The costumes for 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE had to span two decades of Manchester culture, from the punk era of the ‘70’s through the rave and house movement of the ‘80’s. Fortunately for costume designers Natalie Ward and Stephen Noble, the brief from Winterbottom was quite loose. "Michael said he wanted us to recreate the look," says Ward, "but he didn’t care if it wasn’t exactly the same as the original. We weren’t making a documentary, we were making a film, so he wanted us really to just get a feel for it."
The pair initially set about transforming Steve Coogan into Tony Wilson. "We went to Tony’s house," Ward says, "and he showed us a few photos. But we also went out for lunch with his ex-wife, who showed us a lot of old pictures of Tony which we were able to take quite a lot from. Tony was quite easy because he was on TV all the time, so his look is well-recorded." In the film, Coogan can be seen wearing everything from pink tie-dyed shirts and ruffled neck ties, to the trademark Yahji Yamamoto suits that so often adorned Wilson.
The clothes of New Order, Joy Division and the Mondays, were also well-documented, so Noble and Ward were able to create their looks primarily from media pictures and footage from the time. The cast themselves also had some input into their character’s costumes. "Some of the cast were really helpful," says Ward. "Sean Harris (who played Ian Curtis) took the role really seriously and was reading loads of books about Ian. We had one fitting with him where we gave him a pair of trousers and a belt, and he said ‘Ian never wore a belt.’ It was something to do with his epilepsy. He’d done his research on Ian."
Having some of the real people around on set also helped. Rowetta from the Happy Mondays plays herself in the film, and would often help out with what the Mondays boys would and would not have been wearing. "For the young Shaun and Paul, we tried to meet up with Derek Ryder (their dad), but were unable to," says Ward. "We had to use our creative judgement about how the boys would have looked in 1978. Dressing the bands was great, especially the Mondays, as they were a band from my era. To recreate them in our own eyes and know that they looked right was really good."
The costumes themselves came from a mixture of costume houses and second hand clothes stores. "Quite a lot of the early stuff came from costume houses," says Ward, "as you just can’t buy ‘70s everyday wear. Once it got into the ‘80s, in Manchester you can actually still buy a lot of the clothes people were wearing ten years ago. There are a couple of great shops in Manchester that provided us with the big baggy flares, and Aflecks Palace was around in the 70’s and still is now, so we got some stuff from there."
Noble and Ward also had a lot of support from various clothes labels. "We tried to use as many of the labels as possible," says Ward. "Dr. Martins go right through from the ‘70s to the ‘90s. Joe Bloggs reprinted a lot of old t-shirts for us, as the Mondays wore a lot of their stuff. Kickers were around in the ‘70s and then had a bit of a resurgence in the late ‘80s with the
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