‘Unknown’ Costume Designer Turns Detective to Find Vintage Looks

Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez in James Mangold’s powerful awards season contender A complete strangeron how Bob Dylan – played by Timothée Chalamet – left his colossal imprint on our rock’n’roll culture, hails costume designer Arianne Phillips as a “detective” for her ability to trace the source of the thousands of costumes featured in the movie.

Phillips agrees with the Barbaro nickname. “Absolutely, it’s work. I say costume designers are detectives,” she tells me as we browse the film’s costume and set display on the main floor of the Fashion Institute’s Los Angeles campus at Arizona State University. of Design and Merchandising.

The exhibition was put together by museum staff in collaboration with Phillips, A complete stranger production designer François Audouy, producer Fred Berger, the film’s creative departments, Searchlight Pictures and Shelter PR.

At one point, Phillips and her team had to dress thousands of extras, “some of them twice,” she says.

“Plus, we had 120 speaking parts. Timmy alone has had 67 costume changes. It would have been virtually impossible to design all of these costumes, so I always find it essential to have vintage pieces to add texture,” she explains.

The vintage items are six decades old, so she scoured flea markets and vintage stores and tasked industry dealers with keeping her informed of finds.

Mangold has collaborated with Phillips since his 1999 film Girl, interrupted. “It’s miraculous to see all this,” says Mangold, “because we were still filming only six months ago.”

The filmmaker says the costumes capture the mood of the era, which he describes as “this kind of intersection between chic and working class, and it’s kind of Jack Kerouac meets a jazz musician super cool.”

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Barbaro found each piece “incredibly special,” but was particularly taken with a coat she wore in the film, based on a piece Baez wore in the early 1960s.

With Deadline’s London office being just a stone’s throw from Carnaby Street, I had an idea of ​​how old the coat was, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.

“I was able to see how much Arianne considers every inch of her work and I was completely fascinated by that,” Barbaro says while posing in front of the model draped in the coat in question.

I felt Barbaro’s desire to just put on that coat, but she controlled herself and resisted. She was clearly fascinated by Phillips for “recreating it, understanding every element of it and exactly why it was relevant at the time, and how cool it was for the time.”

I asked the actress if she had any memories of the film. She showed me a ring that she asked to keep, although she said she wished she had been “bolder in my requests.”

Barbaro wore the ring in a few scenes, but there’s one “where I cut the strings of the guitar that Bob plays in my house, and I have this ring and it’s very special to me.”

I sought out Phillips and asked him to tell me about Barbaro’s coveted Baez coat.

They were supposed to shoot the movie in 2019, but for various reasons there were a lot of delays, and she kept seeing photos of Baez “in that raincoat in Newport in black and white.” She’s barefoot and Donovan is with her at the festival. And I didn’t understand it because his style in general is quite modest and it looked like a fashion piece and I just couldn’t understand him,” she sighs.

A year later, Phillips was doing what she called “specific research on Joan” and saw the cover of Baez’s 1965 album. Farewell Angelina“and she is wearing this coat, and I saw that Richard Avedon, the famous Vogue photographer, took the photo.

Phillips thought that someone Vogue I had to give him this coat.

Six months later, still on the case, Phillips found an image of Baez with Donovan in London’s Trafalgar Square during an anti-war rally in May 1965. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she probably got it in London. It must be Mary Quant. »

She contacted curatorial friends in the costume department at the Victoria and Albert Museum because they had overseen the glorious and joyous 2019 Mary Quant exhibition.

The V&A team confirmed that yes, Baez wore a Mary Quant coat. In the 1960s, she collaborated with rainwear company Alligator to produce coats at affordable prices. Most of the coats were bright colors, like yellow and red, but Phillips didn’t want the one in the movie to be too loud. She didn’t know what color Baez was wearing anyway because the photos were black and white.

So she chose to create one in a sort of beige color – I’m sure there’s a fancy name for beige…anyone for mushroom? — in a mix of vinyl and linen so as not to be too shiny to reflect light on camera. “It’s very similar to the Carnaby Street mod. And I love this coat,” says Phillips.

Right next to the Mary Quant raincoat at FIDM is an ensemble – a tailored black leather jacket and pants – that Chalamet wears in the film “because it really represents what Bob looked like in 1965, when he came back from London, his style has really changed.

“He loved the Beatles,” Phillips says, “and he was clearly influenced by that, the Carnaby Street look, the Mod look. Bob and Joan and all the folk people were international stars, so the fact that you could see a reflection of their travels in their style, not like today where you have Gucci in every airport!

A complete stranger also stars Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a woman based on Dylan’s ’60s girlfriend Suze Rotolo.

Berger tells me that sales of Dylan’s music featured in the film “went up 200 percent” and that people of all ages are connecting or reconnecting with the ballad opus.

THE Complete unknown The team will gather in London next week for the film’s European premiere on January 14.