"
arit Allen, who has died aged 66 of a brain aneurism, pulled off a powerful use of movie-costume-as-character in the scene in
Brokeback Mountain (2005) in which a lone drifter discovers, in the family homestead of his dead lover, the shirts they wore while cowboying together long before: shabby denim and weary cotton wrapped in each other's arms.
Director Ang Lee could not have entrusted those crucial garments to a better pair of hands. Allen's uncommon strength in supplying costumes for more than 40 productions was in telling a story through clothes. She could run off the major period frock (post-crinoline Scarlett O'Hara for a 1994 TV sequel to Gone with the Wind) along with extreme fantasy (the Incredible Hulk's expanding purple pants in 2003), but they were always grounded in and surrounded by reality.
She found her style early. Her
Norwegian mother had married her English father just before the second world war. With peace, they resumed their business of smart hotel-keeping, and sent her off for holidays with Norwegian relatives, prosperous yet skilled at crafts. She told the British Library's oral history of fashion that her grandmother taught her to embroider, knit, crochet and sew, and that she helped her spiffy mother decorate the hotel for weddings and dances. At Moreton Hall prep school in Suffolk, Allen's non-uniform wear was not the approved beige kit but bright Nordic separates with red stockings. Her classmates mocked and muddied her. She didn't care."