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Wednesday, March 12, 2025
A Complete Unknown: The Making of Costume Designs of Bob Dylan Film
www.hollywoodreporter.com: Having partnered with such A-list musicians as Madonna for decades, costume designer and self-described visual artist Arianne Phillips is no stranger to the music world. Her latest work on James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, marks Phillips’ fourth Academy Award nomination for best costume design and her sixth collab with Mangold.
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It blows my mind that Arianne Phillips had to create over 8,000 looks A Complete Unknown. I think I always forget how much more people need to be dressed in film and television as opposed to live theatre because you can only fit so many bodies on stage in a limited capacity so the largest ensembles don’t go over like 30-50 people if you account for swings and understudies and all that jazz but in film, any one scene where you need extras or a crowd will just be so many people that need to be dressed and considered. I’m really curious what her original timeline would be if she did not have all the delays that the strike and covid provided to her. Another thing that I thought about a lot is the amount of time it took for her to do research and if the same level of research would have been accomplished if she was keeping to her original timeline.
I always find costume designing for Biopics fascinating. I think I would find it difficult to straddle the line between taking looks directly worn by the inspiration versus creating new looks inspired by the inspirations. I find research daunting, and thus am not a designer, nonetheless, I thought the way that the design team broke up the different era’s of Bob Dylan’s looks was very interesting and made sense. I think my favorite of his eras was the second era from 1963 to 1964. As someone who grew up on Bob Dylan, I also particularly love his music from this period in his life. I love the color palette for the costumes in this film and was very excited to see it touched on in specifically the womens clothing choices. I find it fascinating that the real people, Bob Dylan and Sylvie, had inherant fashion chemistry in their clothing choices to be discovered years later.
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