American Vogue November 1994
from "Dressing the Part" by Marion Hume
Directors choose Sandy Powell for her proven and sure sense of the overall picture, rather than what she describes as "the painstaking perfection-of-the-period-button approach." She lists Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game among her credits. "She has a huge historical knowledge, but not in a pedantic way," says Sally Potter, the director of Orlando, for which Powell's deliciously opulent cavalcade of costumes garnered her an Academy Award nomination last year. "She can distill information down to its essence; she can work up from the most slender of clues."

[...]Her first career break came just postcollege, in 1981. She telephoned Derek Jarman (the gay-activist filmmaker who died in February [1994]), who had made his name with extraordinary radical cinema. "I said to him, 'I've got this play on [she was costuming Rococco at the ICA, London's equivalent of an off-Broadway venue]. Will you come and see it?' And he did. He asked me round for a cup of tea and told me to start costuming pop promos. Then he said, 'Would you like to do my next film?'" That was Caravaggio, a 1986 low-budget art-house movie starring Tilda Swinton, Deter Fletcher, and Powell's glorious costumes. "I had a ball," she remembers.

Orlando was also made on a shoestring, although you'd never guess it. The costume budget was about £70,000, or about $110,000 (for Rob Roy, she has more than three times as much). "I had to pull students in to sew for free. Every penny was spent on yardage." And there was certainly plenty of that. "Orlando got a look in because it is full of frocks. The Academy Award for costume tends to go to the one with the most in it. Contemporary clothes don't stand a chance."

movieline.com 1998
Gillian Armstrong
(Director: My Brilliant Career, Little Women)
"The costumes in Orlando were extraordinary, like sculptured pieces. Right after the character becomes a woman, there's a scene where she walks through a huge room in this huge white dress, and her dress mirrored the shape of the objects in the room. But maybe the best costumes are the ones you don't notice. In Visconti's The Leopard, in the big ballroom scene, everyone was in a shade of pink, but you weren't conscious of it. You just had a subliminal sense that there were many shades of rose petals in the background. In the ball scene in Little Women, we used every shade of peach and gold as an homage to Visconti."

Internet Movie Database
Filmography:
Caravaggio (1986)
The Last of England (1987)
Stormy Monday (1988)
Venus Peter (1989)
Killing Dad (1989)
For Queen and Country (1989)
Shadow of China (1991)
The Pope Must Die (1991)
Edward II (1991)
The Miracle (1991)
Orlando (1992)
The Crying Game (1992)
Being Human (1993)
Wittgenstein (1993)
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Rob Roy (1995)
Michael Collins (1996)
The Butcher Boy (1997)
The Wings of the Dove (1997)
Velvet Goldmine (1998)
Hilary and Jackie (1998)
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Felicia's Journey (1999)
Miss Julie (1999)
The End of the Affair (1999)