Elle Fanning also looked so good at the Met Gala this year! The exhibition was loosely themed after Sleeping Beauty which inspired me to make this video 🩷 which live-action princess dress is your favourite?

Back when disney didn't pressure costume designers to make pieces easily transferable to dolls and dress up costumes 💸

I love how the dresses in Maleficent many times reference her innocence and her purity while still honoring the original movie

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed with this movie is she embodies the princess she’s portraying. You can feel the joy and love from the character

Funnily enough, Live Action Cinderella’s dress is how I would have like to imagine Belle’s dress to be. The same extravagant layering of fabric to give the puffy look. Except of course the yellow colouring, and more going to silk/satin instead of the tuille.

also worth mentioning that it doesn’t matter “what belle would wear or wouldn’t wear” when it comes to the gold ballgown. it’s an old enchanted castle, the wardrobe would have pulled out whatever was elegant and available for her to wear, not have it custom to her. at least, in the animation. it’s not believable that this castle would have a dress so cheap and modern looking

I never /noticed/ the costumes in Maleficent 1 and I mean that as the highest compliment. I was never distracted. The costumes look absolutely like they belong in this fantasy world and every character seems to wear things that make sense to the character. The whole scenery, including the clothes, are part of a beautiful painting. Love the movie.

I can't believe Elle Fanning was just 14 years old that first movie. She's a great actress and carried herself so maturely in promotional interviews. What a talent and class act

Aladdin's costumes were SO beyond disappointing. Take any random guest at a South Asian wedding, and I guarantee you that their outfit will completely blow Jasmine's out of the water. And have you seen the bridal couture? All Disney had to do was hire an Indian or Pakistani designer to get the most gorgeous and intricate gowns for their female lead. Even if they simply went shopping around, they'd be spoiled for choice with all the stunning textiles available in your average mall or marketplace in Bangladesh, where much of the world's clothing is produced. It's a crying shame most Westerners don't realize how Halloween-y the costumes actually look to people who belong to the cultures Aladdin is appropriating. They'll give it a pass because Belle's gown was so lackluster, but Jasmine's outfits and dance sequence are equally as laughable imo. If you don't believe me, look up a few Bollywood film scenes and see what the actresses are wearing. You'll be floored by the difference.

I wish more live action movies were reimagined adaptations of old animations (like Maleficent), not just a blind remake. Even in Cinderella (2015) we got to see more of other characters' perspectives rather just Cinderella's. This is the only way I see how this format can work.

I do love how Aurora is the type of person who would feel more at home in a simple white nightgown compared to the stiff over-layered artificial gowns

Nightgowns make her feel very ghost/spirit-like and often like a white-forest witch

I like Belle’s wedding dress, it was the only dress she wore that I actually liked. The pattern on the dress was there for a reason, I can’t recall what though.
Cinderella’s wedding dress is my favorite live action dress because it looks so much like her animated wedding dress, but with more details.

I love this video but I wanted to touch up on the corset part of the video. During the Rococo period (assuming that Beauty and the Beast took place before the French Revolution), women would wear a precursor to corsets called, stays. Every women during that time wore stays whether you were poor or rich. But the basic function of a corset or stays were to support and shape a woman's figure, basically, they were bras, because the modern bra were not invented, until the 1910s.
So for the woman who are against corsets, you are against tight-lacing which is a different thing that wealthy women did, not the working class. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

100% agree about Belle's ball gown feeling lazy and modern. Ive also been team Cinderella 2015 for a long time, I think Aurora had good moments but with Cinderella it was just show stopper after show stopper. The green dress cate blanchet wears? Perfection. I really wish they'd honored Philip with the same care they gave Kit, like how they put the pops or blue near his face so his eyes popped. I think that would have helped Philip be more visually interesting at least.

Cinderella's visuals had a great mixture of bright, drab, vibrant, desaturated, light, and dark colors that makes each frame believable.

The mid shot scenes of Cinderella and the prince dancing are so visually gorgeous with their color and lighting variety. And the outside neutral lighting during their wedding in winter looks so much better than it would have been with a bright sun shining on them.

If you look at the ballroom scene at the end of Beauty and the Beast the colors and lighting makes it look rather artificial and cartoonish. Everything looks so samey and almost bland.

my heart aches for tangled's legacy once the live action is out

Just fyi: Belle’s final white dress isn’t a wedding dress, it’s her “celebration” dress. It’s the same case with Ariel’s final white/pink ruffle dress — it’s marketed as the “celebration” dress. The visual of the white dress and a large gathering implies a wedding ceremony but Disney likes to address stupid criticism in their live actions like “the princesses marry too soon” (even when there’s never any explicit indication they do) so they get to close on a white dress without getting slammed for being a bad influence. The consequence of this is that people will interpret these half-assed white dresses as bridal dresses (as you do here) and so it hurts the audience’s perception of the costuming as a whole by closing on it. Ideally the final look in a fairytale should be one that is memorable and grand, showing a character in their most self-actualized state and setting the tone for their happily ever after. But taking advantage of the visual language of a wedding, the easiest/most effective route for a couple’s “happily ever after”, while not truly delivering on that can result in an underwhelming or empty conclusion. It’s a fairytale, they’re meant to end bombastically, let them get married! Fakeout weddings leave the costuming on such a lackluster note it’s so lame

I actually like the general idea of peasant dresses that can be worn several ways for visual interest, if we’re trying to suggest that a character doesn’t own many changes of clothes so she chooses the ones she has with ingenuity, but yeah, as soon as we go to a castle or a magical land, gimme costume changes! Why doesn’t Disney understand how much I like costume changes??

There is a difference between FAIRY TALE aesthetic and FANTASY aesthetic. The fairy tale aesthetic is something akin to cottagecore - homey, cozy and picturesque. A great example of this is of course Cinderella (2015) The film is low fantasy as opposed to Maleficent's high fantasy, so realism and believability were prioritised more.

A film whose visuals are more akin to fantasy than fairy tale is the French film Beauty and the Beast (2014). From the architecture to the outfit designs, the world looks like a fantasy-inspired alien world, almost like an anime isekai.

I think the biggest thing that gets me about Belle's dress is that it is visibly made of modern manmade fibers. The drape and flutter look like cheap costume materials, and that more than the design is what makes it look cheap to me. There's a lot wrong with that dress, but the fabric just by itself makes you think cheap poly/rayon that you drag around sweating in on a Halloween. By contrast, Cinderella's dress was also made with manmade fibers, but it's not the first and most immediate thing that strikes you about that dress. It doesn't look like cheap materials. They definitely could have done better with Belle just by choosing a different fabric weight or blend of fibers.