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" Albert Wolsky is no stranger to Academy Award recognition: The veteran costume designer has won two Oscars (All That Jazz, 1980; Bugsy, 1992) and has been nominated another five times. He talked to us about his latest nomination, for Sam Mendes&amp;#039; Revolutionary Road.  What appealed to you about the era in which Revolutionary Road is set?   I like doing period because what I really care about is character. Doing modern is always tricky when you&amp;#039;re trying to describe people because everybody wears everything possible and you can&amp;#039;t really tell who they are. But in the past, like in the &amp;#039;50s, which was also a very pretty period, you could really describe people because of social or economic class. People wore certain things for certain occasions. And that made the job more interesting and more fulfilling.   What were your biggest challenges designing for this film?   The biggest challenge when you do period is always not to make it look like a mausoleum or a museum. It&amp;#039;s knowing when to hold on to a period and when to let it go. Also it&amp;#039;s very easy to lose a period, especially the &amp;#039;50s: There&amp;#039;s been a slight rebirth of that period, so things start to look slightly contemporary. I didn&amp;#039;t want it to look modern as much as I didn&amp;#039;t want it to look like a museum piece. It&amp;#039;s a balancing act.   What kind of research was involved?   Some of it, unfortunately, was memory on my part. But it&amp;#039;s a period that&amp;#039;s been very well documented, and there was plenty of material\u2014books, photographs. Life magazine was very big then.  What were your favorite images from the movie?   I&amp;#039;m happy with the broader strokes\u2014for instance, the people going to work\u2014all the men in suits and hats. Every single person back then did not wear a hat, but most people did. And I pushed it. I had everybody in hats and suits and ties. It created an atmosphere for Leo DiCaprio&amp;#039;s character to disappear in this crowd. Many times you can&amp;#039;t even find him because he looks like everybody else. And I thought that was very successful.  Did you have a favorite look for Kate Winslet?   I like her blue dress. When we were doing the dress, I said, &amp;quot;We have to keep in mind that it&amp;#039;s a scene where you&amp;#039;ll be sitting a lot and make sure it&amp;#039;ll work.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s wonderful to do a dress when you&amp;#039;re standing absolutely still, but most of the time people move. She said not to worry, and she was right. She&amp;#039;s wonderful about the use of clothes. She worked that dress and was so proper. She&amp;#039;s very knowledgeable about what works on her and how to use clothes and how to move in clothes\u2014and that was a great pleasure. Read more on Oscar screen style:  Milk  Australia  The Duchess  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a9032/screen-style-revolutionary-road-286530/>