The Remaking of Bob Dylan’s Style in ‘A Complete Unknown’ — Britain, The Beatles, Levi’s

Arianne Phillips, the Academy Award-nominated costume designer, spent years unpicking layers of truth and fiction to create the wardrobe for Bob Dylan’s character in the new biopic “A Complete Unknown.”

The movie, starring Timothée Chalamet, focuses on the origins, and motivation, of the famously enigmatic singer-songwriter. Phillips says coming up with the costumes wasn’t easy, and there was a lot of guesswork involved.

“Our story is about Bob’s origin — finding his way to New York City in search of his hero, Woody Guthrie and his relationship to fame. A biopic on him is quite tricky because he is a very cryptic person, who has kept a lot of myths alive about his life. He’s never been really forthcoming and it’s part of his persona — he’s this mythological character that he’s created for himself,” says Phillips, who worked closely with the director James Mangold.

Phillips says she managed to create a screen persona by shining a light on Dylan’s passions, dressing Chalamet in motorcycle jackets, skinny suits inspired by Dylan’s time with The Beatles and dark sunglasses to conceal his shyness.

She also paid close attention to color, dressing Dylan in suede jackets that became progressively darker in color as he rose to fame, and become more mysterious in the heady years of the American civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement and the precursor to the Summer of Love.

She spent years researching the pop culture star, and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. (He made headlines for failing to attend the Stockholm ceremony due to undisclosed “preexisting engagements.”)

Phillips began her Dylan studies in 2019, reading “Dylan Goes Electric!” by Elijah Wald, on which the film is based. She also spent time with Suze Rotolo’s memoir “A Freewheelin’ Time,” and hours listening to various audiobooks.

But the mysteries remained.

“He told stories to people that he was a hobo and that he was raised in the circus and jumped trains. None of those stories were true, but he created them about himself and dressed that way,” says Phillips.

Dylan’s former girlfriend Rotolo, who died in 2011, wrote in her book that when Dylan arrived in New York City in 1961, he was wearing work pants, dungarees and plaid Pendleton shirts in a nod to his idol Guthrie, whose songs were about the working man and Americana.

Rotolo describes that look as “quite messy and disheveled,” but said his style quickly changed by the time the two met in 1962. He started to wear Levi’s, which became a staple of his look.

Leading up to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, his silhouette gradually became slimmer as he turned from folk musician to rock star playing electric music. To wit, he chose a salmon pink shirt and black jeans when other artists were wearing plaid shirts.

Dylan’s new found confidence and rock-‘n’-roll attitude was also informed by his travels to Britain, meeting and hanging out with The Beatles, Donovan and poets like Allen Ginsberg.

“He became part of a community that’s the center of a youth culture movement around what’s happening socially and politically,” says Phillips.

“Bob came back [to America] dressing more performative, and with more thought. He put his own take on the British Mods — his jeans got skinny and his Chelsea boots became very pointy,” she adds.

For the film, Phillips made it her mission to track down the exact style of Levi’s that Dylan wore as none of her vintage collectors, or dealers, could identify them.

She reached out to Levi’s a whole year before filming began in March to pinpoint Dylan’s jeans. Paul O’Neill, Levi’s Vintage Clothing’s head designer, found them in the brand’s expansive archive. 

They were the rare Lot 606 Super Slims, which were brought up by Japanese denim collectors in the 1990s.

In 2019, right before it was announced that Mangold was writing and directing the Dylan biopic, Levi’s produced a vintage capsule collection of the Super Slims for the Asian market that came with its own coffee table book showcasing the looks.

“When I saw the book and collection, I was freaking out because it looked like our movie,” says Phillips, who had been exchanging many photos with O’Neill, showing how the jeans evolved.

“Rotolo literally cut the inside seam of his jeans and put an insert of another piece of denim so they’d fit nicely around the boot — and this was way before the denim flare. She helped him figure out his style because his jeans were not fitting nicely over his boots,” says Phillips, who recreated the nuance of the jeans in the film.

The suede jackets are of particular significance and salute Dylan’s love for motorcycles and being on the American road.

One of them is a replica of the tan jacket he wears on the cover of his second studio album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” with Rotolo holding his arm on the album cover; a light two pocket caramel suede motorcycle jacket and a dark chocolate brown suede jacket with bone buttons that he wore at the end of ‘65.

The 83-year-old rock star is credited as an executive producer on the film and after reading the script, he gave Mangold a hard tip that “my story is a fairy tale,” Phillips recalls.

“Even to this day, he holds this mystique around his own life and he doesn’t really want to commit to any of the facts,” she adds.

Director Mangold said Phillips has a great ability to bring characters to life on screen — no matter how mysterious they are, or whether they’re willing to cooperate with her.

He said she’s able to “to paint an entire world” through her costumes, working closely with the actors from early in the filmmaking process.

“She creates such a profound sense of openness, and displays such a lack of an ‘agenda’ to the actors. They feel loved and heard and have a real discovery process. There is magic in these early sessions, a magic that serves as the launching pad for great performances,” says Mangold.

Phillips is a veteran. She has worked on both of Tom Ford’s films, “A Single Man” and “Nocturnal Animals” and has just wrapped “I Want Your Sex” starring Charli XCX and Olivia Wilde, who she worked with on “Don’t Worry Darling.”

She prefers to source items from the time period she’s working with rather than work with brands. “I really crave the original fabrications from the time period as it has a certain weight and feeling to it,” she said.

Her fashion career started in the ‘80s when she was styling Lenny Kravitz for his debut album “Let Love Rule” that led to her next gig as Madonna’s fashion oracle for more than two decades on album covers, music videos, concert tours and her directorial debut “W.E.” and designed the costumes for Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” and “Walk the Line,” the Johnny Cash biopic that Mangold directed in 2005.

She loves creating images at the intersection of fashion and music, and said that, like Dylan, she was greatly influenced by British street culture and fashion.

“England is unique because music and fashion have always lived together harmoniously in a youth culture movement,” says Phillips.