How to build a collection like a filmmaker

What cinema teaches fashion designers about world-building.

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By Jorinde Croese and Olya Kuryshchuk

When a film ends and the credits roll, often it can feel like you’ve done little more than watch a screen for a couple of hours. But some films, special ones, make you feel as though you’ve been transported somewhere, as if you’ve briefly inhabited another world, that the air was different, the light behaved in a particular way. You can’t necessarily explain why it felt that way, it just did.

That feeling doesn’t happen by accident. Filmmakers spend months, sometimes years, establishing rules for their invented universes before they shoot a single frame. What colour is the light in this world? How do bodies move through space? What’s present, and just as important, what’s missing? What looks like a detail is actually the architecture of a collection on which everything else rests.

For fashion designers, there’s a version of this same question hiding in plain sight: What holds a collection together? Something deeper than a theme or a moodboard, a logic that makes 40 garments feel like they belong to the same universe. This chapter of Film as Method explores how filmmakers build worlds, and what designers might borrow from the process. We’ll look at three films with distinct approaches to world-building that translate directly to developing a collection, or for that matter an art show, an editorial, or an album: Blade Runner, Her, and Beau Travail.

How production designers actually work

Before diving into specific films, it’s worth understanding what production designers do before they design anything.

Hannah Beachler, who became the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for Best Production Design for Black Panther, created a roughly 500-page “bible” to establish the world of Wakanda before designing a single set. The document covered the history, culture, technology, and timelines of the fictional nation: detailed histories for each of its five tribes, reference pictures, architectural rationales, everything needed to ensure consistency across the film’s Afrofuturist design. Director Ryan Coogler and his team used it as a reference throughout production. For the sequel, Wakanda Forever, Beachler added approximately 200 more pages. “I had to completely immerse myself 100,000 percent in talking to experts,” Beachler said. “I can’t just throw up a culture, even if it’s something that’s specifically not that culture or inspired by that culture. You need to know the rules before you can break anything. You need to understand it before creating something that’s an amalgamation of that or an evolution of that.”

Adam Stockhausen, who has designed most of Wes Anderson’s films, describes something different: a method where visual motifs reveal themselves through sustained research rather than being imposed. “In Grand Budapest we’d be scouting and you would see these coal-burning heaters in the corners of all these rooms,” he said. “And you just start to see it over and over and over, and then you start to say, ‘Well, that’s a good idea. That really is part of the feeling of this place, right?’ And so then you start to use that over and over again, because that’s what you saw when you were scouting. In Moonrise Kingdom, raccoons kept finding their way in. On The French Dispatch, this kind of yellow [colour] kept finding its way in.”

Stockhausen talks about the importance of a long research period, because what might become the core of your work may not appear immediately. The Red Balloon (1956), the acclaimed 35-minute short film directed by Albert Lamorisse – in which a sharp, crisp red balloon is constantly contrasted against the muted colours of a dilapidated Parisian cityscape – was a key visual and thematic inspiration for The French Dispatch. “And then, months down the road and 18,000 pieces of research later, we hit this beautiful reference image of a café – a bright yellow café in the middle of Paris in the ‘50s. And then all of a sudden, you go, OK, well, that’s that. But we went that entire couple of months without knowing that the tone of the whole thing was this intense yellow. The framework was there, it was just waiting for the right thing to click it into place.”

Beachler’s encyclopedic documentation and Stockhausen’s patient observation are two different methods that have the same underlying principle: the world precedes the objects. Instead of designing things and then trying to make them cohere, it’s much better to establish the conditions that would produce them.

Blade Runner: rules that generate decisions

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is probably the most-referenced film in fashion history. The trench coats, the neon, the perpetual rain, all these images have circulated so widely that they’ve become a kind of visual shorthand. The film’s production was a genuine collaboration. Director Ridley Scott worked with production designer Lawrence G. Paull, visual futurist Syd Mead, and special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, each bringing distinct expertise. But before anyone could build anything, they needed to establish what this Los Angeles of 2019 would be.

When Scott began developing Blade Runner, he gave his team a single governing principle: “Think of Chicago or New York City right now, the over-saturation, how impossible it is to maintain some of these buildings,” he said. “Think how expensive it’s going to be to take down the Empire State Building. It will cost as much as building it. Eventually, you’ll just have to ‘retrofit’ things on the face of the building rather than having to pull half the side off, re-house the air conditioning or re-wire it.”

The idea of building the future on top of the present became the film’s logic. Real Los Angeles, already layered with history, became the foundation for imagined Los Angeles. Everything was modified, added to or patched over, never simply replaced. The result, as Scott described it: “You wear your guts on the outside. That gives us a picture of a textured city.”

