Jonathan Anderson on his ‘surreal year’ designing costumes for ‘Challengers’ and ‘Queer’
When Jonathan Anderson met Luca Guadagnino “years and years ago,” he never thought they’d work on a film together, let alone two — and especially not that the films would be released in the same year.
“It would never cross my mind at all. It has been such a surreal year,” he tells Gold Derby of having designed costumes for Challengers and Queer. “I never imagined that we would have done this and it’s bit of a dream come true for me because when you were able to work with one of your best friends and make his dreams come true and make it all kind of come to life, it it is kind of slightly surreal. I’m still trying to piece together this year.”
Anderson, whose day job is as a fashioner designer at his own brand JW Anderson and creative director of Loewe, first ventured into costume design with Challengers, for which he has received a Costume Designers Guild Award nomination. He and Guadagnino were supposed to do another project together that fell apart before the tennis love triangle drama came up. “Then the pandemic happened,” Anderson recalls. “I was like, ‘Why not? What have I got to lose? I have no idea if I’m gonna do this, but we’ll make it happen.'”
Tennis was “never on my radar,” Anderson shares, having grown up in a rugby family. Guadagnino was similarly unfamiliar with the sport, but their ignorance became an asset. “[We] were kind of joking that like we didn’t really know anything about tennis, but it was amazing that when you start to research something that you don’t know enough about, how obsessed you become,” he says. “Delving into something that is foreign to you is actually, really, I think, sometimes quite good because I think you come in it with naive eyes. You’re kind of like you’re seeing things in a different way. I find it really fun actually. It was sort of like so not on my radar that I became completely hooked with like the perfection of finding the technicality of what that should be.”
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Anderson, who has since collaborated with Roger Federer on two Uniqlo lines, approached the costumes for former prodigy Tashi (Zendaya), her husband Art (Mike Faist), and her former fling and his former BFF Patrick (Josh O’Connor) through “the psychology of what a brand means.” Endorsements — or the lack thereof — are an undercurrent in the film about power and control. Tashi lost all her potential endorsements after her career-ending injury and lives vicariously through Art, who’s chasing the career Grand Slam and is endorsed by Uniqlo. And though he hails from a wealthy family, Patrick is a journeyman player with no major endorsements and competes in whatever semi-clean shorts and shirts he can find. His whole brand is nonchalance.
“[With] Patrick, there is a psychology about the aloofness that only nearly comes through wealth somehow. It’s sort of like there is a nonchalance. It is like there is a cockiness that ultimately, no matter what you wear, you just ooze appeal. Whereas Art becomes this sort of like archetype. It is like kind of a vehicle, like the precision of tennis,” Anderson says. “In Challengers, you’re looking at the the birth of a new type of capitalism in fashion with younger people being hooked by image. That is ultimately means status. And you see in Tashi’s character how status changes over the years.”
Speaking of getting hooked by image, fans could not get enough of Tashi’s gray T-shirt emblazoned with “I Told Ya,” a nod to John F. Kennedy Jr., who was photographed wearing a shirt with the phrase in the ’90s. The phrase itself is a nod to John F. Kennedy‘s inaugural buttons in 1961.
“This I never saw coming,” Anderson says of the shirt’s popularity. “I had already planned that we would like remake the T-shirt because I’ve always loved that image of JFK Jr. I had a plan that I wanted to do it as a kind of creative exercise. I had no idea that it was going to be able to be bootlegged globally. I was walking down streets in New York and I was like, ‘What is going on?’ Like what’s happening? And it was really fast. It was like it was so interesting to watch. I think that’s the power of this film.”
Queer came up during production on Challengers as Guadagnino gave a copy of the William S. Burroughs novella on which it is based to Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, who later adapted it. Set in the 1950s, the film follows William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American expat in Mexico who falls for a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Anderson has “always been obsessed” with this era. “Pre-war, for me, is one of the most fascinating moments in in in menswear fashion because it is the birth of the industrial suit. It’s like the war happens and then suddenly everyone is liberated there’s just like growth spurt in industrial practices and fashion. But you still have this idea of the classicism, so, for me, for Queer, everything had to be original.”
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The designer only created two pieces from scratch — the centipede necklace and a suit both characters wear in one of the film’s many surreal moments — while everything else were originals from the period. “I wanted it to be singular pieces, so that’s all they wore. So it was no duplications. It was very kind of like, this is the linen suit [and] as it ages throughout the film, it will age through the process,” Anderson says. “I love this part because [menswear] in the ’50s just has this amazing moment because the fabrications in the ’50s are just very difficult to reproduce today. We don’t have looms that do some of the things that they existed.”
It might be hard to believe that the majority of the costumes are vintage because many of them feel incredibly modern. Allerton dons a see-through seafoam shirt at one point that would not look out of place today. “They were, like, deadstock that I found from the ’50s and they were leisure shirts,” Anderson says. “You bought them in, they came in packs of three, and I loved how strange they were, but they are from the period. And you kind of realize sometimes we think we’re so modern, but some of these things were already already part of the public domain.”
While there’s no official third collab with Guadagnino yet, there are “a few projects in the pipeline.” In the meantime, Anderson is busy with his day job.
“I think the one thing [fashion and costume design] have in common is about characterization. You’re trying to tell a story. I feel when I do a fashion show, it’s by telling a story. But the big difference, I think, for me, is in fashion, I have all these people are running after me and I have to be the boss, whereas [in film] I love that Luca is the boss, and then I’m there to do whatever he wants. … I felt I had to prove myself every day so that I didn’t feel like people were like, ‘This guy has no idea what he’s doing,'” he says. “But [film] is the most ultimate luxury ultimately to me because you are creating something that will transcend time because it’s encapsulated in a cinematic moment.”