‘Elvis’ Costume Designer Catherine Martin on Recreating the King’s Inimitable Style – Coveteur

There are plenty of performers that captivate their audience with their culture-defying sound, gyrations, and romps. Visually, however, there are few superstars that have cultivated a more distinct image than Elvis Presley. Baz Luhrmanns latest biopic Elvis (released on June 24, 2022) explores the arc of Presleys fascinating, boisterous, calamitous, exciting lifeso much of which is conveyed through his clothing.

For Elviss (Austin Butler) first performance in the film, he dons a silky pink suit that flummoxes his audience nearly as much as his music and moves. Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punk-ness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation, says Elvis costume designer Catherine Martin. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. The history alone presented fashion symbolism ripe for interpretation.

In Martin's pursuit of the visual component of what she dubs an American tragic opera, she delicately toed the line between exact replications and artistic interpretationa Luhrmann signature. Martin, who is married to Luhrmann and has worked on his prior films including Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, and Moulin Rouge, notes that this is the first of movies she's worked on based on actual people. Naturally, the research process was extensive. Not only did Luhrmann, Martin, and their crew consume every tangible thing they could, they spent hours and hours at Graceland, immersing themselves in Elviss world. Martin herself dug into the archives to discover the minutiae of every beaded jumpsuit and silky suit.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

You've worked on so many Baz Luhrmann films. What separated this one from the rest?

Well, I think the scale of it, which sounds ridiculous, because all of his movies have a huge scale. This one particularly was just gigantic in its ambition because it spans all of those decades. It's also about real people, some of whom are still alive. So that puts a little bit of pressure on the production and on the subject matter, as well as how you deal with it respectfully, which was certainly something that Baz wanted to do. And obviously, it's also a movie about a man's life, the complicated relationship he has with his manager, the conflict between art and commerce, what it means to be famous. This is all against the backdrop of a very tumultuous time in American history. You have the loss of innocence after the Second World War in America. You've got segregation, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the rise of the feminist movement, hippiedom, drug culture. In the space of 20 years, things got pretty crazy. I think what attracted me when Baz described the subject is that it wasn't just a biopic. It was much bigger. (These are my words not his.) It was like an American tragic opera that I thought was a really interesting way to explore not only the period, but someone's life.

I know you have a really high bar when it comes to research. I'd love to hear about what that process looks like.

Well, Baz is pretty exigent. And it starts during the writing process. He set us a number of visual research tasks for things that he might want to service the script. So for instance, we made an extensive chart of every single jumpsuit Elvis ever wore, when he wore it, if there were any anecdotes about the jumpsuits that were interesting, or might play into a story point. [It ranged from] something as workman-like as doing that to experiencing a road trip in the South to feel the landscape so when we were recreating the South in Australia, we had a feeling for what that was like. Going to Graceland and getting a survey done of the land or getting the original plans from the archives or making notations of every single plant that was in the garden at Graceland contemporaneously, and then comparing it with photos from the past.

We looked at things like Gladys's [Elviss mother] dresses in archive boxes, and just saw the simplicity of the woman. The resounding sadness that came out of the boxes when you lifted the lid, you really felt this sense of dissatisfaction with life or a kind of yearning for something that I think she couldn't quite put her finger on. It's all those ephemeral things that give you a sense of who the people are. And Baz is really into the details, understanding who the people are through their objects. He was at Graceland, on and off, for over 18 months writing. It's the fact that Vernon [Elviss father] kept every receipt and every check. You really see that his parents were products of the Depression. Obviously, we read all the books you can read about Elvis, about his entourage, about Priscilla, but documentary material is only a reflection of the documentarians opinion. So, it's great to actually see the objects themselves because it allows you to tap into who those people were.

Costume designer Catherine Martin and Olivia DeJonge who plays Priscilla Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

What struck me was how much fashion symbolism was already present in this narrative. You have this huge conflict where society tries to put Presley in tails as a symbol of repression. Were you so thrilled to work with that information?

Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punkness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. Although a lot of Black performers had synergized those things, it's interesting to see him do it on that scale. He becomes famous in almost two yearsliterally goes from rags to riches thanks to the television and the Colonel's masterstroke of putting him on the social media of his day.

Outside of the clothes, how did you experiment with Presley's appearance?

It's fascinating how hair has always been such a huge flashpoint for humanityand having long hair specifically. When you look at Elvis's hair now, you think, oh, it's a really handsome head of hair. It's not shocking at all. But that length, the way he cut it, the way it fell over his eyes, the fact that it wasn't short on the sides, but throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was such a flashpoint for everybody. Hair is such a symbol of who we are. In our company, we have a motto, which is transportation, accommodation, communication, and hair. Hair stands for feeling good about yourself, self-care, and all the issues that having a bad hair day brings up in a person. Hair can bring a set to a standstill. We joked that Austin's hair was almost a character in the movie because so much focus was on this hair.

[Elvis's] hair was naturally blonde and he progressively, throughout the '50s, dyed it darker and darker. Some people say it's because he looked at the movies, and he felt that male movie stars tended to have darker hair. Maybe it was that in black-and-white photos, there's more contrast between your face and dark hair.

I read somewhere that a lot of stars in this time would wear flashy clothes so that they would attract attention. I know Elvis didn't have a stylist. What did you discover along this process about his own approach to fashion and style? And how calculated it was versus how much he just found things that spoke to him?