Paull, who had trained as an architect at the University of Arizona, brought research from a trip to Milan that had struck him deeply. The fascist architecture there – high facades rising directly from narrow streets, porticoes and arches creating a claustrophobic compression – offered a template for density. The buildings in Milan were built right up to the curb; the Warner Bros. backlot streets were similarly narrow. Paull and Mead began photographing the existing New York street sets, then filling them with texture: webs of pipes, ducts, technological debris layered onto building facades.

The design drew from everywhere: Egyptian, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaudí, but always filtered through the retrofitting logic. As Paull put it: “We turned the photographs sideways, upside down, inside out, and backward to stretch where we were going and came up with a street that looked like Conan the Barbarian in 2020. I didn’t want right angles; I didn’t want slick surfaces.”

That single ‘retrofitting’ idea generated thousands of specific choices. The flying cars share visual DNA with 1940s sedans. Street markets sell future tech alongside ancient goods. The Tyrell Corporation’s gleaming pyramid sits atop a base of industrial chaos. A city in perpetual repair, adapting to changing needs but never truly catching up. The world starts to make sense once you understand the rule, and anything that violates the rule would feel wrong, even if you couldn’t articulate why.

Paull’s architectural training made him think like a city planner. He designed not just buildings but the entire urban fabric: streets, utilities, public spaces, the infrastructure that makes a city function. Where do the pipes run? How does waste get removed? What happens when systems break down and get patched rather than replaced? These questions might never appear on screen, but answering them created a world that felt inhabited rather than constructed. The nuts and bolts of a functioning city, even a dysfunctional one, were worked out before the cameras rolled.

Syd Mead executed most of the vision. He was an industrial designer who’d worked for Ford, U.S. Steel, and Philips Electronics before, now bringing his real-world design methodology to fictional worlds. He was initially hired to design the film’s vehicles, began by sketching the streets as settings, and gradually became involved in visualising the film’s whole environment. Mead put it this way: “The design process is to treat a movie prop like a design problem in that particular ‘world’...the story world. Regardless of how weird or preposterous that story world might be, it has its own logic and its own rules. You design to fit those rules”. A circumstance is a set of conditions that constrain and generate simultaneously. If you know that this world is retrofitted rather than replaced, certain objects become possible and others become impossible.

Importantly, Mead distinguished between personal vision and client work: “I was hired as a consultant to produce exactly what they wanted for that story, for Ridley’s [visualisation],” he said. “The next movie that I’m hired to work on might involve a vision of the future that is slick or marvelous or has a slight kink in the whole framework so it looks a certain way, but I’ll do that just as deliberately. It has nothing to do with my own personal view of the future.” His goal is to create an atmosphere that serves narrative, not personal expression.

What might this mean for a designer? A collection needs a governing idea, a rule that generates decisions. Start by asking what the conditions of this world are, rather than how the collection will look. If you can articulate the circumstance, the garments will emerge from it. Start with the garments and you’ll spend the rest of the process searching for coherence.

Her: atmosphere vs. aesthetic

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K. K. Barrett, the production designer of Her, faced an unusual challenge: create a near-future that feels emotionally true rather than technologically plausible. Director Spike Jonze had little interest in forecasting the look of 2025. He wanted to know how loneliness might manifest if it were given walls, corridors, and light.

Most science fiction creates a future by adding on top: more technology, visual information, complexity. Spike Jonze and production designer K.K. Barrett did the opposite for Her. “When thinking about the future, people always think about technology and about what technology is rather than what the human experience with technology is,” Barrett explained. “We took things away that were distracting. We took away noisy signage, traffic, the things that surround us in our current world, and by taking those things away we said, ‘Oh, now we’re beginning to be in the future.’ We didn’t really include a lot of innovation, we just cleaned up the present, left it littered with the best of what we know now, and then brought this sexy voice over the computer.”

Barrett described this as designing “a future that is around the corner, rather than some distant time where the audience would marvel at all the changes.” The rule was simple: what small alterations would shed a different light on society? Take away the cars. What would Los Angeles feel like without noticeable traffic? Add a subway to the beach, get in at Hollywood and step out on the sand. A weekend trip to a cabin in the snow on a high-speed bullet train. Each change is modest, yet together they produce a world.

The difference here is between aesthetic and atmosphere. Aesthetic is identifiable: a surface logic made up of colours, textures, and signatures that can be recognised, named, and, with enough effort, replicated. The atmosphere works more broadly. It is the cumulative experience of an environment, shaped by countless elements, most of which the viewer never consciously notices. It exists only when built from the ground up.

