American costume designer Arianne Phillips is responsible for some of the most iconic on-screen looks in cinema, building an extensive repertoire across Academy-award winning productions such as Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Joker: Folie à Deux, Walk the Line and most recently, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Making a conscious decision to stay in the years 1961-1965, using Elijah Wald’s 2015 biography Dylan Goes Electric! as his blueprint for the plot, Mangold’s biopic documents Dylan’s instantaneous ascent to the global stage. Not only do those years prove pivotal in the musician’s career, but they were also pivotal in his style, allowing Phillips to delve into the shapeshifting look of early 60s Americana, complete with suede outerwear and flannel shirts, to the mid-60s mod-inspired silhouettes of drainpipe skinnies and pea coats. 

To help Chalamet slip into the iconic super slims and 501s of Bob Dylan’s wardrobe, Phillips partnered with Levi’s either to source or recreate all of the denim seen on screen, going on to produce a capsule collection with the brand of limited-edition pieces. Here, Phillips walks us through her research process, working with her long-term collaborator James Mangold and how the characters who surrounded Bob helped to shape the man he became.

Ella Joyce: Were you a Bob Dylan fan before taking on this project?
Arianne Phillips: I was raised around this music, and I am an adult fan. I’ve seen him in concert a number of times, and I actually worked with his son, Jesse Dylan – he directed a video in the 90s with Lenny Kravitz that I styled. So it was fun to dive deeper into it.

EJ: How do you tackle the research for a project this vast? What’s the starting point?
AP: It’s all about the research, right? Lucky for me, this is my sixth film with Jim Mangold. We had done Walk the Line, and I’d done a few biopics before. I did The People vs Larry Flynt with Edward Norton, then I did a movie Madonna directed called W.E. about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Having had some experience with biopics, I knew that the most important thing is research – but research is the best part of the job. It’s so much fun, and it’s something that you do even if it’s a completely fictional story, figuring out the tone and your palette, but in a biopic, it’s more about authenticity and getting it right. Initially, it starts with the script. When Jim Mangold asked me to join him working on this film, it was 2019, and he said, “I’m not going to have you read the script, but it is adapted from this book that you should read called Going Electric by Elijah Wald.” So I read the book first, which is about Bob going electric at Newport. I knew a little bit about it from lore, everybody has a different take on what happened, it depends who you talk to, and people argue about it all the time. We have our version in our script that’s closely aligned with the book that Bob is a fan of. Jim Mangold worked with Bob on the script, and Bob gave him notes, which was helpful. We have all his music in the movie, so having that kind of permission from the artist is everything. 

I started in 2019 with just a simple little folder on my desktop computer, massing images. Once Jim gave me the script, I broke it down into beats on the scenes that we were recreating from known events like Newport or the Freewheelin’ album cover or many Columbia Record sessions. The first thing I researched was what really existed, it’s not one photo I’m looking for, I’m looking for multiple. In addition to visual research, reading accounts or reading about Joan Baez and Pete Seeger’s impressions of Bob Dylan – I learned more about Bob Dylan from accounts of other people who knew him. It was about becoming immersed in the world, not just Bob, but all the people in our story. The most informative book about what he wore was A Freewheelin’ Time by Suze Rotolo. Suze is played by Elle Fanning in the movie, but Bob Dylan asked Jim to change her name in the script because he said that she’s the only person in his life and in this story that didn’t want to be famous. She didn’t want that, she was a private person and I thought that was quite sweet. She’s passed, but they met when she was seventeen and he was nineteen, and from what I gather, I’m sure she was his first love – it holds a special place. Now he’s in his 80s, and he’s still protecting the relationship, which I think is beautiful. Elle Fanning is just heartbreaking and so incredible in that role. It’s such an important character for the audience to understand what it would be like to be caught up in a world where the person you care about is becoming famous so quickly. The women in this story are great because they definitely put Bob in his place, they’re not sitting by letting him get away with all his fantasy storytelling. I really appreciate that. 

“It was like a book you couldn’t stop turning the page of”

