Daily Inspiration Quote by Colleen Atwood

Atwood is describing a kind of double exposure: the fantasy of the classic movie musical laid over the hard realities of contemporary filmmaking, bodies, and taste. The line sounds technical, but the intent is quietly political. She is defending a design philosophy that treats “authenticity” as raw material, not a mandate. Research matters, she insists, but only as something to be “filtered through the eyes of today” - a phrase that signals permission to cheat, update, and streamline in the service of the camera and the performer.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the museum mindset that haunts period work. A strict 1920s silhouette - think rigid tailoring, narrow cuts, restrictive underpinnings - reads as historically correct yet cinematically dead if it limits choreography. Atwood’s blunt word “impaired” is doing a lot of work: movement is the currency of the musical, and anything that cramps it isn’t just uncomfortable; it breaks the genre’s promise. Costumes don’t merely decorate the dance, they enable it.

Contextually, this is the designer’s version of what directors do with period dialogue or what cinematographers do with “natural light”: you honor the past by translating it, not reenacting it. The muscle of the quote is that it frames an aesthetic compromise as an artistic principle. It’s not “we modernized because audiences won’t notice.” It’s “we modernized because the musical is a machine, and the body has to run it.”