The Costume-Phantoms of Ester Krumbachová

Costume design for film is based on the premise of an intimate link between clothing and a character’s inner world: indeed, costume is frequently regarded as a direct imprint of a character’s self – their identity and state of mind. The film costumes of Ester Krumbachová, a major figure of Czechoslovak cinema during the 1960s, typically worked against this widely accepted notion. Instead, her approach pointed towards a more idiosyncratic conception, in which costumes did little to locate characters socially but, rather, functioned primarily on aesthetic and allegorical registers. This was especially prominent in Krumbachová’s new wave film collaborations (incl. Daisies, 1966; All My Compatriots, 1968; Fruit of Paradise, 1969), in which she frequently also assumed the role of the art director, if not the scriptwriter. In these films, she used costumes to ‘paint’ powerful cinematic imagery and at the same time to point to hidden meanings within the narratives, especially ones expressive of the human condition. Focusing on Krumbachová’s singular attitudes towards film costume, this essay also considers her thinking and writing about fashion – a related, if separate, domain that heavily informed her design work. The essay appears in the context of a major 2021 publication on Krumbachová (ed. Edith Jeřábková and Kateřina Svatoňová), which redefines her as a prodigiously versatile artist with output spanning not only a multitude of filmic disciplines but also the theatre, literature, art and craft.