In consecutive films, costume designer and three-time Oscar nominee Arianne Phillips designed the wide-ranging wardrobes for Joker and Harley Quinn as a singing and dancing duo in “Joker: Folie à Deux” and for “A Complete Unknown,” with Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan.
“It’s the first time we’ve had two movies come out in the same quarter,” Phillips said, speaking on a video call. “It’s really cool because, for me, my approach and my process is very different with each film. I’m not trying to repeat myself but to learn something new on a project. He undoubtedly has, starting with his first collaboration with “Joker” director Todd Phillips.
The sequel brought another first, following the lead of another costume designer, Mark Bridges, who earned an Oscar nomination for “Joker.”
“I never inherited someone else’s world to build on,” he said. “This brings its own level of responsibility and reverence to the original piece.”
The two projects could not be more different, nor more similar.
Set in 1980s New York, “Joker: Folie à Deux” is a dark psychological thriller loosely based on DC Comics characters that also features racy song-and-dance numbers in colorful fantasy sequences. “A Complete Unknown” is a biopic that covers four pivotal years, 1961 to 1965, when earnest teenager Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota and became superstar Bob Dylan in New York.
Although one film is fictional and the other is based on real events, both stories required respecting an established idea of the characters. Phillips’ job was to extract that believable essence from the pop culture ether and connect it to the script, the character’s arc and, ultimately, the actor.
Both films also feature world-famous actors trying to disappear into beloved characters who have become so ingrained in popular consciousness that any variation risks alienation. Joker and Harley Quinn have been reinterpreted in many ways over the decades, but they have signatures that can be clichés or useful identifiers. Phillips had to decide which was which.
Over the five years it took to complete “A Complete Unknown,” with interruptions due to the pandemic and the 2023 actors’ strike, Phillips became encyclopedically fluent in all things Bob Dylan.
“The best thing was reading Bob’s accounts through the people in his life,” he said.
Dylan offered no personal photos to the team, so he read biographies and consulted other 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 would experience Bob’s evolution over these four prolific years was through his hair and what he wore, his style,” he said. “You would see this 19-year-old kid evolve into this 24-year-old rock star.”
His denim was key. She enlisted experts at Levi Strauss & Co. to identify the jeans Dylan was wearing, and when she couldn’t find specific styles on the vintage market, the company remade them. Phillips also modified his straight-leg jeans as his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo had described them in her memoir: with a denim insert on the inside of the leg so they would fit over his boots.
“This was really one of the first precursors to flares,” Phillips said.
Both films are also period pieces that allowed Phillips to tap into his impressive network of vintage resources: dealers, archivists, collectors and rental houses. Although “Joker: Folie à Deux” had a budget of around $200 million and a 36-person costume crew, “A Complete Unknown” was the most challenging costume task. The 1960s film had more than 120 speaking parts; Chalamet made nearly 70 costume changes; and the next 20 secondary characters on the call sheet had 10 to 20 changes each.
“And then we had 5,000 extras. We have dressed so many people and in multiple concert scenes. We had to source a huge amount of vintage. We basically had a warehouse of costumes that we sourced and collected,” Phillips said.
For the “Joker” sequel, Phillips sourced vintage clothing for inspiration, but custom-made nearly all of the costumes, including dozens of worn-out prison uniforms, Lee Quinzel’s harlequin-patterned jackets, specially knitted socks and many baby-doll dresses (a nod to Quinzel’s clothes). stunted maturity). Each film required full-time teams of tailors and textile artists, including a minimum of four who aged and dyed the clothes, to give a realistic, lived-in feel.
Each film also allowed Phillips to put her years of experience helping musicians create characters through clothes.
“The costumes are a tool, but we’re actually building worlds or telling stories on an emotional and physical level,” she said. “There is a calm experience the actor can have to change their posture or inspire dance moves.” That experience comes to life when the actors take the stage and we in the audience join them as we step into the story and step back in time.
