A Complete Unknown’ Costume Designer Arianne Phillips Created 8,000-Plus Looks for the Freewheelin’ Style of Bob Dylan
- Ingrid Schmidt : Hollywood Reporter
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
The Oscar-nominated designer also delves into how the pandemic and the actors' strike gave her added time for research.
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. The two first teamed up for Girl, Interrupted in 1999, while their work on Walk the Line, which focused on Johnny Cash’s life and career, in 2005 is revisited through the Cash-Dylan friendship depicted in A Complete Unknown. For the film, which landed eight Oscar nominations, Phillips and her bicoastal team of 42 created approximately 8,000 costumes, including 67 wardrobe changes for Timothée Chalamet in the starring role.
“So much happens in the first four years of Bob’s career that it was really thrilling, as a costume designer, to guide the audience through his dramatic style evolution,” Phillips tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He went from this fresh-faced, 19-year-old kid who showed up in New York with a quarter in his pocket and a guitar in search of Woody Guthrie to a 24-year-old global superstar on his way to becoming the Bob Dylan rock ‘n’ roll archetype we know today.”
While Phillips was first asked to join the crew in 2019, a combination of COVID, scheduling conflicts and the actors strike pushed shooting to 2024. The upside? Added time for research, from reading biographies to tracking imagery of events re-created in the film, such as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and scenes at Columbia Records.
Comments