How Costume Designe Oscar Nominees Stayed True to Their Film’s Period

The first conversations director Chloé Zhao and I had were about focusing on the human, personal side of the love story and tragedy of Will (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley), as opposed to William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway, so I started from the interiority of the characters out.

We used the traditional Elizabethan technique called pinking, little slashes in the leather, on Will’s doublets. Scratches became larger slashes as he descended into grief and despair, like little silent screams, until the moment we covered him in cracking clay for the ghost look in the Globe play in the film’s final moments.

Grayish blue-greens connect Will to water. We got our hands on the type of iron oak gall ink Shakespeare used and diluted it to grayscale. His fingers and clothes are stained with it. All the Shakespeare children wear gray-quilted clothing as protection to blend into the background and not provoke the abusive father. Rather than a dagger, Will wears a penner (tubes with ink and a quill) slung across his belt.

Moving away from the traditional stiff portrayal of nobles, I looked at depictions of peasants and farmers. Painter Sebastiaen Vrancx creates incredibly dynamic images of people showing the layers of clothing with movement. That led to Will’s sleeves rolled up, collar open. Agnes didn’t wear any padding; she was loose and free in linens and a bodice of barkskin, a Ugandan fabric made of tree bark, representing how she belonged to the forest.

Elements of religion, nature and mythologies were all in the screenplay that Guillermo del Toro had been working on for years, in a language he was creating. Overall, he wanted a very operatic, melodramatic atmosphere of melancholy — the feelings you would get from a Caspar David Friedrich painting in this new Mary Shelley world set in the 1850s. 

I had images of anatomy, blood cells, fractal patterns and X-rays on my mood boards. The idea of transparency created layers. We looked at 18th century wax models. Guillermo talked about Elizabeth (Mia Goth) being of the world of beetles and William Paley’s Natural Theology. We echoed a female hip bone to create an image of butterflies and insect wings on a pattern that resembles Victorian damask wallpaper. My first big breakthrough was the heightened color sense to move it out of a known world with a melancholy, dreamlike tone. Victor (Oscar Isaac) has fleeting, ephemeral images of Elizabeth and his mother as distant memories. Veiling also evoked that. Because of the single-source lighting and candlelight, getting the colors right was quite a technical alchemy.

Josh Safdie and I are both hyperrealistic people, so we wanted to make sure that the world and the characters felt as authentic as possible. We referenced 1950s New York City photography by Ruth Orkin and Weegee. There are about 5,000 people in the film, so the sheer volume was a challenge. The silhouettes of the suiting and polo shirts were important. We made hundreds of polo shirts for table tennis teams from 16 countries. Marty (Timothée Chalamet) was eccentric, so we wanted to set him apart with small nuances from what every other kid in that period would wear. His sleeves are a bit bigger, pant legs wider. Building Marty’s navy gabardine jacket with red piping was like the pinnacle of everything I love.

One “aha!” moment was finding tank tops in an original dead stock box set because that’s something you cannot re-create and you need doubles. People collect the Marlon Brando-style tees, and I always look at that in films because I know how hard they are to find. Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a dream character. I referenced fabulous old Hollywood stars like Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich, plus costumes by Edith Head and Adrian since she was a star in the ’30s.

Ryan Coogler’s vision of honoring his Uncle James, who loved the blues, became the nucleus of the story, set in 1931 Clarksdale, Mississippi. We brought in red and blue for Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan). I referenced Ralph Lauren’s workwear, palettes of beautiful blue denim and images by Eudora Welty of sharecroppers in hand-me-downs. This is a story of making something out of nothing. I made a “no alterations” rule so everything would be perfectly imperfect.

The Smoke Stack twins had worked for the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, so I viewed booking photos. Michael B. Jordan was preparing for the two roles, and I gave him a clear delineation. Smoke wears a houndstooth four-pocket jacket with a holster underneath, no tie and a denim flat cap. His style is country working-class; his clothes a bit bigger. Stack had a three-piece pinstripe suit with close-to-the-body tailoring, a fedora perfectly seated on top of his head, a pocket watch and a four-finger knife. He’s a ladies’ man. Michael says the shoes helped inform his performance: The open toe-box of Smoke’s boot gave him a different gait, while Stack’s Italian shoe was narrow.

Costumes for the Na’vi are inspired by Indigenous people all over the world based on their environments, and Fire and Ash is a burnt-out volcanic landscape. Varang (Oona Chaplin)’s feathered headdress, as a signifier of her stature as tsahik of the clan, was the first defining element director James Cameron wanted for her. Body paint, scars and piercings define the Ash People. A gift of working with Jim is that I get to head all these aspects that complete a whole character. I’m the only department to build finished products for every piece you see in the film, from costumes to hand props and hair grooms, as well as performance-capture suits for live-action.

With artisans at Weta Workshop in New Zealand, we build each piece, from loincloths to necklaces, to human scale and deliver it to Weta FX. They scan it and their artists start to model it. Then we virtually fit samples to a 9-foot-tall blue body, making the costume a second time in a virtual fitting room. We film tests of every piece involved in dancing or swimming or flying and turn them over to the animators and simulators so they understand how the costumes move, because that’s the caliber and demand that Jim has. As a scientist, proof of concept is incredibly important to him.

This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.