Fiebing's Antique Finish & Fiebings Acrylic Leather Dye)

The (almost exclusively) new boots and shoes were also treated to make them to look 'worn' (e.g. Original fabric & fabric made to a shirt after stone-washing (Shirt Viktor / Poland) You do that in order to give the cotton/linen fabrics this aged look (as is frequently done in fashion with blue jeans). Quite a few costumes were 'stone-washed' before they were soiled. These were then hanged up in a special way and loaded with weights to dry.Īfter drying another group removed the fluff on certain spots (partly with burners and razors).Īnd after a lot of preparation work the uniforms could finally be 'soiled'. Within our department one group first washed the costumes or watered them. Almost all the actors in uniform in this film had several costumes which all had to be treated identically.Ĭoats, jackets and trousers are not just painted - they were aged before painting to get the typical creases. Since stuntmen also act as his double and given that there were a lot of explosions/special effects the costume crew needed each uniform model eight (8) times on the set. In the three parts of the series there were 3000 extras in uniform and in addition to that the (several) costumes of the main characters.įor instance: Friedhelm wears two different uniforms in the film. Which is no problem if you only have to age ten costumes - but we had to age thousands of costumes and costume parts within two and a half month. The costume breakdown would have to be washed out completely or dry cleaned after shooting. This is particularly hard to achieve, as we couldn't use colour that would stick permanently to the costumes. When Wiebke Kratz asked me to work for her as a breakdown artist / textile artist* it had already been made clear that almost all the uniforms would have to be returned thoroughly cleaned and without any trace of our distressing products (soiling/aging) to the uniform costume stock. Die Sprache der Toten) wanted to create a costume design for ' Generation War' which shows uniforms that have been worn for a long time already and tell their own story, thus supporting the actor's play. The costume designer Wiebke Kratz (famous for: Die Flucht, Bonhoeffer, Schicksalsjahre, R.I.S.

From January until the end of March 2011 along with a team of young and creative co-workers, I have patinated and aged the uniforms for the ZDF mini-series ' Generation War' (German title: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, 'Our mothers, our fathers').

Unsere mütter unsere väter album art