Baz Luhrmann says wardrobe design was central to the success of 'The Great Gatsby'.

The 52-year-old director has confessed that if the costumes hadn't been right in his film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of the same name, the audience wouldn't have been able to connect in the same way.

He explained: ''Clothes are such a visceral way to connect with the audience. On Gatsby it was all about conveying the shock of the new. For the older generation, seeing those flappers in their slip dresses was like seeing them in their underwear.

''You don't necessarily convey that by being slavishly accurate. If pointy shoes mean something different to an audience now than they did in the Twenties, then make the toes square.''

The 'Romeo + Juliet' filmmaker - who recently directed the new Chanel No.5 perfume advertisement starring supermodel Gisele Bundchen - also denied claims that he and his costume designer wife Catherine Martin's work is inauthentic.

He told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: ''People sometimes accuse us of being inauthentic, but no one does more research than Catherine and I. That was one of the big draws of shooting this ad. We could spend day and night in the Chanel archives, which we did. That's what makes us happy.''