For ‘A Complete Unknown,’ Arianne Phillips Had to Dress Over 4,000 People in Period Costumes

Arianne Phillips first teamed up with director James Mangold on “Girl Interrupted” when she was “a baby costume designer,” as she told IndieWire. In the 25 years since that collaboration, Phillips has created some of the most iconic clothes in contemporary American cinema, from her looks for Brad Pitt’s laidback stuntman in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to her recreation of Johnny Cash’s “man in black” style for Mangold’s “Walk the Line.”

Both of those films garnered Phillips Oscar nominations (she was also nominated for her work on Madonna’s “W.E.”), but they were mere warm-ups for her latest work on Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown.” Unlike “Walk the Line” or some of the other biopics Phillips has designed (like Milos Forman’s “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), “A Complete Unknown” takes place in a relatively compressed time frame, following Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) for the first four or five years of his career. Its simplicity, however, is deceptive — at least as far as Phillips’ job is concerned.

“Timothée had 66 or 67 costume changes,” Philips said, and that was just the beginning — every character from Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) to Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) had between eight and 25 looks. In addition to the over 100 speaking parts, “A Complete Unknown” also had over 4,000 background actors whom Phillips had to dress in period-accurate clothing, making “A Complete Unknown” as massive an undertaking as any film in her career.

Making the progressions of each of the film’s characters feel organic was Phillips’ biggest challenge on the film, but she says she got some help from circumstances that weren’t, on the face of it, entirely positive. “The idea was that we were going to shoot in 2020, and then we got delayed by COVID,” Phillips said. “Then when we came out of COVID, it became a scheduling kerfuffle between Timmy doing ‘Dune’ and Jim doing ‘Indiana Jones.’ Pre-production didn’t actually start until 2023.”

Even then there was another delay when the actors’ strike shut the movie down. Yet for Phillips, there was a major advantage to all the stops and starts. “By the time we got started it had been four years of me knowing I was going to do the movie and keeping an archive of images, hunting and gathering as I went,” she said. When the movie shut down for the strike, Phillips had done her initial fittings with the actors and was able to ruminate on her choices. “I got this really quiet six-month period where I was on my own time, just thinking and looking at the work I had done.”

Phillips took advantage of the hiatus to read every Dylan biography she could and to create hours and hours of playlists of his music, activities that helped her gain a fuller understanding of the musical legend. “A lot of the time you have to run and gun from zero to 60,” she said. The added prep time led to multiple discoveries that made their way into the movie, the most significant of which was that Dylan was extremely deliberate about his clothes, even before he was famous.

“In Suze Rotolo’s book, she describes how meticulously Bob dressed, and I had thought he just dressed like a messy 19-year-old boy,” Phillips said. “In fact, he really made an effort to mimic this Woody Guthrie idea of an American worker with dungarees and Pendleton shirts. I wouldn’t say it was orchestrated, but it was thoughtful — he was thinking about how he wanted to be presented.” Phillips’ deep dive led her to discoveries regarding other characters as well.

‘A Complete Unknown’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

“I had seen this beige mod vinyl coat in photos from Newport, and it just didn’t seem in tandem with anything Joan Baez ever wore,” Phillips said. Eventually, she realized that Baez had worn the coat on an album cover photographed by Richard Avedon and figured out that the coat must have been given to her. Phillips embarked on a bit of detective work to trace the coat’s origins, and it became a central costume for Baez, who, like Dylan, was trying to find her own identity at the time — an idea that was central for Phillips.

“I really wanted the clothes to show a young man finding his voice, not only musically, but how he presents himself to us,” Phillips said. She added that the clothes were also important for showing the passage of time. “Most biopics are the trajectory of someone’s life from birth to death, and this was just four years where Dylan wrote this incredible amount. The technology, the architecture, the automobiles…none of that really changes in four years. So I really had an opportunity to guide the audience through the film.”

Although “A Complete Unknown” is a period piece about a specific cultural moment, Phillips feels its appeal has more to do with how it speaks to the present day. “There are similarities with what’s happening in the world right now,” she said. “We need hope, we need to believe change is possible, and we still have the same tensions and the same divisions. Ultimately, for me, this movie is about how creativity is essential, and music is the ultimate leveler that brings everyone together. Hopefully, those themes will resonate with people.”