and clothing in a way to telegraph her emotional state, her spiritual state, and her political state.
She was going through a lot of [trauma and abuse] and telegraphing that.
She went after the fashion industry for not making clothes that were big enough.
So, yes,
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