A Complete Unknown's Costume Designer Breaks Down Bob Dylan's Style
You may know Arianne Phillips as the costume designer for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Don’t Worry Darling and A Single Man, films that boast some of the best on-screen wardrobes of the century so far. Or maybe you know her best for her post-apocalyptic collab with Rick Owens on 1995's Tank Girl. But Phillips has had a big impact on the music world, too, and when she was researching the looks for A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold, she noticed a connection between the legendary folk singer and one of her former pop star clients.
“I worked with Madonna for twenty years” – on photo shoots, music videos and six world tours, where she designed her stage looks – “but in the late nineties or early 2000s, I remember one of the photo editors from Rolling Stone magazine told me that the only two people that ever had photo approval for the cover was Bob Dylan and Madonna.”
It's a few days after the UK premiere of the film – yes, where Timothée Chalamet rode in on a Lime bike – and news is still fresh that Phillips has been nominated for a Bafta.
She explains that the key to costuming a biopic’s lead is to become “fluent in who they were.” It was something she learnt while working on James Mangold's celebrated take on Johnny Cash's life story, Walk the Line. You’d think getting to know a Nobel Prize-winning musician would be easy when the film’s star is still alive and tweeting – a platform Dylan has returned to in recent years despite withdrawing from the public eye. But while he read the script and gave Mangold the go-ahead, Dylan didn’t have any say on Phillips’ artistic choices.
“I learned about Bob Dylan through other people's perceptions of him,” she says. “Even then [1961 to 1965], Bob created this mythology about himself that continues to this day. You can see it on that post [on X] Dylan made where he said, ‘Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.’ He's not very beholden to truth, which is fun. It gave us a lot of permission to interpret his story for the film’s narrative purposes.”
Jim, as Phillips calls him, asked her to be part of the project in 2019. He didn’t have a script yet but was basing the film off of Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric, which she started reading. Then Covid struck and production was halted. During lockdown, Phillips watched documentaries (Don’t Look Back; The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival) and read more books (Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin' Time). “Being able to absorb myself in that world felt very poignant during COVID,” she says. “I had multiple folders with all the characters, and it almost became a hobby.”
The film starts in 1961, when Dylan arrives in New York in well-worn clothes picked up from thrift stores. It doesn't take long for him to make his way in the music industry, and by 1965 we begin to see trans-Atlantic influences – from the likes of The Kinks and The Beatles – filter into his wardrobe. But Phillips learned that those looks in the earlier sixties were a stylistic choice; Rotolo famously notes in her memoir that “Bob chose his rumpled clothes carefully.”
“That was a surprise to me, especially in the early days when I thought he was just a messy 19/20-year-old,” says Phillips. “Suze Rotolo says in the book that he spent hours in front of the mirror cultivating that Woody Guthrie look.”
While his wardrobe did evolve, there were continuous staples. Suede, boots and arguably the most picked-apart item when analysing Dylan’s style: his jeans.
Phillips got in touch with Paul O’Neill, the head of design at Levi’s Vintage Clothing, to help track down specific denim pieces. After diving into the archives, he worked with Phillips on recreating styles for the film – some being so rare that they were only in production for two years. A suede jacket and pair of 501s form a capsule for Dylan style fans to slip into, with costume notes printed on the pieces’ lining, and a few lines of song lyrics can be found hidden in pockets.
Phillips estimates that around a third of the costume in the film were vintage pieces, while the rest were recreations that were aged to avoid looking too stylised. She dressed around 4,500 background actors for the film, and 15 principal stars. TC had around 67 wardrobe changes.
“He wanted to keep a couple of the pieces, the producers had to approve it, of course,” she says. “That's always a huge compliment for a costume designer.”
Learn more about the characters’ memorable looks, as told by the costume designer herself.
New York, 1965
“These jeans were made specially for the film by Levi's. In '65, he was wearing archival jeans called Super Slims, and they were only made for two years. It's very hard to source the vintage ones. Luckily, Paul O'Neill offered to recreate them for us, so they're made bespoke for him. He's wearing his Chelsea boots that he wears different versions of, but these, I believe, are the suede ones that he wears throughout '65. This is basically a low-slung, double-breasted jacket, similar to a pea coat. Dylan had these bespoke sixties tab collar shirts, which we recreated.”
New York, 1965
“It's so crazy, because I look at this and I almost think it's the original photo that we recreated! That shirt is actually vintage. It was the closest that I could find to the original one from the Columbia record sessions. For me, when you're telling a story over time and you have so many changes, it’s really important to be able to have some vintage pieces. It's hard to recreate the fabrics. Like in this case, that pattern and fabric is so unique I would have never been able to recreate it. You can recreate patterns digitally, but it doesn't have the same feel fabric-wise. Then he’s wearing the Chelsea boots that we made, and the Super Slims again.”
Newport, 1965
“Jim kind of created a little storyline for the shirt, because it's actually based on a real shirt that Bob wore. He didn't wear it at the Newport evening concert, but he wore it during sound check, which was really interesting to us because we saw in the research that at Newport, Al Kooper, played by Charlie Tahham, wore it. We assumed that because Bob wore the shirt in sound check, it was either Bob gave it to Al Kooper to wear, or they bought multiple shirts and it was part of a band look.
"The reason why I love that shirt so much is because our film ends in ’65, but in ‘66 Bob Dylan’s style goes completely mod. He's wearing stripe-on-stripe and polka-dot suits. In ‘66 he goes over the top, and I wanted to see that mod influence. You see it with his hair and his Chelsea boots and his skinny jeans, but I really wanted to see it in some of the pattern.”
New York, 1963/'64
“This would be ‘63/’64. This is our capsule collection with Levi’s. We have the jeans, with inserts that Sylvie (aka. Suze) famously made for him to fit over his boots, as bootcuts weren’t a thing then. We have the D-belt, which we made and he wears consistently, and some vintage shirt again.
"We made that suede jacket. We couldn’t vet that this snap jacket was indeed Levi's from the research that we did, but we imagine it was because we found another vintage jacket from the time [in a different colour] with the same design.”
Newport, 1965
“He did wear the orange shirt at ’65 Newport. A reporter asked me, ‘Why did you change the shirt from soft pink to orange?’ And I replied saying that it actually was orange, it’s just that they’ve looked at pictures where there was a harsh flash. I had seen those pictures too, and it looked more like a salmon pink. We recreated the leather patch pocket blazer, too.
When we recreated pieces, we had to age everything. But the ’65 looks weren’t nearly as aged as the earlier pieces. These are meant to be his new clothes; at this point, he’s gone to England and he’s had bespoke pieces made.”
Newport, 1965
“I based this on what he wore in on the day, when he played in Newport in ’64 [in the film, it's set in 1965]. It's a different actor, but it was so much fun to revisit a character that 20 years ago, I designed. This is a leather whip-stitched vest, and like a tuxedo, ruffle-front shirt. And I what I love about the shirt is that it has a ruffle on the edge, so when he's playing guitar like this [simulates how Johnny Cash would point his guitar at the crowd] you get that detail, and I had seen that in a lot of photos of Johnny Cash at that time.”
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