Tour de force

In Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s parable on the pursuit of perfection, a high-strung Natalie Portman pliés and pirouettes across the stage like a tightly-wound reed. Slim to the point of emaciation — the actress was reportedly instructed to lose 25 pounds, a big weight drop for her already skinny petite figure — Portman’s character spent most of the film under the torturous weight of her aspirations: her desire to triumph as the show’s lead, to circumvent her body’s appetites, to elude her mother’s suffocating, virtually crazed devotion.

In a New York magazine profile on Aronofsky, author Thomas Shone writes, “His films are immaculately calibrated surrenders in which his heroes splinter and break upon the rocks of their own consuming obsessions.” That’s precisely the premise of this much-buzzed-about film.

It’s an ode to a performer’s breakdown.

Dancer in the dark: A flowy top and skin-baring tights make a playful match.

As the film’s 108 minutes progress, Portman’s character takes on darker themes, as she despairs over her role in Swan Lake. Exploring the twin themes of the white swan’s purity and grace next to the black swan’s artful guile, her costumes shift from sweet pastels to seductive gothic garb.

For Black Swan, Rodarte was tasked with costuming the luminous Natalie Portman. And the black, feather-dusted dress she wears in the movie posters is but one of the 40 costumes the design duo created for the film.

In ballet, the dancers vacillate between fractured dimensions. In performing, stiff crinolined dresses, immaculate toe shoes and hair pulled back into a harsh bun mark the dancer’s dress. Whereas in practice, she is loose-limbed and less inflexible. Knit sweaters over runny tights and old leotards make up the lion’s share of her wardrobe.

It’s the difference between performance and practice that makes for an interesting examination. In this editorial, the mix of urban and sweet/ juxtaposition of structured and flowing mimics the duality essential to ballet. The play between sweeping emotion in a vigorously-choreographed performance is what makes art, including fashion, worth watching.