2012 — The wardrobe & objects
Skyfall
Featuring James Bond
Skyfall keeps James Bond moving between glass and weather, from the hard sheen of Shanghai to the bleak open country of the Highlands. He tails Patrice out of Pudong Airport in a navy Billy Reid peacoat, then later turns up on a grimy Whitehall rooftop in black Crockett & Jones, taking in London from above. The final act takes him home, or near enough: to Skyfall Lodge, the ancestral house in Scotland, where he arrives with M and Kincade to brace for Silva’s assault. There’s a blue N.Peal cashmere jumper, an olive Barbour jacket, and the dark brown Islay boots made for mud, stone and old obligations.
Contents
Beacon Heritage X to Ki to Sports Jacket
Bond Peacoat
Islay
007 Crew Neck Cashmere Jumper
Highbury
Dispatch Nº 01 · Location Secret
Skyfall
The Shanghai That Never Was
Skyfall’s most ravishing stretch sold China to the eye while barely leaving Buckinghamshire, turning Pinewood into a neon hallucination of Bond’s Eastward drift.
The light had to come from somewhere. Dennis Gassner had giant lions in mind for the Macau casino entrance, the sort of grand ornamental beasts a Bond film can carry off without blushing, until Roger Deakins asked the practical question that tends to ruin and then improve everything: where, exactly, was the light coming from? So the lions were dropped. In their place came two illuminated dragon heads, 30 feet high, glaring over the water like nightclub gods. Around them, the crew floated 300 lanterns across Pinewood’s Paddock Tank, and the whole sequence — one of the film’s most transportive passages — was built not in Macau at all, but just outside London. Twelve artisans were flown in from China to make the dragons. Deakins lit the place with practical sources, candles, batten strips and a small army of lamps, until Bond’s arrival by boat looked less like location work than a dream somebody expensive had carefully wired.
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