On this post I will focus on Partridge's designs for the Silent Hill Movies. The Silent Hill series started in 1999 as a PlayStation video game under the genre of Horror-Survival. Since then several installments of the game have been released, each presenting new characters and the experiences they live through when events beckon them to return to the mysterious town of Silent Hill.
However, the main protagonists clothes is not what makes Wendy Partridge worthy of my attention, it is rather the monsters and nightmarish apparitions that she was able to bring to life in the big screen that make her in my opinion a phenomenal designer.
In the movie, Silent Hill has become a nightmare prison for the fanatics who under their false beliefs tried to stop the apocalypse by torturing a small girl named Alessa. Within this Silent Hill everyone has a haggard decrepit look, letting us know about their suffering and pain.
They are still wearing very conservative clothes, but all of them have a very old and dusty look about them. Signifying how long they have been trapped within the nightmare and how the prison is eating them away.
To further torture its victims, Alessa has created several monsters within Silent Hill. The most prominent ones withing the movie are the undead nurses and Pyramid Head.
Pyramid Head is Alessa's executioner, and it is my favorite costume of the movie. He is very simple clothing wise. He merely wears sort of an apron that is seemingly made of human skin sewn together. The most important part of this look however is his iconic head piece and the giant butcher knife that he wields. Both of these pieces are supposed to be made of very heavy material to the point of weighing him down. Partridge in a special feature included in the movie DVD talks about how they achieved that look without making the pieces too heavy by a treatment of paint that made both pieces look like very study rusty metal.
The nurses on the other hand, require more fabric work. They all wear their nurses uniform (one piece dress and cap), but an important element is how the nurses have their faces covered in bandages or simply have no face at all. Here again its not really about the display of sewing techniques, but about the fabric treatment that she achieves. She turns simple fabric into something terrifying, by giving it that decayed and almost putrefied look. The make up that lets us see the veins on the nurses bodies and their disfigured faces also enhances this effect.
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