Charlotte Flemming

Charlotte Flemming (3 July 1920 - 3 March 1993) was a German costume designer for stage and screen. Her prolific career in German and American cinema spanned forty years, though she is best known for her BAFTA-nominated costumes designs for Cabaret.

Flemming was born in Germany and studied fashion and theatre design at the Weimar Academy of Arts. After the Second World War, she began her career as a costume designer at the National Theatre in Weimar, and went on to design ballets, plays and operas at multiple theatres in Berlin.

In 1971, Flemming contributed costumes to Trotta, a period film set in Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won Germany's Goldene Lola as well as multiple awards for directing and acting. The lead actress Rosemarie Fendal remembered her costume fittings with Flemming, when the design could swiftly "change the dress and me... I have disappeared. The image reflected in the mirror is the part I will play". Recent commentators have criticized the use of 1920s fashions for a film set in the 1930s, while recognising that they effectively "emphasize the trashy diva / naive waif sensibilities of Minnelli’s Bowles". Award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell has cited the anachronisms of Cabaret as highly influential, explaining that a shot of Sally's green nail varnish was "not very 1930s at all, but that's what I love about it. I love seeing the 1970s in the 1930s and vice versa".

A couple of years later, Flemming returned to the interwar cabarets of Berlin for The Serpent's Egg (1977) directed by Ingmar Bergman. The main character Manuela has been described as having "a hint of Sally Bowles about her". Bergman credited Flemming with having "tenacity and obsession", qualities that he considered necessary to survival in filmmaking, and would employ her again to design costumes for From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). Her designs for Mozart's Cosi fan Tutti, staged for the Edinburgh Festival in 1965 were praised for adding "delightful colour" to the enjoyable production by the Bavarian State Opera.

Selected filmography

The Devil Makes Three (1952) As Long as You're Near Me (1953) Robinson soll nicht sterben (1957) Face of the Frog (1959) Duel with Death (1959) Moral 63 (1963) Trotta (1971) Cabaret (1972) The Clown (1976) The Serpent’s Egg (1977) Die Elixiere Des Teufels (1976) Fedora (1978) Schloss Konigswald (1988)