La Cenerentola

This project reimagines Oliver Messel’s 1952 designs for Rossini’s La Cenerentola, the story of Cinderella, at Glyndebourne Opera House. Rooted in academic study, my work draws on Messel’s sketches, his use of monochrome contrasts, and wider histories of dress, such as the development of jodhpurs, American workwear, and post-war women’s clothing. At the same time, it is haunted by the ghostly presence of Francesca Woodman’s black-and-white photography, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry, whose work confronts the unseen forces that shape women’s lives, through exploring themes of invisibility, metamorphosis, the female body, distortion, and the fragility of identity. My interpretation unfolds through three costumes. The first presents Angelina (Cinderella) as a maid, reworked through denim dungarees to disrupt conventional femininity that is so associated to the character if Cinderella. The second transforms her into a princess, where military tailoring, feathers, and fragments of denim combine to question romantic ideals of beauty while still acknowledging Messel’s theatrical legacy. The item that she loses is a glove to reference Francesca Woodman’s use of the Surrealist symbol. The third costume merges the two step-sisters, Clorinda and Tisbe, into a single bodied figure, their mask and divided bodice evoking cosmetic alteration, social pressure, and the grotesque echoes of earlier Cinderella tales, such as the Brothers Grimm retelling. The unsettling spirit of this work aims to invite the audience to question the instability beneath appearances to remind us that La Cenerentola is not just a romantic tale, but also a story shadowed by themes of erasure, transformation, and the violence bound up in beauty. Equally important to this process was my collaboration with photographer Toby Marshall. His images gave the costumes a life beyond the studio, capturing the haunting and surreal qualities that I wanted to convey for each character. The fractured identities of the characters are embodied through both his lens and the garments — the photos became portals into a darker, dreamlike reimagining of La Cenerentola. These photographs invite viewers not only to see the costumes, but to feel the essence of this retelling: the tension between beauty and distortion, romance and unease, fantasy and critique.