‘I became fluent in Bob’: How the costume designer of ‘A Complete Unknown’ transformed Timothée Chalamet

CNN, SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

By Leah Dolan, CNN

(CNN) — If fashion is a language, Arianne Phillips, costume designer on James Mangold’s latest film “A Complete Unknown,” is a polyglot.

In 2005, she mastered the visual lexicon of Johnny Cash’s style for Mangold’s “Walk the Line,” dressing the Rockabilly legend in Western work shirts and all-black stagewear. For 2019’s “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood,” Phillips perused Sharon Tate’s real wardrobe to outfit Margot Robbie in the same snakeskin trench coat and yellow hot pants that the actor and model wore before her harrowing death in 1969. But for the last five years, Phillips has been studying Bob Dylan — becoming “fluent” in both his worldview and his wardrobe.

Releasing on Christmas Day in the US, “A Complete Unknown” stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, charting the musician’s meteoric rise from his arrival in New York at age 19 to becoming a bonafide star at 24.

“We were recreating known events that are widely documented,” Phillips told CNN in a video interview. “That was the beginning point for me, just in terms of the research. Excavating and forensically breaking the script down to known events.”

The film spans the years 1961 to 1965 and covers seminal moments in the folk-rock star’s early career, including, the now-iconic 1963 photoshoot of his “Freewheelin’” album cover, his tumultuous 1964 year tour with Joan Baez and his divisive performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Costumes tied to these occasions were simpler to execute because Phillips faithfully recreated them. Take the leather jacket and red button-down Dylan wore performing at Newport, during which he was booed relentlessly by the crowd for playing an electric guitar, or his green and white polka-dot blouse from the same weekend. But Chalamet has more than 65 costume changes, in the film’s depiction of behind-the-scenes moments, Phillips explains, when Dylan was either not yet famous, or off-duty at home.

“You know (his) stage persona, you know the news reels,” Phillips said. “But what we don’t see are many photos of him in his private time, when he’s not on stage or promoting something.”

In order to fill in the gaps, she had to embody Dylan, picturing which pair of jeans he would pick to walk around Manhattan, the shirt he’d wear to go to the studio, or which jacket he’d grab for a drive on his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle.

“We didn’t have access to personal photographs. So my way in is really becoming fluent in Bob, in the research… understanding his aesthetic, how he dressed himself and also learning through the people that knew him,” she explained.

According to Phillips, Dylan gave Mangold notes on the film’s script, but that was the full extent of the rock star’s involvement. No access was granted to his personal wardrobe, either, so Phillips relied on various biographies and books about his life.

The 2008 memoir “A Freewheelin’ Time,” written by Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo, was also particularly helpful in capturing the essence of those early years.

“I learned a lot from her,” Phillips said of Rotolo, who died in 2011, and is played by Elle Fanning in the film as the character Sylvie Russo. “How Bob dressed himself and (how he) wanted to present to the world — his persona. I think that it’s a story of a young person finding their way in the world, (figuring out) how they want people to perceive them, (experiencing) freedom and moving away from home. I think we can all relate to that, when we’re 19 or 20, finding our own personal style.”

After receiving the call to join the film in 2019, Phillips spent years reading around her new subject and building a robust visual archive of images. Slowly, a Bob Dylan fashion formula emerged.

“My throughline was really the denim he wore,” she said. Phillips partnered up with Paul O’Neill, head of vintage collections at the Levi Strauss headquarters in San Francisco, to track down and verify Dylan’s preferred pair of jeans. Early in the decade, it’s the classic 501s.

“You can see him wearing the 1963 version of 501s on the cover of “Freewheelin’,” she said. “They were able to help me source a lot of vintage Levi’s for the movie.”

But it wasn’t long before his sartorial tastes switched. In 1965, after spending some time with the Beatles in the UK, Dylan was influenced by the slick mod look often found on London’s Carnaby Street. He switched up his looser fit denim for something skinnier.

“They were called Super Slims and they’re collectible and super hard to find,” Phillips said of the style of jeans. “So lucky for us, (Levi’s) recreated them and made them bespoke for us, which was thrilling.” Earlier this month, Levi’s announced they were reissuing Dylan’s favorite 1955 501 jean, as well as his classic suede Trucker jacket, for a limited time.

Dylan’s experimental style and playful approach to clothes meant a lot of costume changes for Chalamet. “We had a very ambitious shooting schedule,” Phillips said. “Certain days we were doing ‘61 and ‘62 looks, to the ‘65 looks and back to ‘63. It was mad. Really really busy. So being able to be the support for the actors in terms of helping them align where we were in time when shooting these scenes is a part of my job that I love… Costumes really serve a tactile experience for an actor and help them access that character.”

Chalamet has tackled historical dramas and memoir adaptations before, but “A Complete Unknown” marks the actor’s first foray into celebrity biopic territory. Although he was stretched tight between music rehearsals, vocal coaching and pre-recording performances, Phillips nods to Chalamet’s patience with their many fittings.

“It’s a very intimate job, costume design,” she said. “We’re the only department on the (set) that’s like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Take your clothes off.’ There’s a lot of trust involved.”

Since the press tour began, the cast and crew of “A Complete Unknown” have been blessed with an acknowledgement from Dylan himself. “There’s a movie about me opening soon,” 83-year-old Dylan tweeted, adding that Chalamet was starring as him (which the actor promptly shared to his own 19.3 million Instagram followers). “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.”

“It’s a different experience to work on a film about a living person,” Phillips said. “I hope that he (Dylan) sees the film and I hope he enjoys it.”

Yet she doesn’t lament the fact that her team didn’t have access to the star’s wardrobe; as she noted: “We’re not making a documentary.”

“And filming is quite hardcore,” Phillips added. “I wouldn’t expect Bob Dylan to have any (clothing) that lasted 60 years, and if he did that should be in a museum, not in a movie.”

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