I think it's a combination of things. When you find things that speak to you and you're able to combine them in a look that galvanizes people, it's got to be deliberate to some extent. What's extraordinary about Elvis is he didn't come from a very stylish place. Tupelo, Mississippi, isn't inherently the style center of America, but Elvis had this ability to not be bound by any kind of convention, and look at things and be influenced by things and synthesize them into his own take.

He was very shy and had stage fright all his life so the clothes were probably armor for him. But he naturally gravitated to extraordinary and shocking combinations. He wore a lot of lace shirts. He used to tie his shirts up Peter Allen-style and not wear a shirt under a jacket. He loved a shacket. He constantly made bold choices. His mother thought this was totally fine so he never understood why people had such violent reactions to the way he presented himself. He was certainly swimming against the tide, but he made all these visual decisions deliberately. He wore mascara and covered his pimples with his mother's base. On the one hand, Elvis is unabashedly masculine. You feel this kind of virile masculinity. He often wore clothes that worked against that in a traditional sense, but you never think that. The jumpsuits, particularly in the latter part of his career, started to look very like Liberace's costumes, with the same degree of camp-ness. But it's just a fascinating thing because with him in the jumpsuits, you never think oh, that's super camp. And maybe that tension between the two things makes him more interesting.

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley.

Photos: Courtesy of Prada

A sketch of Priscilla's outfit.

How many of these costumes were a perfect homage to previous ensembles from history and how many were you using as creative embellishment? Was the goal to recreate original looks with 100 percent accuracy?

Well, I think there were distinctly two schools, certainly that Baz spoke about. There was the trainspotting (which refers to a class of English people who can recognize steam trains and trains from a huge distance, and they know exactly what model of train it is). So there were certain outfits that were absolutely homages to existing costumes. For instance, the jumpsuits. They were all made by a company called B&K Enterprises [Costume Company]. They carry the Elvis jumpsuit torch because they actually connected with Bill Belew who designed the original jumpsuits. They connected with the tailor who actually put these garments together. They connected with the belt maker. But to some degree, we needed some subtle changesas simple as wanting a trim hand sewn on because it was to be on a 40-foot screen. When we got those jumpsuits, we fitted them to Austin. We changed them subtly because we found when we slavishly used all of the Elvis proportions, they became caricatures of themselves. The approach had to be for this version of Elvis.

Then there's some interpretive moments because they're either fictionalized scenes that are conglomerations of a bunch of events that happened to Elvis, but they're put into a scene that compresses all that information. Like the pink suit, which is totally based on real clothes that Elvis actually wore in the period. We know he wore black and pink and we know he wore that style of suit. So that is interpretive. But it's not like Gatsby in the sense that The Great Gatsby was based very broadly on research. It's more like a historical reconstruction, rather than just absolute fantasy.

Was your approach to Priscilla's character similar to that of Elvis's?

Just like Elvis, Priscilla's such a style icon. We didn't want to just slavishly reproduce her clothes and make a pale imitation of who she actually was. We wanted to keep respect and reverence for her. And so we didn't just get Priscilla's hairstyle and plunk it on Olivia [DeJonge]'s head. Shane [Thomas], our head of hair and makeup, spent a lot of time, along with his crew, working on the proportions. And similarly with the clothes, we needed to do the same thing. We did copy some of Priscillas outfits in exactly the same way that we did for Elvis. Her wedding dress is a loving reproduction. In the scene on the tarmac, both Elvis's tracksuit and Olivia's outfit were reproductions of the outfits that Priscilla and Elvis wore coming out of the divorce court hand in hand.

Costume designer Catherine Martin on the set of Elvis.'

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Fashion lovers will have spotted the Prada print from old runway shows on Priscilla. I know you've worked with Miuccia [Prada] before, but what was it like to collaborate on those looks?

It's always such a pleasure to work with her. I think there's a great synergy with Prada culture, and Baz and Muccia's perspective. Although she has said to me, Oh, I don't think I look at the past in the way that you say. But I always think it's that they both, in their completely different ways, look to the past, but always end up in the future.

Obviously, [Prada] is a luxury brand, but it's luxurious working with them because you have all these resources that add so much production value that is just not as available when you're making a movie. Just the ability to say, Okay, I want this beaded tunic with those pants in this brocade and I want the matching shoes. And its all beautifully made with incredible fabrics, incredible savoir faire, and such a depth of archive. I think that's the other great thing about Miuccia [Prada]. The clothes are a dialogue with women. They're about women and all their facets. They're very much clothes by a woman for women.

Are you excited to see how this film affects the way people will dress in the real world over the next year or two?

I always feel like fashion and cinema are in constant conversation. And you never know what comes first. I love fashion and I love clothes. So, I would have to say that I'm always influenced by what's happening around me. And I think it's just a conversation. It's always interesting, but I'm not sure it's as direct as that. It's more that we're all living in the same world at the same time. And Baz has this incredible ability to sort of [tap into] the zeitgeist. He always feels sometimes a little too ahead of his time. It's just interesting to see how they all interact with each other.

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'Elvis' Costume Designer Catherine Martin on Recreating the King's Inimitable Style - Coveteur