I was raised by Mattel’s abandoned fashion doll franchise, Ever After High, which means I was raised by fairy tales, which means I never shut up about love and hope and beauty—I, like most people, need magical things like that—especially when it gets colder and the nights get longer and black ice facilitates the smooth approach of seasonal depression. Every year on Christmas Eve, I rewatch Ever After High with my sister (about whom I also never shut up) and surround myself with affection and marzipan potatoes to fend it off. It’s the true holiday of love, I think—the holiday of true love, and thus fairy tales, too.

“Once upon a time, there was a king so great, so loved by his people, and so respected by neighbouring kingdoms that he was the happiest of monarchs” is not an ideal way to begin a fairy tale in which the king wishes to marry his daughter, but maybe that’s why Disney never adapted this one: Donkeyskin or Peau d'Âne is a French literary fairy tale written in verse by Charles Perrault. It was first published in 1695 in a small volume and republished in 1697 in Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 510B, “Peau d'Asne”, formerly known as “The Dress of Gold, of Silver, and of Stars (Cap O’Rushes)”. See what I’m getting at?

In 1970, dazzlingly adept French New Wave director Jacques Demy took on the perfect risk of creating Donkey Skin, an uncensored musical-fantasy-comedy based on Perrault’s Donkeyskin, so sparkly and bright that it borders on garish. My favourite actress, Catherine Deneuve, stars as both the dead queen and her daughter. When the king promises his dying wife that he will not remarry until he finds a woman more beautiful than she, this casting choice seems perfectly natural—it would have been exceedingly difficult to find someone prettier than Deneuve to play the princess, and the king would have had to break his promise within the first twenty minutes. It is exceedingly difficult, even now, to rival the fairy-tale beauty of Demy’s Donkey Skin.

After all, Demy’s films are celebrated for their beauty, and even though I believe that Donkey Skin really is his most beautiful (despite financial problems and set malfunctions), above even The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) or Bay of Angels (1963), it is not solely for its visual composition—in the blue kingdom even the horses are dyed blue—that I love it so much but also for its unabashed playfulness, doorways so low everyone must duck to get through them, throne shaped like a giant cat… and the dresses. French Vogue talked about the dresses. Of course I want to talk about the dresses. 

In Donkey Skin, the princess demands three “impossible” dresses from the king as conditions for the impending incestuous marriage she desperately wants to escape, each more exquisite and inconceivable than the last. Artist Agostino Pace and costume designer Gitt Magrini, who together created no less than ten different costumes for Catherine Deneuve as Princess “Donkey Skin”, performed miracles on that set. The film, like all proper fairy tales, frees itself from any precise historical reference, and, as in Michel Legrand’s harpsichord-electric-fusion score, styles and epochs coexist: “the Princess’s Louis XV dresses and the Prince’s Henri II costume… Classic elements such as the ruff and vaporous Hollywood-star negligee for the Lilac Fairy… The King’s exaggerated puff sleeves whose form and volume take inspiration from compositions by Eisenstein or Welles…” (La Cinémathèque française, “Donkey Skin and the Marvellous”). Since even the Lilac Fairy did not believe in their existence, the princess’ dresses had to defy imagination. “One must feel the fabrics,” wrote Demy in his preparatory notes. Sequins, baubles, jewels of all hues, veils, pearls, decorative excess. Simple but bright colours, childish illustrations closer to Disney than good taste. Demy wanted magic. He got exactly what he wanted.

Though the impossible dresses cemented Donkey Skin’s status as a jewel of French cinema, they are far from the only wonders worn in the film. I’ve ranked my top fifteen—

This is Donkey Skin’s first appearance in the film, and her absurdly puffy sleeves and leaf-adorned skirt immediately plunge you into the surreal world of Jacques Demy, where you put on your most voluminous gown to sing about love in the courtyard.

Here, Donkey Skin is marrying the Red Prince, whom we’ll meet in eleventh and eighth place. The Medici collar stands out like the points of a star—she has shed the donkey skin and revealed her true self.

Delphine Seyrig plays the Lilac Fairy, but doesn’t quite look the part in dreamy yellow gauze. “Yellow is definitely not my colour,” she complains to her magic mirror before, in an endearingly awkward transition typical of Donkey Skin, she turns her dress violet.

