Monica Barbaro, who portrays Joan Baez in James Mangold’s powerful awards-season contender A Complete Unknown, about how Bob Dylan — as played by Timothée Chalamet — put his colossal stamp on our rock ‘n’ roll culture, hails costume designer Arianne Phillips as a “detective” for her ability to track down the source of the thousands of costumes featured in the movie.
Phillips agrees with Barbaro’s moniker. “Absolutely, that’s the job. I say costume designers are people detectives,” she tells me as we walk around the display of costumes and sets from the film on the ground floor of Arizona State University’s Los Angeles campus of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
The exhibition was assembled by the museum’s staff along with Phillips, A Complete Unknown’s production designer François Audouy, producer Fred Berger, the film’s crafts departments, Searchlight Pictures and Shelter PR.
A photo montage of Bob Dylan, plus a hairpiece worn by Timothée Chalamet in ‘A Complete Unknown’, on display at the FIDM Museum in Los Angeles
. Baz Bamigboye/Deadline.
At one point, Phillips and her team had to dress thousands of extras, “some of them twice,” she says.
“Plus we had 120 speaking parts. Timmy alone had 67 costume changes. It would have been virtually impossible to design all those costumes, so I always find having some vintage pieces to add texture is essential,“ she explains.
The vintage items are six decades old, so she scoured flea markets and vintage shops and tasked dealers in the industry to keep her appraised of finds.
Mangold has collaborated with Phillips since his 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted. “It’s miraculous to see all this,” Mangold says, “because we were still shooting only six months ago.”
Costumes worn by Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning in ‘A Complete Unknown’
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The filmmaker says the costumes captured the vibe of the times, which he characterizes as “this kind of intersection of chic and working class, and it’s some kind of Jack Kerouac meets supercool jazz musician.”
Barbaro found every piece “so unbelievably special” but was particularly taken by a coat she wore in the movie, based on a piece Baez wore in the early 1960s.
With Deadline’s London office located just a stone’s throw from Carnaby Street, I had an idea of the coat’s antecedence, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.
“I got to see how deeply Arianne considers every single inch of her work and I was just completely mesmerized by that,” Barbaro says as she poses in front of the mannequin draped in the coat in question.
Monica Barbaro and the raincoat she wore in ‘A Complete Unknown’
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
I felt Barbaro’s desire to just want to slip that coat on, but she kept herself in check and resisted. She was clearly fascinated by Phillips to “have it re-created, to understand every element of it and exactly why it was relevant at the time, and just how cool it was for the time.”
I asked the actress if she had any keepsakes from the movie. She showed me a ring that she asked to be allowed to keep, although she says that she wished she’d been “bolder in my requests.”
Barbaro wore the ring in a few scenes, but there’s one “where I mute the guitar strings that Bob is playing in my house, and I have that ring on and that’s very special to me.”
I sought out Phillips and got her to tell me about the Baez coat so coveted by Barbaro.
They were supposed to to shoot the movie in 2019, but for various reasons there were a lot of delays, and she kept on seeing photographs of Baez “in this raincoat at Newport in black and white. She’s barefoot and Donovan’s with her at the festival. And I didn’t understand it because her style in general is pretty modest and it seemed quite a fashion piece and I just couldn’t make sense of it,” she sighs.
A year later, Phillips was doing what she termed “specific Joan research” and saw the album cover of Baez’s 1965 album Farewell Angelina, “and she’s wearing that coat, and I saw that Richard Avedon, the famous Vogue photographer, took the photo.”
Phillips figured that someone from Vogue must have given her that coat.
Arianne Phillips with the costumes that represented the international outlook of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the 1960s
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Six months later, still on the case, Phillips happened to find an image of Baez with Donovan in London’s Trafalgar Square at an antiwar rally in May 1965. “I thought, ’Oh, my goodness, she probably got it in London. It must be Mary Quant.’ ”
She contacted friends who curate in the costume department at the Victoria and Albert Museum because they had overseen the gloriously joyful 2019 Mary Quant exhibition.
The V&A team confirmed that, yes, Baez was wearing a Mary Quant coat. In the ’60s she had collaborated with the Alligator rainwear company to produce coats at accessible prices. Most of the coats were in vibrant colors, like yellow and red, but Phillips didn’t want the one for the movie to be too loud. In any case, she didn’t know what color Baez wore because the photos were in black and white.
So, she chose to create one in a sort of a beige color — I’m sure there’s a posh name for beige … anyone for mushroom? — in a vinyl and linen mix so as not to be too shiny to reflect light on camera. “It’s very like Carnaby Street mod. And I love this coat,” Phillips says.
Right next to the Mary Quant raincoat at FIDM is an ensemble — a tailored black leather jacket and trousers — that Chalamet wears in the film “because it really represents how Bob looked in 1965, when he came back from London, his style really changed.
“He loved the Beatles,“ says Phillips, “and he was clearly influenced by that, the Carnaby Street look, the Mod look. Bob and Joan and the whole folk world were international stars, so the fact that you can see the reflection of their travel in their style, not like today where you have Gucci in every airport!”
Sketches of costumes that adorn Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro in ‘A Complete Unknown’
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A Complete Unknown also stars Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a woman based on Dylan’s ’60s girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
Berger tells me that sales from Dylan’s music featured in the film “have spiked 200 percent” with people of all ages connecting or reconnecting with the balladeer’s opus.
The Complete Unknown team will reunite in London next week for the film’s European premiere January 14.