Ngila Dickson

       Ngila Dickson is a fifty seven year old New Zealand born costume designer. She has won one Academy Award for “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” with another fifteen won awards in her life, such as the BAFTA, Saturn Award, and Costumer’s Guild awards, along with eighteen other nominations. 

       She got her big break into the business when she was hired to do the costume design for director Peter Jackson’s film “Heavenly Creatures” starring Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, where her biggest challenges were to illustrate the relationships of families with her costumes, as well as visually setting the dream sequences. Soon after, she was hired to do the costumes for the TV show “Hercules,” which then led her to taking on a second TV show, “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Here Ngila had the “greatest learning curve of her life,” managing two TV shows at the same time and all of the subsequent people and projects. “Xena” did not have an exceedingly large budget considering the scale of the story they were telling, and what Ngila managed to design and make for this show was truly stunning. She worked on “Xena” until about 1999, when she was offered the job to do the costumes for “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy with Peter Jackson. 

       Ngila would have been completely unable to tackle the massive undertaking that was “The Lord of the Rings” if it hadn’t been for her time on “Hercules” and “Xena” together. She was already familiar with setting a fantasy world, only this time she was following the production manager’s wishes to begin with what the two illustrators for “The Lord of the Rings” had already begun designing for the movie, and then to design her own costumes from there. 

       Dickson approached the complexities of presenting a fantasy world but making it absolutely believable by going through history and taking styles and shapes from multiple time periods to assign to different races of people. She had to build a language for the people that the audience would be able to understand. The Hobbits were influenced by 18th century English styles, the Elves were based on a mixture of ideas of Art Nouveau and Fortuny, the Rohirrim reflecting a more medieval and slightly Celtic look, and so on. Her use of colors is important, where some colors are being used to represent things such as the over-dyed green of Arwen’s coronation dress, or the incredible complexity of Gandalf the White’s robes. With repeating motifs and recognizable structures, she created a visible world that was understandable. 

Immediately after “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” she went to work on “The Last Samurai” and took her best workers with her from “The Lord of the Rings.” She strived for absolute perfection in the film, consulting and meeting with an incredible amount of people to produce the most accurate costume they could make for the various soldiers. She made around 17,000 separate armor pieces, assembling upwards of 300 costumes. She was competing against herself that year for the Oscar Award, and won it for “The Return of the King.” 

       Ngila has done multiple genres of movies now, and as she’s stated in interviews multiple times, she loves to try new things, which I am looking forward to seeing her different projects in the future. She spends so much time on the detail and story of each character shes building clothes for, and that mindset excites me for projects in the future.