Filmmaker Magazine: Joel and Ethan Coen have been making films for over 30 years now and, since the mid-1990s, costume designer Mary Zophres has been a key part of creating their distinct aesthetic worlds. Working consistently with the fraternal directing team, Zophres has provided some iconic looks, among them the puffy jackets of Fargo (1996), The Dude’s sweater and bathrobe in The Big Lebowski (1997), and the prison garb of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), to name just a few.
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I had never heard of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, despite it actually being quite a recent work. While this probably never popped up on my radar on account of it being cowboy vignettes, it's still intriguing to me that it exists as an anthology. This idea of having separate and different stories, while also following a similar theme or other feature, resembles something like Black Mirror, which (instead of being a movie is a television show) provides very different theatrical stories, but all following a similar message. This, especially from a design perspective, seems to be a difficult task in that you are working on a single project, but it involves a bunch of little projects, all which need to be different. I didn't know the name of Mary Zophres, but I am very familiar with her work. She said in the article that she had to think about this job like she was designing for six different movies. I know that it takes a lot of time to create and maintain a style for just one aspect (one time, one place). Under one budget she had to travel all over the American frontier, while also taking into account the occupation, class, gender, and period of the characters she was designing.
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