Fashion fit for the King

Forty-five several years just after his loss of life, Elvis is again. Performed by 30-yr-aged Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s riot of a biopic, the younger king of rock ’n’ roll is remodeled into an ethereal dandy.

Elvis wears black-lace shirts beneath newborn-pink fits, and a quiff that grows even bigger and bouncier the much more revenue he tends to make. “I are not able to overstate how unusual he looked,” muses his supervisor Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks with a mixture of showman’s verve and peaceful menace, as he recalls his first encounter with his prodigy.

Luhrmann’s movie, in United kingdom cinemas later on this thirty day period, is extensive. At two hours and 39 minutes, it has to do the job tough to preserve the audience’s attention — and it succeeds, thanks in element to a parade of exuberant costumes.

Butler is on display nearly continuously, playing Elvis from his early-1950s-model epiphany outdoors his regional tailors, Lansky Bros of Beale Street, Memphis, to the jumpsuit several years and the overwrought Vegas exhibits of the 1970s.

How many costume variations does Butler go through? “I think it is 93 . . . definitely around 90,” claims Catherine Martin, the film’s costume designer, co-producer and Luhrmann’s longtime artistic collaborator and wife, in a get in touch with.

The film spans additional than 3 decades — the postwar period when vogue modified at dizzying pace. Some ensembles had been imagined and made to in good shape the plot some others have been replicas of outfits Elvis and other key characters really wore.

Martin states the toughest challenge was dressing Butler for the moment Elvis turned a star: “Finding that 1950s appear that encapsulated Elvis’s rebelliousness and sexuality at that watershed minute — and then letting Austin’s overall performance to suit his model of Elvis, relatively than slavishly copying the originals.”

Martin — a heat, exuberant Australian — is a 4-time Oscar winner for her operate on prior Luhrmann movies, like The Excellent Gatsby and Moulin Rouge! She claims she and Luhrmann pored in excess of film, supporter footage, photos and archives to nail the spirit of the figures and their era.

Occasionally, her costumes operate like a supporting forged, in that they normally seem to be to be symbolic. For case in point, Elvis’s baby-pink and powder-blue suits worn with black-lace shirts in early scenes evoke innocence on the outside and sexuality within just. Martin claims they had been mainly imagined: “It was about utilizing colours that were attribute of male tailoring at that time, and combining it with the sexy and subversive.”

Some others are eerie coincidences. In a afterwards scene at the conclude of their marriage, Elvis’s spouse Priscilla, performed by Olivia DeJonge, wears a patchwork coat — suggesting the patching of a disintegrating marriage.

In truth, suggests Martin, DeJonge’s coat is a replica of a person worn by Priscilla when she and Elvis emerged arm in arm from the divorce courtroom in Los Angeles in 1973.

In his last live performance scene, a frail Elvis performs “Unchained Melody” donning a jumpsuit emblazoned with a golden sun — America’s golden son — and an upside-down horseshoe pendant that implies his luck is draining away. The golden-solar jumpsuit is a duplicate of one particular worn on phase by Elvis in his last overall performance in Indianapolis in 1977, two months in advance of his death.

“Who is familiar with what was going on in his head? Elvis experienced lots of superstitions, and he took signals and symbols very critically,” states Martin. “For instance, he felt peacocks were being auspicious since his 1968 NBC Comeback Special was so profitable, and the NBC brand was a peacock tail feather. Later on, he often wore a peacock-embroidered jumpsuit.”

That televised concert was important in restoring Elvis’s vocation — the minute he reclaimed his crown. Right up until then, a decade just after his heyday, he had been mainly composed off soon after a series of mostly dreadful film roles and lacklustre releases.

For the ’68 Comeback Unique scene Butler wears a replica of Elvis’s trim, black-leather-based ensemble, worn with Napoleon collar and necktie: the black leather-based manufactured the King stand out against a flower-power, psychedelia-period audience.

Martin details out that Elvis’s dresses were normally his very own option, and his instincts have been sturdy: “Stylists are a pretty modern-day thought. He labored with designers, but he was his have maker of design and style. He actually manufactured it happen for himself.”

Elvis was his personal maker of design. He seriously created it occur for himself

But she credits the celebrated Hollywood costume designer Invoice Belew for that leather-based ensemble — he was the guy who would go on to dress Elvis in a blur of bejewelled jumpsuits and capes in the Vegas a long time. They not only shimmered like the Vegas Strip at evening they accommodated his escalating girth and his favoured kung-fu-model stage moves. The film’s jumpsuit creations were being hand-embroidered by Gene Doucette, who worked on Elvis’s originals.

Women’s costumes are just as lavish and regarded as Elvis’s stage gear. The Sweet Inspirations, Elvis’s onstage backing group, dress in immaculate matching ensembles with extended tassels hanging from sleeves that emphasise their movements.

Elvis’s mom Gladys, performed by Helen Thomson, goes from downtrodden drudge to elegant mistress of Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis mansion, as her son turns into quite rich, extremely swiftly. In a tender scene right after Gladys’s loss of life in 1958, a distraught Elvis is observed caressing the apparel in her wardrobe.

Martin and her workforce drew on Gladys’s garments still held in Memphis by archivists at Graceland. “We opened a box of Gladys’s clothes and we felt the unhappiness carry off those clothes,” she states. “The unhappiness of an unfulfilled existence.” Gladys died young, in her mid-forties and at the height of her son’s initial hurry of fame.

Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former wife, now 77, made available styling assistance to DeJonge, who as Priscilla wears a sequence of impressive beehives that increase a lot more elaborate as her marriage progresses. Like the patchwork coat, Priscilla’s wedding ceremony gown was a facsimile of the initial.

Other DeJonge costumes were interpretations. Martin’s workforce worked with longstanding collaborator Miuccia Prada and Prada’s crew of pro craftspeople — the Italian designer, states Martin, is “always referring to the previous, but constantly with an eye to the future”. Their innovative problem was: “How do we link a present day audience to Priscilla’s revolutionary model?”

For some costumes Martin regarded as Priscilla’s first wardrobe, then went through Prada’s archives to discover pieces that connected to her innate model. They ended up then tailor made designed for DeJonge. Here, Prada’s experience was priceless: “Shoemaking, embroidering, beading — all of that provides so much worth,” says Martin.

Elvis took much more than a year to movie (partly delayed by the pandemic). As well as specially commissioned goods, costumes were being procured from collections, employed from Europe and the US and sourced from vintage dealers. In an early scene, when the not-fairly-popular Elvis requires to the stage in a pink suit in a segregated southern US city, his quivering, pouting hip-swivelling sends his teenage viewers into a point out of delirium. They clutch at their faces and tear at his clothing. A prim female emits an involuntary scream, as if possessed by a power bigger than herself.

And, of class, she is, mainly because the environment has improved for ever. The opulent costumes in this cinematic portrait remind us that Elvis was a lot more than a performer he embodied a instant in time.

Adhere to @financialtimesfashion on Instagram to uncover out about our most recent tales first