First of three impossible dresses is a dress the colour of weather, made entirely of the same material as a movie screen. A luminous moving cloud pattern was projected onto the fabric to create the illusion of fair skies and, so the king had unpleasantly hoped, a peaceful marriage ahead for father and daughter.

The Red Prince all in white. Jacques Perrin and Catherine Deneuve resemble angels, playing like children in the enchanted forest. The light softens their edges. The lack of colour emphasises their innocence. The simplicity symbolises their humility and tells you, “They deserve their happy ending.”

This might be my favourite mantle design ever. With his swollen shoulders and glittering tights, the Blue King (Jean Marais) has your attention even before you’re made aware of the incestuous nature of his rebound. In spite of some sinister subject matter, the film’s childlike whimsy is always tangible.

This is the Blue Queen’s sole outfit, excluding her nightgown—she’s wearing it in the spherical glass coffin from earlier. If I died swathed in rippling deep purples and blues and silver flowers, maybe I would want a glass coffin, too.

The vibrant Red Prince, who becomes smitten with Donkey Skin after spying on her in her hut in the woods, is unsurprisingly beautiful, because everyone looks beautiful in a red like this. Deneuve wears nearly the same shade in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967).

The Red Queen and King complement each other flawlessly—the pale and deep reds, her jewelled bodice and the stones around his neck, their billowing silhouettes… Their roles are of little importance, but the execution of their costumes is exemplary.

After her transformation, the Lilac Fairy is ready to sing about the dangers of incest in her Hollywoodish negligee for two full minutes. But she also seems to be in love with the king herself—they actually get married in the end—so I’m not as confident in the sincerity of her concern as I am in her skittish beauty.

In this dress, whose wide neckline exposes Donkey Skin’s susceptibility to her father’s manipulation, she pleads for the Lilac Fairy’s help. It is purity and youth: Trails of embroidered blossoms drifting down an azure stream, flow uncertain, and in place of a crown a simple headband made of hair.

A plain, loose nightgown may look relatively uninteresting, but it is the perfect tool to convey Donkey Skin’s vulnerability under her father, the predatory king. She appears younger, softer, and scared. The effect is somewhat saintly.

It is the real skin of a donkey that Catherine Deneuve has draped over her shoulders, but even covered in dirt and hide she looks adorable. Her donning the donkey skin and becoming a scullery maid juxtaposes beauty and cleanness with ugliness and filth. It is symbolic of a child’s understanding of abuse—and for just a moment some of the film’s playfulness dissipates.

Second and most distinctive of three impossible dresses is a dress the colour of the moon, whose hypnotizing silvery material and impressive ruff make it the most accurate of the three, too; its unique reflective properties evoke lunar landscapes and yin energy. The shimmering moon has alighted on her bed of moss and flowers. I could stare at this satellite for hours—it hurt me to place it second.

Third of three impossible dresses is a dress the colour of the sun: Beyond iridescent, Deneuve rivals the sun in it—it’s a wonder that she doesn’t squint at the mirror. It is in this divine gilded gown that Donkey Skin bewitches the Red Prince and bakes the love cake that he declares will cure him of the illness of longing. An ethereal costume that represents both the true royal identity of Donkey Skin and her liberation from her father’s clutches—it could not have been placed anywhere else.

The costumes were created in 1970, but poorly preserved—no trace of the original three impossible dresses exists today. So the Cinémathèque Française recreated them, under the supervision of Agostino Pace himself, for the Le monde en-chanté de Jacques Demy exhibition in 2013. The garments were reproduced by the atelier MBV using only the film stills, the costume designer’s models, and Catherine Deneuve’s testimony as reference. 

The dresses were heavy to wear and it was difficult for me to wander through the interminable staircases of the castle of Chambord. But these difficulties did not interest Jacques. For him, it was as if a dancer had come complaining about his bleeding feet or his broken back. It had nothing to do with the movie itself, so why talk about it?

In 2012, French designer Franck Sorbier paid tribute to Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin in his haute couture fall-winter 2012/13 presentation in Paris. A model wore a white dress, made in collaboration with the electronics company Intel, onto which light patterns were projected via video mapping. “This great first will allow haute couture customers in front of a screen around the world to order ‘a dress the colour of the sun’,” Sorbier told Le Monde. Commissioned during the winter holidays, your illusory brocade sun may arrive just in time for summer!

https://youtu.be/8n0C3ZwFpCQ