Death Becomes Her: The Style of Lady Dimitrescu
All images © Capcom unless specified otherwise, provided for reference purposes only. I’m not making any money off of this.
She’s big. She’s bad. And she’s everywhere. When Lady Alcina Dimitrescu barged through her first tiny doorway, she took the gaming corner of social media by storm. The Resident Evil Village villainess enthralled an army of fans within hours. When art director Tomonori Takano revealed her height - nine feet, six inches - it threw a hairspray can on the fire. The fanart arrived in droves. Then came the GIF edits. Then the ASMR roleplays. Then a Thomas the Tank Engine mod, because, I guess, why not? Six-foot-nine-inch Olympian and model Ekaterina Lisina even cosplayed her, which brings home a gold medal for “saw the opportunity and went for it.” The internet basked in a moment of blood-soaked Beatlemania, cementing her as one of the series’ most iconic antagonists.
I was excited when I saw Lady Dimitrescu’s retro vamp design, because we don’t get a lot of vintage-inspired clothes in video games. In general, historical fashion stays in the realm of games with period settings, like Assassin’s Creed, where it’d be immersion-breaking to ignore what people wore way-back-when. Even then, the level of research can vary, and sex appeal can win out over historical accuracy. Now, there’s a time and a place for everything, and granular costume criticism pointed at the wrong target can turn you into the fun police. That’s especially true for a series like Resident Evil, a tacticool romp about big guns, big zombies, and Leon S. Kennedy’s Don Bluth hair. It shows out in boots, bullet pouches, manly statement jackets, and, in Ada’s case, a little red dress. That’s not a bad thing. Haute couture is simply not what it’s about.
But as soon as I encountered Lady Dimitrescu, I thought, “Oh, they looked at Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. They did their homework. This rules.” I thought Village’s artists might have been inspired by the transitional period between the late 1930s and early ‘40s, even if I couldn’t put my finger on how. It turns out, I was right, just not in the way I expected to be. In the hype before the game’s release, canny internet detectives tracked down a photo of a woman in a familiar black hat and white dress. It’s from a modeling shoot by photographer Erik Holmén, done for Nordiska Kompaniet, a Swedish department store. The photo is dated to 1938, which puts it a year after Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, right in the formative days of film noir. Cosplay Central hedges its bets and says that the photo most likely inspired her look, but there’s no way it didn’t. It’s too much to be a coincidence. (The source of inspiration is common knowledge now, at least on Twitter, but I’ve included it anyway. I love finding things like this. As thrilling as any Easter egg.)
Source: Nordiska museet, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
What’s a woman dressed like a pre-war femme fatale doing in a world of lycans, axe murder, and icky black mold? Lady Dimitrescu is a vampire, or, more pedantically, a patrician with a blood disease hosting a gene-altering parasite. (A ‘blood disease?’ The series’ wiki suggests porphyria, but isn’t that technically a liver disease? You know what? It’s Resident Evil. Don’t worry about it.) When it comes to dressing vampires, designers typically take one of a few paths to telegraph their character’s immortality. They can make the character self-consciously of the era in which they were turned, still strutting around in damask breeches or an opera cloak. They can go the occult route and give them some kind of robe, or have them mishmash modern clothes without understanding the rules.
Or - as with Lady Dimitrescu - they can make the character timeless, with classic shapes that float between periods without feeling out of place. Of course, what we think of as ‘timeless’ is not technically timeless. They’re just bygone styles that we haven’t moved too far from yet. There’s also the fact that the markers of Lady Dimitrescu’s lifespan are kind of all over the place, which I’ll get into further down. But Village came out this year, and to our 2021 eye, the “old Hollywood look” has potent symbolic meaning. It evokes a distant, fantastical otherworld of luxury, as well as the decadence and corruption that went on behind the scenes. It speaks to stars with dreamy, somewhat alien diction and gait, who died decades before we were born, but live forever on film. All we need is a projector to have them here with us again, fed by the lifeblood of each new generation who knows their names.
So how do you convey all this and mix in enough layers of fear for the character to haunt the halls of a survival horror game? A fast-paced, interactive title like Resident Evil Village leaves you limited dialogue and usually no narrator. That places visual information at a premium, and Lady Dimitrescu’s costume design has that in spades. Let’s examine her clothes piece by piece and see what we can find. There may be more to the viral vampire’s outfit than it seems.
Everything about Lady Dimitrescu’s outfit is built to maximize her height, and in this capacity, her dress plays a starring role. First of all, it’s floor-length. It also has a slim skirt, typical of the ‘30s, which makes her silhouette appear rectangular, as opposed to the square of a fuller skirt. Finally, the gathered folds funnel straight down from her chest to the hemline, echoing the Ionic columns that frame her castle’s corridors. In fact, I like to call this kind of dress “architectural,” because it uses its structure to create visual interest instead of accessories or prints. The dress is all vertical lines, which draws attention to how tall she is instead of dressing to downplay it, which many real-life tall women are taught to do.
