The bitch is back

There won't be any white coats, shirts and trousers in the charity shops this winter. Costume designer Anthony Powell has bought them all up for a scene in the new 102 Dalmatians film.

The script called for all of London to be covered in Dalmatian spots, as Cruella De Vil realises nothing - not even a stint in prison - can control her puppy-pelting fetish. How better to dress the hundreds of extras than in second-hand garments painted with dots?

'We wanted to save money so we could go over the top on lavish costumes for Glenn Close and G?rard Depardieu,' says Powell. And lavish costumes they are. Sitting in a restaurant near his Blackheath home, he flicks open a portfolio of the 16 outfits created for ?ber-bitch Cruella (Close) from her 'bin bag' version of a fur coat to his favourite - a scarlet, jewel-encrusted gown lined with ostrich feathers, revealing Cruella's true devilish colours.

Taking his inspiration from New York's Ladies Who Lunch (think Joan Rivers), Powell has come up with dog-biscuit buttons, gloves with spiky fingernails, and a dogtooth suit that owes a nod to Coco Chanel. Even the hairdos have been carefully considered - Cruella's heavily set bouffant ('the idea is that she is a prisoner in her own hair') unravels as she reverts to her fur-loving ways. Sure the film - tipped as this Christmas's blockbuster - is full of cute pups, but the real star has to be Fashion.

G?rard Depardieu plays furrier Jean Pierre Le Pelt, leaving Powell the unenviable task of turning the beefy Frenchman into a believable Paris couturier. 'I thought of the great Paris designers - Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano - and mixed them up. So G?rard has Galliano's earring and moustache, Gaultier's bleached-blond hair and Lagerfeld's ponytail. I didn't think G?rard would go for it, but he did.'

Powell's interest in design began at the age of four when he created puppet plays to entertain his grandparents. He studied set and costume design at the Central School in the late Fifties and his big break came when he designed the costumes for School for Scandal at the Haymarket in 1960. The production moved to New York and he won a Tony.

There was a problem, though. Powell always wanted to do things that were not possible on a tight budget. 'Every time the curtain went up on the first night I felt destroyed. What I saw on stage never bore any relation to my dream.' So he moved into design consultancy until a chance meeting changed his life.

'I was invited to a friend's dinner party and met the director Irving Lerner. Irving always worked on instinct - he discovered Stanley Kubrick when he was just a boy hanging around the studios - and he called me the next day and asked me to come with him to Spain that week to do The Royal Hunt of the Sun.'

Powell designs a costume around an actor's personality. 'It took me years to understand that you can't just give them funny make-up. The Glenn Close character is over the top but it still has its own reality. There's a bit of Glenn in Cruella - she has a marvellous sharp-end quality.'

As well as 101 Dalmatians and the sequel, Powell's credits include his Oscar-winning designs for Travels with My Aunt, Death on the Nile and Tess, plus surely one of the most famous images in modern cinema - Indiana Jones and THAT hat ('everyone thought it was made in the States by Stetson but it was actually made in London by Herbert Johnson'). Last year he was made Royal Designer for Industry - the UK's highest design award - and this February was honoured with the Costume Designers Guild of Hollywood's Lifetime Achievement Award. Curious, then, that over here he remains virtually unknown outside the design world.