Bob Dylan’s famous Levi’s 501s were recreated for his biopic – and now you can buy them
“Bob Dylan famously wore denim, so denim was my thread throughout this movie,” says Arianne Phillips, the costume designer behind A Complete Unknown, the biopic directed by James Mangold that tells the story of four to five wildly intense years in the musician’s life, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald.
I met up with Phillips the morning after her Bafta nomination for the film, in the London headquarters of Levi’s UK. Phillips worked with the denim geeks at Levi’s Archives to recreate rare vintage jeans that Dylan wore when he was knocking around Greenwich Village in the 1960s – “denim that does not exist any more!” she laughs. Well it does now and, furthermore, Phillips has collaborated with Levi’s Vintage Clothing on a limited collectable capsule collection of pieces which are near-as-possible reproductions of what the tousled troubadour wore in the 1960s (and which doppelganger Timothée Chalamet wears in the movie). This includes a butterscotch suede trucker jacket and a special adaptation of a 1955 501 jean with a bootcut insert (£500). More on the touching origin story of this particular detail in a moment.
1960s suede jacket, £1,050 and 1955 customised 501 jeans, £500, Levi’s
Phillips has worked with director James Mangold many times before, including on another music biopic Walk the Line, the stirring rendition of the Johnny Cash story, for which Phillips was nominated for an Academy Award. However, working on A Complete Unknown felt personal. “Bob Dylan really was the soundtrack to my childhood,” says Phillips. “My father was a musician and my parents played Bob Dylan records and I’ve seen him many times in concert as an adult.”
Whether you grew up listening to Dylan or not, there’s something utterly immersive about the sound scape and production design of A Complete Unknown (watching it, you feel so completely sucked into the tobacco-stained folk cellars of Greenwich Village, it’s almost surprising to find that your clothes don’t smell of cigarettes when you leave the cinema).
The costume team dressed literally thousands of extras (around 5,000 were used in the concert scenes), while Phillips created 64 different costumes for Chalamet alone. That “denim thread” she talks about? Dylan’s narrative progression and personal transformation can indeed be gleaned from his changing silhouette in jeans: From the 19-year-old Minnesota kid in overalls and a ragged scarf, to the West Village troubadour in Levi’s 501s (that famous image we know from the Freewheelin’ album cover). Later he adopted a more tailored Mod look (a style affection he picked up from the Beatles after travelling to London). At the climax of the drama, he has become the skinny pants-wearing, leather-jacketed angry young man who goes electric at the Newport Folk festival and changes the history of music forever.
I ask Phillips how Chalamet was to work with? “The thing that is so impressive about him is his focus and his commitment…I thought he was really brave, which may sound like a strange thing to say…. But the first thing you say as a costume designer is, ‘Hello, nice to meet you. Get naked’, it’s such an intimate job…” she gives a wry smile. “He was similar in a way to Joaquin [Phoenix], in that he left his ‘real world’ self at the fitting room door, and he was very open… The fittings were really enjoyable. We played a lot of music. He even played music, and sang. And he was very patient.”
It must have been a pleasure to work with someone who is such a natural clothes horse I suggest? “Well actually, it was a challenge, because he looks so very elegant. He puts a T-shirt on and it looks elegant,” laughs Phillips. “We had to work hard at that early silhouette when he’s a cherubic, young 19-year-old with that baggy silhouette. I don’t want to give too much away, but we used a lot of smoke and mirrors to disguise that elegant body!”
Of course, the trajectory of the story does not solely belong to the boys. At the heart-breaking emotional centre of the movie, is Dylan’s love triangle with Sylvie (based on Dylan’s real-life first love Suze Rotolo, played in the movie by Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Baez was “almost monastic in her style, very modest,” says Phillips. However there is a Baez costume in the film that Phillips particularly loved sourcing: a double-breasted coat worn over a pair of cut-offs. This is a piece that Phillips had seen Baez wearing in multiple photographs from the period, including a Vogue shoot by Richard Avedon, but could not verify the provenance. But after months of research, she finally identified it (with the curatorial team at the V&A) as a design by Mary Quant. “This is what we love geeking out about as costume designers,” she laughs.
A dress, worn by the Sylvie character, at the Newport Folk festival is another favourite of Phillips’s, but one she admits she struggled to nail. “I wanted to underscore her vulnerability and youth, and the tenderness of that moment, but I could not find the right fabric [everything was too floral]”. Eventually Phillips sourced an original 1960s Marimekko print, somewhat reminiscent of a Rothko painting. “That’s when it all came together emotionally for me. It’s such a tender costume.”
“I particularly love the women characters in this film, because they don’t take Bob’s s--t. They really stand up for themselves,” continues Phillips. Suze Rotolo’s memoir A Freewheelin’ Time was an important source both for her when researching Dylan’s wardrobe and was particularly informative in terms of his self-invention through image and clothing. “I found out reading Suze Rotolo’s book that he spent hours looking in the mirror, cultivating this kind of worker look,” says Philips. “I guess it reminded me of myself at 19, you know you are figuring out your relationship with the world.”
It was in fact Rotolo who helped Dylan customise the hem of his Levi’s 501s, by sewing in a triangle of denim, so that the hem would cover his shoes. It’s this DIY detail (rendered with slightly crude stitching and all) that has been recreated in jeans in the A Complete Unknown x Levi’s capsule. “So you see, Suze invented the bootcut jean,” says Phillips with a smile. When you watch the movie, keep your eyes peeled for the subtle threads of Dylan’s lost love story that are stitched into the hem of his jeans.
Levi’s Vintage Clothing: A Complete Unknown Collection (levi.com)