A friend of mine dislikes the choice of white for Lady Dimitrescu’s dress, claiming that it washes her out. I think it does that on purpose. Choosing a color so close to her skin tone turns her whole figure into a single, unbroken shape. This involves a system of optical illusions that’s more complicated to explain than it is in principle. Every time one color or article of clothing ends, it leaves a visual “line break” on the person wearing it. A belt or a waistband creates a break at the hips or waistline. Sleeves, necklines, hems, shoes, and stockings create breaks that affect the appearance of your neck and limbs depending on how long they are. I may not be a fan myself, but this is the logic behind nude heels. By disappearing into your foot, they elongate your legs, because your brain registers a uniform color block rather than focusing on where the leg ends and the shoe begins. Through the same trick, Dimitrescu’s dress draws the player’s eyes all the way up in one fell swoop, and exaggerates how much she seems to tower over them.
Beyond that, Dimitrescu’s version of the dress is not an absolute white. It’s ivory, which clashes with the cool-toned, deathly pallor of her skin. Everyone has either a warm, neutral, or cool cast to their skin, and normally, you look best in colors that align with your undertone. If you’ve ever noticed that silver, white gold, or platinum suit you better than yellow gold, or vice versa, this may be why. However, Oscar-winning costume designer Edith Head argued that you could flip this rule for narrative effect. In her book How to Dress for Success, she explained how she deliberately chose unflattering shades for scenes where her actresses were supposed to look sad, eerie, or ill. In Dimitrescu’s case, the yellow light in the castle tints the ivory dress even warmer, and her skin, by contrast, becomes even more ghoulish.
But let’s put all this aside and acknowledge the obvious. The dress is thoroughly impractical for a blood-drinking killer. The fabric’s sheen suggests it’s satin, which means that it’s not washable, and from that brownish tint at the hem, she’s not sending it out for dry cleaning in Bucharest. She chases Ethan well enough in it, and she has room to swing her arms, but its fitted cut rules out the feral hunting style of her minions. It’s just not the kind of outfit you butcher people in. One spatter from one of her victims, and the whole thing would be lost. That tells us that, despite the zeal with which she cuts off Ethan’s hand, Lady Dimitrescu doesn’t like to get her own hands dirty. With the blood in her castle contained to wine bottles and a bath, she carries out even her most brutal acts under a veneer of civility.
Like in the Holmén photo, Lady Dimitrescu complements her ensemble with a large-brimmed black hat. Once the dress has pulled the player’s focus upward, her hat provides a large, looming focal point to top it off. You know what else large-brimmed hats do? They swallow up your head. When your head looks smaller, you appear to be more “proportional heads” tall. In general, anatomy guides suggest that a drawing of a normal human should be seven to seven and a half heads tall. With a higher ratio - like eight heads - the figure becomes more idealized. Nine heads and above, and you’re getting into superhero comic territory. I think we can safely assume that Dimitrescu is at the top end of that scale regardless of her headwear. The brim also throws a deep shadow across her face, which makes her expression both mysterious and threatening.
Her other accessories grab less of the player’s attention than her hat, but don’t mistake their small size for lack of interesting detail. She’s pinned a black flower corsage to her chest, the typical placement in the ‘30s and ‘40s, instead of the wrist corsages you may remember from prom. (I can’t tell what variety the flowers are supposed to be. Roses? I defer to the people who didn’t murder their gardenia bushes like me.) On top of black flowers being a goth mainstay, a developer note says that the three blooms represent each daughter, and they echo the flower on the House Dimitrescu crest. She’s wearing her allegiance to her noble line right on her front. Hold onto this idea. I’ll come back to it later. She continues to reference the Holmén photo with short black gloves, which balance the hat and corsage, but contrast sharply with the dress. While this wouldn’t have been unheard of in the ‘30s - I mean, they’re right there in the picture - it feels like a bold, dramatic, “high fashion” choice. I’d wager many everyday women of that generation would’ve played it safe and opted for white gloves instead. She finishes the look with a pearl necklace and earring set, classically ‘30s in length, and - again - featuring her family crest.
Why such an ostentatious display of her lineage? I have another theory about Lady Dimitrescu’s design. However, to dig into it, we have to hash out a couple of timeline problems that her clothes present. Frankly, the entire village has kind of a timeline problem. The villagers’ clothes swing from plausible to downright Victorian, though they did in Resident Evil 4, too, so I’m not sure how much to read into that. The important point is that Lady Dimitrescu’s aesthetic of choice wouldn’t have been seen as “timeless” at the time she was turned. In her 1938 outfit, she would have been up to twenty years behind. (I realize I’m implying that she lives in a Charlie Brown hellscape, wearing the same dress every day for sixty years. Sorry. We have to take the path of least resistance sometimes.) Sure, a lot of us hang onto the styles of our youth, but fashion underwent radical change in those two decades. In the ‘50s, people would have seen a woman wearing clothes from the late ‘30s as dowdy, not fashionably retro. Imagine that window where your jean cut is just old enough to be awkward, but not old enough to pass for nostalgia or irony.
