Stereotypical Costume

• For male characters in film noir the detective look is the most common. The characters often wear a suit and a long coat, making them look important and intimidating.

• Where as the female role often wear a fancy dress making them look more innocent and seductive.

• This costume choice for the characters makes the male role seem more powerful and in charge and the females look weaker and make it seem like they are just there to look pretty, more as a trophy shown off by the male characters.

• This also helps if in the story the twist is that the woman is the bad guy as it is more unexpected and shows that you can't stereotype someone by how they look.

• These costumes are very stereotypical and makes the film feel older as the males are always in working clothes and seem to be mainly detectives or spy's and the female roles always seem to be in fancy dresses in show business or in plain old fashioned clothes and are house wives.

• The costumes are often colour coded to fit the characters in film noir and are made so the more important roles contrast, are made to stand out more. For example because it is in black and white a female character would wear all black but have fair skin and light coloured hair making her contrast and stand out more like the woman on this picture.

• This also makes the female characters that have costume like this look more seductive and have something about them and the female characters that don't contrast seem more boring and less important.

• The male characters that do this make them seem like theres something going on with the character, making them stand out like this gives the audience the feeling that they have an important role in the film and may be the downfall in it or as a twist the more shady male character in the beginning turns out to be the big hero in the end.