By Sara Bright
I have a confession to make. I have a soft spot for films that are, on paper, completely ridiculous. You know the ones. The high-concept melodramas that require you to suspend not just your disbelief, but your entire understanding of biology and physics. The Age of Adaline is precisely that kind of film.
If you haven’t seen it, the premise is essentially a fairy tale for people who buy Vogue. Blake Lively plays Adaline Bowman, a woman born in 1908 who, thanks to a freak car accident involving lightning and icy water (don’t ask), stops aging. She stays twenty-nine forever. She watches her daughter grow old. She runs from the government. She changes her name every decade.
It’s silly. It really is. But here’s the thing – I can’t stop thinking about the clothes.
Usually, when a film spans a century, the costume design feels like a history lesson. It’s a checklist. Here are the flapper beads for the 20s, here are the shoulder pads for the 80s. It feels performative. But Angus Strathie, the costume designer, did something different here. He didn’t just dress a woman moving through time; he dressed a woman who is hoarding it.
The Hoarder of History
I remember walking through a vintage market in Spitalfields a few years back, watching a young girl try on a heavy, moth-eaten coat from the 50s. She didn’t look like she was in costume. She looked like she was borrowing a personality.
Adaline is the opposite. She isn’t borrowing. She owns these decades.
Strathie – who won an Oscar for Moulin Rouge!, which was an explosion of colour – went quiet for this one. He had to. The challenge wasn’t to make Blake Lively look good (which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly hard labour), but to explain how a 107-year-old woman dresses when she still looks like a supermodel.
The answer, it turns out, is “conservatively.”
There’s a scene where Adaline is working in the archives of a library in modern-day San Francisco. She’s wearing a chunky knit sweater. A turtleneck. It looks cozy, sure. But look closer. It’s old-fashioned. It’s something your grandmother might wear to shell peas, but because it’s on Blake Lively, we call it “chic.”
This is the genius of the wardrobe. Adaline is technically young, but her soul is ancient. She doesn’t chase trends. She buys quality and she keeps it. For eighty years.
The Red Dress: A Time Machine
Let’s talk about the big one. The red dress.
In the film, this is the showstopper. Adaline wears it to a New Year’s Eve party in 2014. It’s a velvet gown with a cinched waist and a sweeping skirt. It screams “Old Hollywood.”
But the narrative trick is that it’s not a new dress. We see a photograph of her wearing it in 1945.
I’m usually skeptical when big fashion houses get involved in movies. It often feels like a commercial break. And yes, Blake Lively was the face of Gucci at the time, and yes, Gucci helped create this dress. I wanted to roll my eyes at the synergy of it all. But I couldn’t.
Because it makes sense.
If you bought a couture gown in 1945, you wouldn’t throw it away. You’d wrap it in tissue paper. You’d keep it in a cedar chest. And on a night when you wanted to feel like yourself again – not the fake identity you’ve created, but the real you – you’d put it on.
The dress is an anchor. In a life where she has to constantly change her address, her job, and her name, the clothes are the only things that stay. They are her continuity.
The Gucci Connection (and why it works)
It’s not just the red dress. There’s a distinct “Gucci-ness” to the whole film, but it’s the Frida Giannini era of Gucci – a bit retro, a bit romantic.
There’s a yellow dress later in the film – we’ll get to that – and a coat that she wears over the red gown. But what interests me more are the accessories.
Strathie talks about rummaging through “wagons of clothing.” He pulled pieces from vintage collections, charity shops, and second-hand bins. And you can feel that texture.
There’s a handbag she carries. It’s a 1950s shape. Rigid. Proper. In 2015, nobody carried bags like that. We were all carrying slouchy totes. But Adaline carries it like a shield. It’s a small detail, but it tells you she refuses to adapt completely. She will participate in the modern world, but she won’t surrender to it.
The “Old Lady” Aesthetic
Can we discuss the cardigans?
There is a lot of knitwear in this movie. A lot. At one point, she wears a Ryan Lo cardigan over a Chanel lace dress.
On paper, this should look like a mess. Or it should look like what we now call “Grandma Core” on TikTok. But in the context of the character, it’s protective.
Adaline spends most of the film hiding. She’s hiding her age, hiding her history. So she wraps herself up. She buttons her collars high. She wears scarves.
There’s a grey suit she wears to meet her daughter (who is played by Ellen Burstyn and is visibly eighty years old