EJ: Your first movie with Jim Mangold was Girl, Interrupted, which came out 25 years ago, so I imagine you’ve developed quite a shorthand with one another. What is it like working with him?
AP: That was my first film with him, which will always hold such a special place for me. It was a great experience to work on a film with so many female characters, which is so unusual – I wish we had more of them. An ensemble with such talent, Angelina [Jolie] won an Oscar for that. This is my sixth film with him, but I hadn’t worked with him in ten years. I was really grateful that Jim asked me to design this movie [A Complete Unknown] in 2019. We were supposed to shoot it in the summer of 2020, but obviously, Covid got in the way. I did a lot of research during Covid because I had time. Normally, as a costume designer, you get hired, and then you start a week or two weeks later. It’s very rare that you get a longer run-up time. With Walk the Line, because I had been working consistently with Jim, I knew a year before and also with W. E. with Madonna, because I worked with her for over twenty years as her stylist. Those movies afforded me more time to digest research, and that’s what is great about having lead time. There were times when I wasn’t sure if we were ever going to get to make this movie, but I kept my research going because it was so pleasurable. And because I’m a Bob Dylan fan, I’m a Joan Baez fan, I grew up with Pete Seeger’s music. Once I started digging into research, it was like a book you couldn’t stop turning the page of. It was so engaging learning about all the relationships because I just listened to the music; I didn’t think about the world and what was happening. There are so many parallels to today in terms of uncertainty: Kennedy was assassinated, the Bay of Pigs, the beginning of the nuclear arms race with Cuba and Russia, and the Vietnam War with the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. We see the same kind of political and social turmoil today; not a lot has changed. The music holds so much meaning, and the story is very relatable – it’s a human story. 

EJ: So many biopics span a person’s whole life, but this one only covers four years. How did that affect your design process?
AP: Greatly, because so much happens over those four years. When I did Walk the Line, or The People vs Larry Flynt, or W.E., I could really collaborate and lean into production design in terms of architecture changes or technology changes, cars and automobiles change over the trajectory of a story, and in this film, none of that changes – what changes is Bob. Within Bob, you can see his silhouette changing with his hair and his shoes. In the beginning, he wears work boots, then he wears these kinds of rough outs and cowboy boots, and then ends up in these very mod-looking Chelsea boots. He’s not wearing tennis shoes or loafers, he’s a boot guy. Then, the other thread that was apparent to me was denim. He’s wearing denim from that Woody Guthrie dungaree look through to the mid-60s, kind of encapsulated on the Freewheelin’ album cover. I wasn’t sure, but they looked like a version of 501s and then we had the 60s look, which was very mod skinny jeans. I reached out to the people at Levi’s who have a wonderful entertainment division that works with the archive and vintage department, and I had worked with them closely on a couple of projects, notably on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which takes place in ’69. They put me in touch with Paul O’Neill, who’s the head of the vintage department and works in tandem with the archive. Paul’s like a historian, he knows everything about Levi’s, so he was able to vet Bob’s jeans. So yes, indeed, on the cover of Freewheelin‘, he’s wearing 501s that were popular at that time. Then in ’65, he explained to me that Levis’, for just two years, made what they called Super Slims. This was before stretch…

EJ: So they’re drainpipe skinnies… [both laugh]
AP: Exactly! The entertainment department at Levi’s in LA helps source a lot of vintage, but we could not source the Super Slims. Lucky for us, they had reissued the 501s that were popular in ’63 and ’64, so they could give those to us for Timmy – he’s wearing them in a long period of the movie. They offered to recreate [the Super Slims] for us. That was really exciting. He wore black denim and blue denim in ’65, so they recreated those for us, and we even got more time over the strike to redefine them further. So they were better than what they were going to be if we were shooting in 2023.

One of the things Paul told me was really helpful to him was A Free Wheelin’ Time by Suze Rotlo. She spoke in detail in the book about how Bob dressed himself. I thought that kind of early Woody Guthrie American worker look was just him being a messy boy, but in the book, Suze says that it was very considered. He spent a lot of time in the mirror, crafting that look. He’s a nineteen-year-old kid, he’s just left home and he’s trying to figure out his relation to the world. He clearly modelled himself after his hero, Woody Guthrie, it’s very relatable when you put it in those terms. Bob’s such an icon, we think of him as kind of God-like, but he was just a nineteen-year-old kid who happened to be a genius. One of the gems that Paul pointed out to me was that when Sylvie and Bob were living together, she put a patch on the inside of his jeans because his jeans didn’t fit very nicely over his cowboy boots, so she made this denim insert. Once he told me, I realised I had seen tons of pictures where he’s wearing jeans with the insert, but because the pictures are black and white, you don’t notice it. But once he’d told me, I couldn’t unsee it. So, we recreated them in the Levi’s capsule collection. It was hugely helpful to Timmy, Jim, Elle and me as a storytelling piece.

EJ: The clothing looks so lived-in in the film. How do you achieve that look?
AP: We have a team of breakdown textile artists. That’s always the hardest thing on a film because it takes time. So we had five people working twelve hours a day, just ageing things because we’re making most of his costumes, and then it takes days to age everything. I’m happy you noticed that. The way our cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who’s brilliant, shot the film is with a lot of natural light rather than big film lights, it’s quite moody, and sometimes when you age something it has a tendency to look very clean on film and it’s hard to see, so we kept ageing it farther and farther and farther.

