Joanna Johnston, costume designer on director Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, had only a few months to research and prep for the film. She started the hard work in July 2011 and the shoot began the following November. However the film had been on Spielberg’s to-do list for nearly a decade and she had been asked several times to come up with a preliminary budget. “That long build-up process helped me think out my strategy,” she said. Johnston, who has worked on five previous films with the director going back to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, found there wasn’t much available from the world of costume houses that was quite right, “because when Hollywood got into its rhythm in the 1930s and 1940s, clothes were heavily tailored in historical pictures, including most recreations of the Civil War era. But what men really wore in the 1860s was not heavily tailored at all.” And the cast is overwhelming male in the movie, with Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president – brilliantly portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis – at the center. A few outfits from the period were found in “a worldwide gather.” Key was coming upon some of Lincoln’s original clothing stored in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. A trove of period photographs was her fallback. Photography had just been introduced in the mid-19^th century and it quickly gathered momentum across all strata of the population. “Everyone was getting their picture taken, so that was my main resource, because so much information was contained in those photos. Lincoln himself realized the power of the photograph and was extensively photographed by Matthew Brady,” observed Johnston.

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