‘A Complete Unknown’ Costume Designer Arianne Phillips Created 8,000-Plus Looks for the Freewheelin’ Style of Bob Dylan
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.”
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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.
“Bob Dylan is famously known for being press shy, but lucky for us, in the early days, his life was well documented with news reels, press conferences, photos and concerts,” says Phillips. “We watched Joan Baez performances and episodes of Pete Seeger’s [television series] Rainbow Quest on YouTube. One of the most helpful things I did was read A Freewheelin’ Time, the book by Suze Rotolo [Dylan’s girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, who is named Sylvie in the film]; she speaks in detail about how Bob dressed himself. He spent hours in front of the mirror adopting this proletariat look, which surprised me. I thought it was just a messy 19-year-old boy thing. But the Pendleton shirts, worker dungarees, work boots and baker boy hat were very considered. He had ambition, and he was figuring out who he was, so he fashioned himself based on his heroes, Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It makes sense because Dylan is the most pragmatic artist.”
Phillips and Mangold created three “beats,” starting with the 1961-62 proletariat look, when he was covering traditional folk songs for Columbia Records. During the second era (1963-64), Dylan’s star rose as he began to record his own music and immersed himself in the West Village coffeehouse scene as a solo artist.
“That is encapsulated best on The Freewheelin’ album cover,” says Phillips. “His silhouette got slimmer, and he wears classic Levi’s 501s, sometimes with cowboy boots. I made versions of three different brown leather jackets I found in research. The Freewheelin’ one has beautiful scrimshaw bone buttons; then there is a snap-front tan suede motor jacket. The jackets look like they were made for him, maybe by a cobbler in Woodstock, who probably made his belts and shoes as well. And a fisherman-striped sweater is in all the pictures.
“The last beat is 1965,” she continues. “After he has gone to London and met The Beatles, The Kinks and The Animals, he adopted the mod look: a peacoat with epaulets, stripey stovepipe trousers, Chelsea boots, angular sunglasses, his hair got longer. It was in tandem with him going electric and being in a band.”
Both strong women, Sylvie and Baez (played in the film by Monica Barbaro) inhabit opposite ends of the fashion spectrum. “Sylvie was an activist, an artist; her Italian immigrant parents were socialists, while her sister worked for Alan Lomax,” says Phillips. “She was independent, intelligent, confident. I talked to people who knew her, but I didn’t have many pictures at all. I gave her a darker color palette, as that post-beatnik New York cool girl. There’s an aesthetic kinship with Bob’s style; they both wear stripes. Joan is already an international star, and her style is modest, almost ecclesiastical. At Newport, she wears this fringed jacket you would expect to see at Woodstock four years later, yet she’s in a very conservative white pleated dress with a bow. She expressed a West Coast vibe in paisley and that wonderful Mexican sweater. We learned that Joan always wanted to go barefoot, so Monica’s barefoot in most scenes.”
A multitude of vintage pieces, including Pendleton shirts and workwear for Chalamet, were pulled from dealers, costume houses, flea markets, Etsy and L.A. shops Mothfood, The Way We Wore, Melet and Old Focals — Phillips’ go-to for period eyewear, including Dylan’s signature sunglasses. Levi’s stepped in to provide vintage and reissued denim, also re-creating Dylan’s archival 1955 Super Slims 501 jeans with boot-cut panels (originally stitched in by Rotolo) and a D-ring belt available in a limited run of 501 pairs.
Beverly Hills shirtmaker Anto crafted custom shirts for Chalamet, Boyd Holbrook as Cash and Ed Norton as Seeger, while Western Costume Co.’s late, long-time head shoemaker Mauricio Osorio re-created Dylan’s Chelsea boots. Research revealed that Seeger’s wife, Toshi, hand-knit his sweaters and hats, so two New York artisans (Mary Pat Klein and Maria Ficalora) were enlisted to create custom knitwear for Norton and Chalamet.
The ultimate costume design compliment might be when the star, particularly when it’s fashion-forward Chalamet, asks to keep some clothes. “Yes, Timothée went home with a couple things the producers gave him,” says Phillips, who wouldn’t elaborate. “You can ask him!”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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