EJ: I wanted to ask you about Monica and Elle’s outfits because they’re both women of the same period, but they dress very differently. How did you build their wardrobes?
AP: You’re right, they’re very different. Joan, to me, represented what was going on on the West Coast. She lives in Carmel, California, and what was happening on the West Coast, the style is different, her colour palette is different, and she’s a musician, she’s famous in our movie already. Sylvie was a couple of years younger than Joan, she was an activist and an artist and had more of a New York urban style. I took some liberties with her because there weren’t a lot of research photos, but I did read a lot of books and did what felt right for Elle’s interpretation of the character.

These are all impressions and interpretations, we’re not creating a documentary. Elle wears a dress in the film that was probably my most challenging costume, she wears it when Joan and Bob are performing on stage and she leaves very upset and emotional. That costume was really hard for me because I wanted it to underscore tonally what was happening in the scene. I wanted her to feel vulnerable, and I wanted it to have an emotional quality. I knew I wanted her to wear a dress and I wanted it to be print because in the 60s, there were so many prints. But I couldn’t find a print that was right. The 60s prints were Liberty-esque florals or graphic stripes, and it all felt too harsh for the scene. I’m usually inspired by fabric first, so I found this really wonderful reissued fabric from a Swedish design house, and I was able to cut into it to create an ombre degrade fabric. I was really pleased with that dress. Her wardrobe is really fun. To create with both of these women is like an embarrassment of riches, everything looks so good on them, they’re both so physically beautiful and interesting, and their characters are complicated women – they’re not pushovers. My favourite piece of costume that we created for Monica was at the very end of the movie…

“…my responsibility is to underscore the story and create visuals, but also to create a beam me up suit for the actors…”

“Johnny Cash is the original punk rocker”

EJ: Is it the coat?! I wanted to ask you about that, it’s perfect.
AP: I’m so glad you noticed it! It threw me because in all these black and white photos of her at Newport, she’s wearing cut-off Levi’s. She always dressed very modestly, almost monastically. Then I see her in these photos at Newport, mostly in the audience with Donovan, and she’s barefoot. She’s wearing those long shorts, a high-neck sleeveless top, and a very mod-like raincoat, but I never saw what colour it was. I saw those pictures, and I was like, “Oh, it’s so different from her other wardrobe,” kind of like the fringe jacket she also wears at Newport, her outerwear was more trend-oriented to what young people were wearing. So that’s July 1965, and then I saw in May 1965 she shot her album cover with Richard Avedon, one of the most important fashion photographers of the 60s, and she’s wearing that coat on her album cover, Farewell, Angelina – but it’s also in black and white. They were great pictures.

Then, when we shut down for the strike, I had more time to research further, and I came upon some photos from May 1965 of her and Donovan in Trafalgar Square at an anti-war rally. And I was like, “Oh, that makes sense, it must be a Mary Quant coat.” I know a couple of curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum who I worked with closely on the movie W.E., so I emailed them, and they were able to vet it and say that’s probably a Mary Quant coat. Mary Quant had designed it, but she couldn’t do the production, so she partnered with a British label called Alligator, which was a raincoat brand in the 60s in England, and you could buy them on the high street for 100 pounds, which was probably a really expensive designer piece at the time. Those are the gems that are really fun to uncover during research and something I was only able to find the origin of over time.

It’s cool because, in a similar way to Bob’s polka dot shirt, it shows the British influence, the British Invasion look. They had both toured in England in ‘65, and you can see that. It’s not like today where the same designer shops are everywhere, even in the airport. You didn’t have the internet, you really had to be there. Even when I was a kid, you couldn’t get Dr. Martens in the States, so that was unique to what she got in England, just like the way Bob wears the tab collared shirts, the pea coats and the Chelsea boots. He was a huge fan of the Beatles and he was hanging out with The Kinks. You can see that influence in ’65 when he comes back, and it’s the beginning of this rock ‘n’ roll archetype as an American rock star. Before that, we had Elvis, Buddy Holly and Little Richard. 

EJ: You mentioned previously about working on Walk the Line, and Johnny Cash is a character in this movie as well. What was it like coming back to his character now with a fresh perspective?
AP: It was a different actor, so that has its own inspiration, which was great. I learned a little bit about Bob and Johnny’s relationship when we were doing Walk the Line, and I was always intrigued by it because I couldn’t figure it out – they seemed like such different artists. Johnny Cash was so essential to Bob Dylan’s story because Johnny also refused to be defined by one thing, and he was older than Bob, he was known and respected. Johnny Cash is the original punk rocker, he’s the man in black. He’s a musician’s musician, and Bob admired him greatly. I think Johnny gave Bob a lot of confidence to be his own person, his own artist, and not let people tell him what to do. When Johnny Cash played at Folsom Prison, he went against everyone at the record company, nobody was in support of him doing that. But he wanted to play at Folsom Prison, to play for the people, and he had that integrity. Johnny’s pioneering attitude allowed Bob to find his own way.

A Complete Unknown is out in cinemas now, and check out Levi’s capsule collection here.