When Miyako Bellizzi was designing the costumes for “Marty Supreme,” the brand new Josh Safdie film, she spent lots of time fascinated about Timothée Chalamet’s underwear. His character, Marty, a Ping-Pong champ from the Decrease East Facet, may need worn a one-piece union swimsuit, the standard male undergarment of 1952, when the film is ready. However boxers and briefs have been simply coming into model, and though most of Marty’s shabby wardrobe was doubtless just a few years outdated, Bellizzi opted to place him within the newfangled lingerie. She defined her logic: “It’s form of like how our grandmothers aren’t sporting thongs, however we’re.” (She added, “And, to be trustworthy, the union swimsuit shouldn’t be the best look, proper?”)
In costume design, the time period for garments that precisely replicate an period is “interval appropriate.” Many of the clothes worn by “Marty Supreme” ’s major characters have been custom-made, however all the opposite garments within the film are classic, purchased or loaned from costume-rental homes. “These characters most likely obtained their garments within the late forties,” Bellizzi stated. “It’s form of like current day—we’re most likely sporting garments that we’ve had for just a few years.” One exception is the wardrobe for Gwyneth Paltrow, who performs Kay, a fading film star who will get entangled with Marty. Her garments are fully au courant, Bellizzi stated, “as a result of she’s wealthy.”
A couple of weeks after “Marty” started filming, in 2024, Bellizzi was in an workplace in Chelsea that served because the manufacturing’s closet, making ready for a shoot at a city home on East Sixty-ninth Avenue—a stand-in for the London Ritz. It was Halloween, and a few members of the inventive staff have been dressed up—as a jester in a tulle skirt, as Wednesday Addams—however Bellizzi wore road garments, an oxford shirt cinched on the waist and monitor pants with racing stripes. The top tailor, Miwa Ishii, was ending a silk gazar shirt for Paltrow. Bellizzi headed to a nook the place clothes have been being aged and distressed, to evaluate the progress on a sweater. “Fuzzier,” she advised an aide. “Extra snaggy.”
Bellizzi, who’s thirty-seven, first labored with Safdie and his brother, Benny, on their film “Good Time,” from 2017. She all the time does lots of analysis. “That is my dream period,” she stated, of “Marty,” “so I knew rather a lot about it already.” She boned up by finding out mid-twentieth-century images; the becoming room was stocked with books by Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin, and Weegee.
“If something ought to ever occur to me, I would like you to look into that man.”
Cartoon by Dahlia Gallin Ramirez
Born in San Francisco to Japanese American and Italian American mother and father and raised in Alameda, Bellizzi is tall and skinny, with lengthy hair dyed strawberry blond. In contrast to most Hollywood costumers, she began in vogue, finding out at F.I.T. and taking jobs at T journal and Vice. “I needed to be a vogue editor—till I labored within the business,” she stated. “I thrive in chaos, and I don’t like constant normalcy. That shit is simply not for me.” Earlier, she’d labored at two resort bars, the Bowery and the Jane (“I used to be a bottle woman—heels”), and regarded turning into knowledgeable softball participant. Her designs for the Safdies, in addition to her prolific Instagram cataloguing of garments worn by common folks on the road, have earned her a repute as a doyenne of verisimilitude. A sequence of boards within the workplace have been pinned together with her costume illustrations and images from fittings. “Forties collars are form of like seventies collars,” she noticed. “They’re actually massive and pointy.”
There’s a psychological facet to the job. “Getting somebody weak, getting them speaking about their garments and what they don’t like about their physique, straight off the bat,” she stated, “it’s virtually like a customer-service talent.” With Chalamet, she stated, “you may inform, even at first, he was nonetheless Dylan. My first fittings with him in L.A. have been actually difficult. He wasn’t absolutely concerned but.” The job is reworking folks, however Bellizzi additionally desires them to really feel like themselves. “Actresses, I really feel for them,” she stated. “Gwyneth seems to be good in all the pieces, however the way you wish to be seen on digital camera—it goes deep.”
She headed uptown for the shoot with a carful of garments. “Seventy-first and Madison,” she advised the driving force. “Ralphie’s.” (She meant the close by Ralph Lauren retailer.) At a trailer on web site, she ran by necktie choices for Marty—a blue one was deemed too boring, one other “too dandy,” within the phrases of Chalamet’s dresser, Hassan Boone. (He had a button on his cap studying “I WEAR DEAD FOLKS’ CLOTHES.”) Bellizzi saved rummaging: “I’m simply seeking to see if there are another weirdo ties.”
Outdoors the honey wagon (the porta-potty trailer), she stopped to examine an additional dressed as a busboy, checking the size of his apron. He appeared nervous, however she relaxed him with a joke. “In fact, it’ll be a closeup of your butt,” she stated, earlier than strolling over to the town-house set. On Madison Avenue, she noticed an older lady in a beige skirt, a black leather-based jacket, and platform boots, with a mod printed scarf tied round her head, carrying two buying baggage. “O.Okay.,” she stated, snapping a photograph. “Unimaginable.” ♦
