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anything i have to say about superhero costume design is captured in the contrast between dudes jamming the zipper on the cooke costume under selina’s tits and joelle jones achieving so much more eroticism while only exposing selina’s armpits and wrists
the earth shattering thing about the joelle jones catwoman design is that i can immediately put myself in it. i can instantly know what the bolero *feels* like across my shoulders and how the gloves sit on my hands. it’s not about consuming her, it’s about becoming her.
something that cooke exemplified that gets forgotten a lot is that superhero costumes aren’t designed for real people to wear, they’re for cartoon people with cartoon proportions so how artists abstract the human body is frequently more important than the costume itself
you can see all these choices that cooke made: emphasizing the size and shape of selina’s breasts and hips or drawing the erotic focus to her face while never actually drawing the costume skin tight. there’s always folds in the fabric. it’s all extremely deliberate.
and the real lesson is that the cooke costume was iconic in his hands not because of the design but how he chose to deploy it. no design can be a prophylactic against exploitative art. multiple artists drew boob socks into dust’s burqa. it requires care in execution.
as a side note, the silhouettes that eartha kitt, julie newmar, and michelle pfeiffer had as catwoman are way more intense than cooke drew. you can use bigger hip pads and less cinching to emulate his art than you can trying to replicate the “real” ones, hilariously.
