If you’ve designed Madonna’s garments for a number of excursions, movies and movies, styled Lenny Kravitz and Justin Timberlake, and costumed 1000’s of Broadway, movie and opera performers, you aren’t prone to be intimidated by dressing a criminally insane couple and a Nobel Prize-winning music legend.
In back-to-back movies, costume designer and three-time Oscar nominee Arianne Phillips designed the far-ranging wardrobes for Joker and Harley Quinn as a song-and-dance duo in “Joker: Folie à Deux” and for “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as a younger Bob Dylan.
The sequel to 2019’s blockbuster “Joker” has Joaquin Phoenix reprise and develop his position as Joker/Arthur Fleck and introduces Girl Gaga as Lee Quinzel, also referred to as Harley Quinn. Phillips’ tackle Dylan and the people music scene of Nineteen Sixties New York arrives when the movie opens on Christmas Day.
“It is the first time I had two films come out in the same quarter,” stated Phillips, talking on a video name. “It’s really great because, for me, my approach and my process are so different on each film. I am not looking to repeat myself but to learn something new on a project.” Little question she did, beginning together with her first-time collaboration with “Joker” director Todd Phillips.
The sequel introduced an extra first — following the lead of one other costume designer, Mark Bridges, who earned an Oscar nomination for “Joker.”
“I never had inherited someone else’s world to build on,” she stated. “That gives its own layer of responsibility and reverence to the original piece.”
The 2 initiatives couldn’t be extra completely different, or extra alike.
Set in Nineteen Eighties New York, “Joker: Folie à Deux” is a darkish, psychological thriller loosely primarily based on DC Comics characters that additionally contains snazzy song-and-dance numbers in colourful fantasy sequences. “A Complete Unknown” is a biopic masking the seminal 4 years, 1961 to 1965, when earnest teen Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota and have become famous person Bob Dylan in New York.
Although one movie is fiction and the opposite is predicated on precise occasions, each tales required adherence to a longtime concept of the characters. Phillips’ job was to drag that plausible essence out of the popular culture ether and join it to the script, the character’s story arc and, in the end, the actor.
Each movies additionally function world-famous actors making an attempt to vanish into beloved characters who’ve turn out to be so woven into the favored consciousness that any variation dangers alienation. Joker and Harley Quinn have been reinterpreted in some ways over the a long time however have signatures that may be both cliché or useful identifiers. Phillips needed to determine which was which.
All through the 5 years that “A Complete Unknown” took to get completed, with interruptions for the pandemic and the actors’ strike of 2023, Phillips grew to become encyclopedically fluent in all issues Bob Dylan.
“What really was the best was reading accounts of Bob through the people in his life,” she stated.
Dylan didn’t provide any private photographs to the staff, so she learn biographies and consulted different Dylan-adjacent sources.
“In most biopics, you see the trajectory of someone’s life from birth to death, and the environment changes. In this case, it was very clear that the way the audience was going to experience Bob’s evolution over these prolific four years was through his hair and what he was wearing, his style,” she stated. “You would see this 19-year-old kid evolve into this 24-year-old rock star.”
His denim was key. She enlisted specialists at Levi Strauss & Co. to determine the denims Dylan wore, and when she couldn’t discover particular types within the classic market, the corporate remade them. Phillips additionally modified his straight-leg denims the way in which his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo described them in her memoir — with a denim insert on the within leg in order that they’d match over his boots.
“That was really an early precursor to flares,” Phillips stated.
Each movies are also interval items that had Phillips tapping her spectacular community of classic assets — sellers, archivists, collectors and rental homes. Although “Joker: Folie à Deux” had a finances rumored to be close to $200 million and a 36-person costume crew, “A Complete Unknown” was the larger costume process. The ’60s film had greater than 120 talking elements; Chalamet had practically 70 costume adjustments; and the following 20 supporting characters on the decision sheet had from 10 to twenty adjustments every.
“And then we had 5,000 extras. We dressed so many people and in multiple concert scenes. We had to source a massive amount of vintage. We had basically a warehouse of costumes we hunted and gathered,” Phillips stated.
For the “Joker” sequel, Phillips bought classic garments as inspiration however custom-made practically each costume, together with the handfuls of threadbare jail uniforms, Lee Quinzel’s harlequin-patterned jackets, specifically knitted hosiery and lots of baby-doll clothes (a nod to Quinzel’s stunted maturity). Every movie required full-time groups of tailors and textile artists, together with a minimal of 4 who aged and dyed garments, to offer a sensible, lived-in really feel.
Every movie additionally allowed Phillips to use her lengthy expertise serving to musicians create characters by garments.
“Costumes are a tool, but really, we are world-building or storytelling on an emotional level and a physical level,” she stated. “There’s a quiet experience that the actor can have to help change their posture or inform dance moves.” That have involves life when the actors step onstage and we within the viewers be part of them in moving into the story and again in time.
