www.backstage.com: Bob Dylan has always known how to make a fashion statement—and in James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” Timothée Chalamet captures this quality with uncanny precision. With the help of Oscar-nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips, the actor easily slips into the folk singer’s aesthetic, whether he’s wearing a Woody Guthrie–inspired baker boy cap or a vibrant orange shirt at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
2 comments:
I really appreciate how the costumes in this movie not only reflected the passage of time and the slightly different styles from the beginning of the movie to the end, but also the shifts Dylan goes through in this movie. Another good attention to detail was the difference in clothes between the more rock star style characters and the more folk singers, showing the divide and sort of internal turmoil that Dylan was going through when deciding what kind of music he wanted to make. A person's fashion choices tell quite a bit about what kind of person a person is. This movie I think did a really good job of giving Bob Dylan a kind of mysterious and whimsical air, which as far as I can tell is definitely what he manifested while he was alive. The point about how physicality was important was also interesting, because at the end of the day Timmys gotta play his guitar.
Arianne Phillips wasn’t someone I heard of before reading this article, but I really admire her work and how she approaches costume design. She discussed the actor’s movement as being a really important part of the design process. I feel like that’s something that’s often overlooked/not thought about, especially when the story you’re telling wants to have extravagant costumes. I admire how she researches and shows the little details, like how Joan Baez likes to sing barefoot. A lot of costume design is helping the actors feel like the character, and the clothes they wear is a huge aspect of that. Reading about how they showed the evolution of Bob Dylan was really interesting, especially when he started to become more himself and how his clothes reflected that. There’s a lot of things that I learned from this article, particularly the different priorities between designing for camera vs. theatre.
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