Still more bewildering are the portraits that we find in the castle halls, one of the three daughters, one of the lady herself. They’re beautifully rendered, somewhere between Neoclassical and academic art, like the work of Franz Xaver Winterhalter or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In fact, Dimitrescu’s pose and feathers are a direct reference to Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Rococo portraits of Marie Antoinette. (Huge hat tip to Capcom’s art team here. I’ve tried to copy this painting style, and it’s fiendishly difficult.) I’d place their dresses and hair somewhere in the 1840s, shortly after Queen Victoria’s wedding. The problem is, based on the data we find in Mother Miranda’s lab, she and her daughters wouldn’t have been around back then. Either the whole game’s timeline explodes, or Lady Dimitrescu went out of her way to commission a painter to portray herself and her family like that.
Let’s think about that second option. Apart from showing that she has a massive ego, it would suggest a fixation with the historical moment of these art movements. Lady Dimitrescu yearns for an age of nobility, monarchy, empire - seeing herself in it, hearkening back to it. Keep that in mind. Let’s go back to the numbers. If Dimitrescu was “turned” at 44, and it happened before 1958, she’d have to be born no later than 1913. Let’s just go with 1913, for science. That would mean, in 1938 - the year of the Holmén photo - she would have been 25. At her youngest possible point here, she still would have been a grown woman, old enough to have a personal style - and to be aware of current events.
And what was going on in Romania in the 1930s and ‘40s? A lot. I’ve studied a fair bit of Russian history, but twentieth-century Romania is less in my wheelhouse, so I’ll tread carefully. I’m researching as I go. Encyclopedia Britannica says that the Kingdom of Romania suffered heavy economic losses during the Great Depression. Over the next fifteen years, it went through frequent political upheavals, lost territory to other countries, and was occupied by the Soviet Union. It became a people’s republic in 1947, give-or-take a decade before Dimitrescu got her Cadou parasite.
Dimitrescu comes from a noble bloodline, so these changes would have affected her family, and they’ve left her with a chip on her shoulder bigger than the Megamycete. She misses the institutions of the ancien régime because she’d actually remember them, and she won’t let anyone forget it. She’s constantly condescending to the other village lords, and she resents Mother Miranda for not acknowledging her as their superior. Now that we have that historical context, the vintage, glamorous villainy of her outfit takes on a different, more sinister tinge. With her 1930s garb, she proudly asserts herself as someone from an era when she would have been feared and obeyed. She’s not a pretender with fantasies of a time when everyone “knew their place.” She’s a genuine artifact of it, and hell-bent on reclaiming it at any cost.
I’ll admit, this is a reach, and I could very well be throwing analytical spaghetti at the wall. Or maybe I’m not. Takano stated that the development team wanted to include “elements of the Great Depression-era [in Dimitrescu’s] overall design.” Here she stands, in her costume straight out of a ‘30s escapist film, lording over a village that clearly trudged along in quiet desperation even before the game’s plot hit. Takano also references Elizabeth Báthory, who - if we believe the tales - may have gotten away with her crimes for twenty years because her status protected her from scrutiny. It’s not a subtle message, and we wouldn’t want Resident Evil to be. Lady Dimitrescu would have been villainous long before Miranda got to her. She thrives in parasitic opulence while her peasants fight and starve, the way Ramon Salazar did in Resident Evil 4.
In the end, this makes Lady Dimitrescu timeless after all, in the way that all of Resident Evil’s antagonists have evergreen flaws. It always comes down to that. Underneath the explosions and vampires, we have to ground a story in human emotions and ideas. Albert Wesker allows himself to be consumed by his warped ideas about genetic supremacy. The Bakers have good intentions and bad luck. Umbrella pushes ever forward on the classic bad-guy cocktail of hubris, desire for profit, and disregard for suffering. Mother Miranda loses herself in the howling miasma of grief that engulfed Europe after the flu pandemic, a loss that sits differently in a pandemic of our own. Not too shabby for a series where you get to punch a boulder and watch murderous villagers shamble off to a game of bingo.
SOURCES
Nordiska Kompaniet dress, ph. Erik Holmén: https://digitaltmuseum.se/011013839214/dammode-kvinnlig-modell-poserar-ikladd-draperad-aftonklanning-och-vidbrattad
Resident Evil Wiki, “Alcina Dimitrescu”: https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Alcina_Dimitrescu
Head, Edith, and Joe Hyams. How to Dress for Success. Abrams, 2011.
Devin Larsen, “Standard proportions of the human body:” https://www.makingcomics.com/2014/01/19/standard-proportions-human-body/
Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Countess Alexander Nikolaevitch Lamsdorff (Maria Ivanovna Beck, 1835–1866): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437943
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn (1825–1860), Princesse de Broglie: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459106
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette with a Rose: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/656931
Encyclopædia Britannica, “Greater Romania:” https://www.britannica.com/place/Romania/Greater-Romania