Eiko Ishioka

Okay, I’m kind of snickering at the fact that Eiko Ishikawa’s father was a graphic designer who tried to prevent her from going into the field but was unable to, because it means that Graphic Design Was Her Passion. But also, seriously, it was and look at her career. She revolutionized advertising in Japan. Her poster for Apocalypse Now was so dramatic that it brought her to the attention of Francis Ford Coppola himself, which led to an Oscar win for designing the costumes for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She won a Grammy for designing the cover for the Miles Davis album Tutu, which is how I learned that the category even exists.

Eiko, as she was generally called, was encouraged to be an artist by her father, and she attended the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Despite his discouragement when it came to actually being in the field, she joined the advertising department at Shiseido, where she won Japan’s most prestigious advertising award at the age of 27. From there, she moved to work for Parco, wherein she used Faye Dunaway as the face of Parco. She worked there until 1983, at which point she formed her own design agency.

Her work in film started when Paul Schraeder hired her for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters as the production designer. She also designed the costumes, creating a unified look for the work. She got a special award for it at Cannes. An Oscar, as said, for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She directed three Björk videos. Tarsem Singh hired her four times, culminating in a second Oscar nomination, this time posthumous, for Mirror Mirror—not a movie I liked, but goodness the costuming was impressive. She lost to Jacqueline Durran for Anna Karenina, and having seen both films I can’t say why.

Eiko worked in red for preference; she liked red, and she liked a very specific shade of red. There are two movies she made involving red, quasi-anatomical armour. But what she really worked in was the surreal. The striking. The intense. She thought just using blood was the easy way to get people’s attention and therefore the lazy way. She also thought it was rude. But she also refused to make a costume piece more comfortable for Jennifer Lopez, because the whole point was that it was uncomfortable.

Even if you didn’t know her name, you know her work on sight. She had a style all her own. You hired Eiko because you wanted Eiko. It was really that simple. You weren’t going to get anything else from her but who she was. There’s a reason Tarsem Singh worked with her repeatedly, because their styles intersected. She also designed the costumes for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, because that’s just one more wild aspect to that fever dream of a show.