Born in Turin, Milena Canonero studied art, art history and costume design in Genoa before she moved on to England. There she met the then enfant terrible of cinema Stanley Kubrick on the sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1971 she designed the fantastic futuristic costumes for Alex and his Droogs in Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The costumes immediately morphed into the zeitgeist of a London in transition between hippiedom and space age opera. Five years later she worked with Kubrick again on his adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, arguably the finest costume film made in the English language. Her stunning costumes for a tale set in eighteenth century baroque Europe were set off by Kubrick’s meticulous eye for detail and the resplendent photography of John Alcott making the film a visual stunner that is hard to equal. She won her first Academy Award for this film. Barry Lyndon probably remains Milena’s best work in cinema to date. Since then she has won the Award twice more, once for Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire (1981) and more recently for Sofia Coppola’s revisionist period drama Marie Antoinette (2006). She went on to work with Kubrick one more time in the memorable Jack Nicholson starrer The Shining (1981). All in all, there are few in the business of costume designing and especially in the department of costume designing for film who can match Canonero’s grand achievements. Her designs remain trendsetters defining the feel of a period much emulated everywhere.

Canonero’s skills are evident from the fact that she has consistently been sought out by the most acclaimed and detail-driven directors of the world to design costumes for their films. Not only does she work with grand scale or off-beat costumed drama but also with dramas where a proliferation of costume types according to cultures and classes makes the designer’s task very daunting. Such an all-encompassing versatility in designing is exemplified in Milena’s work with Francis Ford Coppola with whom she did the Jazz Age America Cotton Club (1984) that required period costume set to the zaniness of performative flamboyance that the storyline demanded while for Godfather III (1990) she had to drape a large range of characters belonging to all walks of life and to various cultural backgrounds. Throughout her career Canonero has had the fortune of working with the best cameramen and lighting and production designers thus assuring that her costumes come alive as an integral active principle for the workings of a film. Out of Africa (1984) and Louis Malle’s Damage (1992) remain some of the other high points of her career.

Beyond Kubrick and Coppola, Canonero has had a long association with Warren Beatty (Dick Tracy, Love Affair and Bulworth). She has also worked with Steven Soderbergh’s controversial remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Solaris (2002) and the utterly stylish heist drama Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Recently she has started an association replete with stylistic quirkiness with Wes Anderson with whom she has done The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (2004) and Darjeeling Limited (2007). The latter is being shown at the 10th OCFF in order to honour Milena Canonero and her presence at the festival. With Anderson’s work Canonero has turned full circle, going back to work with a director playing with as immensely complex a visual palette as that of a Stanley Kubrick. IBM² is proud to present in conversation Milena Canonero and Sangita Kathiwada, a leading fashion designer of India who has recently done the costumes for Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya, a period biopic of the nineteenth century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma. The session will address key issues of costume designing for cinema and its central importance for the meaning and values a film conveys. It will be conducted as an audio-visual event with Sangita Kathiwada discussing particular films that Milena has designed through the showing of relevant clips from those films. This will ensure an exciting session about all kinds of films and all kinds of costume design, challenges that such a wide variety of cinema is bound to throw up.