Great Gatsby Costume Designer Exclusive

Catherine Martin, who created the costumes for the long-awaited film version of  The Great Gatsby was not always a fan of the famed F Scott Fitzgerald novel. In fact, the film's director, Baz Luhrmann had to use his persuasive skills to convince the designer to forget her initial opinions on the book and give it another try.

"I remembered Gatsby from being a teenager and not quite connecting with the story, but Baz was very persuasive," said Martin. "So I read the novel and - you know how one can rewrite history - I then became the greatest proponent of Gatsby ever. Much to Baz's irritation, because it was really his discovery and his insistence that made me read the book."

Martin worked alongside Miuccia Prada  and Brooks Brothers to create the Twenties-inspired costumes that the cast wear, including Carey Mulligan  and Leonardo DiCaprio. The designer has long been fascinated by the book's time period, due to the social revolution that took place after World War I.

"Saying that women were at the forefront of that revolution, I don't know that it's entirely accurate, but they were certainly making strides," she said. "It was a time of incredible change where we basically go from a 19th-Century world to a modern, mechanised world reliant on machines in the space of five years."

High Fashion : Great Gatsby Style

Although maintaining the authenticity of original Twenties clothing was important to both Martin and Luhrmann, the idea of reconnecting audiences with the story was also a key focus.

"Baz was describing to me about the modern music in this version of Gatsby and he said, 'We've got to get the audience to feel how it must have felt to hear jazz for the first time at a party,'" she said. "You need to feel how scintillating, extraordinary, new and dynamic these things were; there needs to be a frisson of the new for people to actually understand what it was really like to be there in the Twenties."