Zac Posen Turns Costume Designer: “This Isn’t a Glamour Film. It’s About Gangsters and Tailoring, and That’s New For Me”

Talk about the day-to-day of the costume design you did for this film.

I worked with a co-costume designer Sophie O’Neill. She’s London-based and I was doing this from New York, Zooming through this process. It was swatches going back and forth and vintage tie fabrics that were found and hats, and we had to work really quickly. The Huntsman component of it… To watch an actor find his character as the suit got made was really very cool; there’s a perfection to what they do. I was looking at the back of a suit and I wanted to pull it in, and normally that would be the kind of thing where you have to re-cut a whole panel and in a fashion setting it probably would not be done in the studio. And here the master cutter Campbell Carey just re-cut the piece. It was a nice experience to have your instincts affirmed by someone with such mastery in their field.

I think of the Daniel Day-Lewis movie, The Phantom Thread, which was a film about another master cutter. Hollywood loves fashion and vice versa, but there’s a sense within our industry that Hollywood rarely gets fashion right.

You know, really good storytelling is about dialogue and script writing, right? There has to be a bigger story than finishing the collection. The stakes have to be higher.

The stakes are high here. The Mark Rylance character’s clients are mobsters.

The movie is set in mid-’50s Chicago and I think what’s interesting, what drew me to it, was this idea that it’s kind of right before ideas of futurism came into the culture. You know, it’s still traditional and he’s a Savile Row tailor working in Chicago in like the mid-’50s. And really the look of men’s suiting at that time is an American kind of look. It was really imagining what a traditional British Savile Row shoulder and armhole would look like from the inside, but being interpreted in that period of time for gangsters and mafia.