Canonero was born in Turin, Italy. She attended university in Genoa, studying fashion, period design, and art history before moving to England in the late 1960s.[1][2] She designed for friends' London boutiques and began assisting in commercials, meeting many filmmakers along the way.[3] By chance, Canonero was also invited to watch Stanley Kubrick shoot parts of the landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the director asked her to collaborate with him on his next feature film.[3]
Career
Canonero received her first major screen credits for designing costumes for Kubrick's dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on Anthony Burgess' novel of the same name. She created an instantly recognizable character's wardrobe that perfectly captures the film's discourse on class, money, and power through provoking aesthetics, which has since become an enduring inspiration for fashion icons and designers.[4] Kubrick and Canonero continued their collaboration on the epic period drama Barry Lyndon (1975), based on the 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray about social ladder in Georgian era Britain. She and Swedish costume designer Ulla-Britt Söderlund examined original 18th-century attire at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and copied patterns from the collection to produce authentic-looking film garments. In their designs, the pair also drew inspiration from the period-defining art, including portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, as well as paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin and William Hogarth, among others. They also sourced vintage fabrics, laces, and clothing from auction houses and private collections. By combining crafted film pieces with original clothing, the designers achieved unrivaled for the period drama authenticity sought by the director.[1] Given the grand scale of production, the biggest challenge, however, was Kubrick's innovative decision to lens the film using only daylight or faint, flickering candlelight. Taking that into account, the costumes had to stand out noticeably both in shape and texture.[2] Canonero and Söderlund won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for their exceptional work.[3] Then film director George Lucas approached her to design costumes for his space opera Star Wars (1977), an offer she eventually turned down and later considered the biggest lost opportunity of her career.[3] Canonero worked with Kubrick once again on the cult psychological horror The Shining (1980), based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. She won her second Academy Award for another collaboration with director Hugh Hudson, with whom she previously worked on the short film back in the early 1970s. This time they reunited on his iconic sports drama Chariots of Fire (1981), the true story of two British athletes in the 1924 Olympics. She superbly interpreted the 1920s English tweeds, blazers, and college garb to the extent of inspiring 1980s fashion trends; such great success led to an offer for Canonero to create a clothing line for men's-wear manufacturer Norman Hilton, for which she received a special Coty Award.[3]
Canonero’s next major film was Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), based on Danish author Karen Blixen's autobiographical memoir of the same name about her decade-long experiences in colonial Kenya starting just before the outbreak of World War I. Canonero faced a formidable challenge when tasked in a strict three-month term to research, design, and produce hundreds of costumes appropriate for a vast ensemble of characters that includes African natives, white hunters, and European nobility. It took her on an intense journey everywhere, from the New York Public Library to the various museums and costume houses across England and Italy, and from the Blixen’s home in Denmark to Africa, where she met anthropologist Richard Leakey, who consulted her on less known aspects of African fashion in the 1910s, especially those regarding the indigenous groups.[5][6]
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