Black Swan/White Swan

Kate and Laura Mulleavy, also known as the sister design team Rodarte, share some of the responsibility in making Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan exceptionally visually arresting. The Mulleavy’s costumes draw on the form of Edgar Degas’s famous ballerina sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, but find seductive drama in the tutu that Degas viewed as a marker of the low class. The Mulleavy’s aesthetic, often a complication of dark lace and proliferations of layered ruffles, were a natural match for Black Swan, easily animating a central concern of the film- the clashes and interactions between dualities: light and dark, rough and soft.