Movie costumes I have loved: Pepper Potts in the Iron Man franchise.

Thanks to Tumblr, I'm absorbing way more promo material for the new Avengers movie than I otherwise would. Which isn't to say that I'm not psyched about The Avengers (I am!) but I'm definitely thinking about it more than expected. Effective marketing, you guys! (N.B. The most effective marketing of all is Clark Gregg's Twitter -- ie, the guy who plays the Men In Black-style Agent Coulson in the Thor and Iron Man movies. Seriously. He's awesome.) Anyhow, today I was thinking about Pepper Potts, and how much I love her.

One of my favourite things about Pepper Potts is how terrible the character seems on paper. She's the PA to a self-destructive billionaire playboy who regularly ignores her advice and almost gets her blown up on multiple occasions. She stays with him because she loves him. He bribes her with expensive shoes whenever he's done something especially atrocious. Now, from that description the Tony/Pepper relationship sounds all kinds of awful, like some dire Mad Men/Miss Moneypenny throwback to the days when mainstream films didn't have to keep their rampant misogyny on the down-low. But the surprising reality is that Tony and Pepper are one of the most charming and engaging onscreen superhero couples ever, and that's mostly down to the casting. I mean, it's widely agreed that Robert Downey Jr basically is Tony Stark. Did you see his and Gwyneth's Tony/Pepper-in-all-but-name routine at the Oscars this year? Perfection.

Their couple-name is Pepperony. Almost as good as Peeta/Katniss from The Hunger Games = Peeniss!

I didn't realise it until after Iron Man 2, but Gwyneth Paltrow is really inspired casting for this role. Obviously her performance is engaging and she has great chemistry with RDJ, but physically speaking she really just... looks like the kind of person Pepper Potts would be.

Watching any blockbuster movie requires a certain level of disbelief-suspension just in order to accept that a bunch of people who look like movie stars are anything other than movie stars. How likely is it that every member of the X-Men is coincidentally going to look like Hugh Jackman or Halle Berry? I'm not seriously complaining about movie stars looking hot, but I'm still not wild about the fact that outside of chick-flicks there's rarely much acknowledgement of the fact that maintaining those looks is damn hard work. In real life, Scarlett Johansson is probably given free cosmetics and designer clothes on a regular basis, has a personal trainer and spends an hour in the makeup chair before filming, but her character in Iron Man 2 is a government agent who receives none of these benefits yet still looks like Scarlett Johansson.

Everyone knows that being a successful Hollywood actress hinges on image and appearance, but most of the time when a character played by one of those actresses is shown spending the same amount of time and effort on her appearance then she's portrayed as being neurotic or a bitch. I'm sure that any hardened pop-culture feminists reading this are now rolling their eyes because this isn't news, but it does bear repeating.

Gwyneth Paltrow is openly obsessed with the kind of New Age remedies and diets that a) often sound like nonsensical pseudoscience, and b) exclude everyone who can't afford juice cleanse ingredients and yoga retreats. But the flip side is: unlike the many women in the public eye who feel pressured to claim they look like poreless works of art without any outside intervention, Gwyneth talks about the effort she puts into maintaining her sylphlike figure. She's practically the poster-girl for weird famous-person dieting, and works out for several hours a day.

For Pepper Potts, this is perfect. She's a "career woman" (please feel free to imagine obnoxious finger-quotes around that particular phrase), and if she'd been portrayed as another female character who "just happens" to be stunningly attractive then she immediately would've been less authentic. Because Pepper probably does diet and spend intimidating amounts of money on pedicures and facials. Not only is looking good a job requirement for someone who has to be the sane face of Stark Industries whenever Tony's off getting wasted on a private island or crashing a robot into the Chrysler building, but I'd also guess that she just likes looking pretty. I find it oddly heartwarming to see, for once, a character in a comicbook movie who is acknowledged as being feminine and girly but not mocked for it or relegated to a damsel role. She's the kind of person who relaxes by going to the spa, which is vanishingly rare among the hero characters in geek/genre narratives.

I'm so used to being bombarded with token female characters like Megan Fox's sex-object role in Transformers that I end up overvaluing characters like Natalie Portman's Jane Foster in Thor, just because she wears sweaters and plaid shirts like a Normal. By superhero movie standards Jane Foster is a great character, but when I compare her to Pepper Potts, I can't help thinking... isn't it a little disingenuous to suggest that Natalie Portman looks like a workaholic physicist who lives in a trailer in the desert, on a diet of Pop Tarts and cereal? This isn't so much a criticism of Jane Foster (whom I loved) as a personal qualm I have about the trope of "normal"-looking female characters being played by world-famous beauties. When it comes to female beauty and its relationship with makeup/vanity (oh, the good old "natural-look makeup" debate) there are already about fifteen levels of backlash.

Closely related to this is Hollywood's love of casting extremely thin women, an action that's frequently followed up by a shrilly defensive exclamation of, "But she eats like a horse!" -- Case in point Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a character who lives off energy drinks and oven pizza but is portrayed by an actress who was more-or-less ordered not to eat for the duration of filming. I feel like although Pepper is an unusually slim person, there's a tacit acknowledgement that she's not among the ranks of the Salander-like "I eat like a horse!" characters, and that's partly due to casting.

from here.

In her role as the other side of Tony's coin, Pepper dresses the way the head of Stark Industries should be dressing, even before she's promoted to CEO. Thanks to the boardroom uniform of two-piece suits it's a lot easier for men to look businesslike than women, but Pepper's an expert. Tony only seems to wear a suit when Pepper picks one out for him, otherwise he'd be perfectly happy to show up at press conferences in the same Styx t-shirt he'd been wearing for the last fifteen hours in the lab. Pepper, on the other hand, is a very careful dresser and has a distinctive style. With the exception of formal/party outfits, everything we see her wear is either black, grey or white, and all of it is very closely tailored. In fact, Pepper's wardrobe is quite similar to what Gwyneth Paltrow wears in real life, which must have been helpful for branding purposes while promoting the films. I recall that during the publicity tour for at least one of the Iron Man movies she wore 5-inch heels for all her interviews and TV appearances, still visually in-character as Pepper.

In the above still from the new Avengers trailer, Pepper's wearing something that looks quite similar to the outfit she wore to the Oscars, with the same type of structured shoulders. The only major difference between Gwyneth's own style and the costumes she wears as Pepper Potts is that Pepper more closely toes the line of suit/office themes. (Seriously, google-image "career woman" some time -- every single picture is a woman wearing a black skirt-suit.) Pepper's costumes are feminine and very chic, but generally incorporate some aspect of the classic suit, such as faux lapels or squared-off shoulders. She's the perfect Vogue-editorial CEO.

Links
Previously on Movie Costumes I Have Loved: A fan's introduction to costume design.
More costume design reviews can be found with my Movie Costumes I Have Loved tag.

Costume design review of Iron Man 2 at the Clothes On Film blog.