Her has a clear aesthetic: warm but muted colours, soft textures, furniture that has no hard edge, clothing with no logos feels neither contemporary nor futuristic but somehow displaced. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema consciously limited the color blue in the film, as it is heavily associated with the cold, sterile tone of typical sci-fi. The team also deliberately avoided consulting technology experts for the film despite it being sci-fi. There are no cars, aggressive advertising, or visible screens beyond Theodore’s handheld device. Technology recedes into the background, it is rather invisible and unremarkable, allowing the story to focus on human connection. Theodore’s apartment has almost nothing in it: a bed, a desk, warm light, and a great deal of empty space. The city itself, a hybrid of Los Angeles and Shanghai, is clean to the point of sterility. “I think the idea was to try to make this more seemingly utopic feeling, all soft materials and warm colors and woods,” Jonze told Showbiz Junkies.

The takeaway for designers: Design the feeling before you design anything else. Start with “loneliness in a world designed for comfort” rather than “warm tones and soft textures.” Once you have that, you can work backward. What colours feel lonely even when they’re warm? What silhouettes feel isolated even when they’re soft? Barrett was thinking about what it feels like to be alone in a room that’s supposed to make you happy. Fashion does this backward constantly: we nail the visual and hope it means something. Start with what you want someone to feel, then build toward it.

Beau Travail: when the body is the design

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Most designers start with how clothes look. A smaller group thinks about how they move. Beau Travail, Claire Denis’s spare, quiet military film from 1999, suggests a third possibility: what if movement itself is the design?

The film follows a unit of French Foreign Legion soldiers stationed in Djibouti. There is almost no dialogue. Denis isn’t interested in telling you what to think. She watches instead. Men iron their uniforms with near-religious care. They train shirtless in the heat, bodies arranged into strict geometries. They build an obstacle course stone by stone. The actions repeat, settle into rhythm. The soldiers begin to resemble a dance company.

Denis worked closely with choreographer Bernardo Montet, drawing directly from the physical discipline of the Legion. In an interview with The Quietus, she explained that she was not allowed to formally observe the Legion’s training, so she had to watch from a distance in the desert before working with an ex-legionnaire back in Paris. “We were rehearsing for two months in order to appear together as a group of perfect soldiers,” she said. “The rehearsal took more the form of hard military training than choreography.” Later, once filming began, those exercises began to shift. “When it came to shooting, I brought the playback of the score by Benjamin Britten… I think eventually it was this music that choreographed the actors’ movements.”

What makes Beau Travail particularly resonant for fashion is the way Denis treats bodies the way most designers treat fabric. The soldiers wear identical uniforms – simple blue work clothes, white tank tops, beige fatigues. There is almost no variation in costume, no styling hierarchy. Difference emerges elsewhere. “What you see is the uniform of the Legion, not an exaggeration,” Denis said. “The body is itself their uniform. Like a sculpture, it’s their identity.” Movement becomes the site of expression: posture, tension, gait. Personality appears through how someone stands, turns, or holds their jaw.

For Denis, the body carries meaning more powerfully than explanation. “Music is a medium that puts body and space in relation. Music authorises the body to exist in space. You can almost read more from body movement than from speech.” That philosophy shapes the film’s structure. The famous morning routine scene – the smoothing of bedsheets, the calisthenics – stretches on for minutes at a time, allowing repetition and duration to do the work of narrative. Meaning accumulates physically rather than verbally.

The film’s most memorable scene is the finale: Denis Lavant, playing Sergeant Galoup, dancing alone in a nightclub to Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night”. The scene was never rehearsed. In an interview, Denis recalled: “We never rehearsed the dance scene at the end of Beau Travail. I let him hear that great disco music, and he said, ‘This is it.’ So we didn’t need to rehearse. I would be there, and I would let it go.” After 90 minutes of contained, disciplined movement, Galoup’s body finally releases what the film has held in check.

Throughout, Denis’s camera stays close to bodies at work – skin, muscle, breath under strain. She has described her approach as resisting aestheticisation in favour of physical presence. “I don’t try to aestheticise this,” she said. “I simply allow the camera, and the viewer, to be with them physically.” Gravity, effort, resistance: these are not metaphors, but material facts. Movement generates meaning.

The takeaway for designers: Think about how a garment changes a body’s movement. Does it restrict or extend? Reveal effort or conceal it? A runway show is an opportunity to make movement visible, to choreograph not just sequence but gesture, pace, the rhythm of bodies through space. Casting matters here: different bodies move differently, and those differences produce meaning whether or not you intend them to.

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