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Experimental director Ken Jacobs's short film documenting the lives of predominantly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1955 served as the primary reference point for Josh Safdie and costume designer Miyako Bellizzi in creating the bustling world of downtown in Marty the Supreme.
“Obviously I was looking at the young, cool kids,” Bellizzi says. Diversity about a short film that she says Safdie showed her after she came across it at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the color vignette, the boys wear pleated trousers, white tank tops, skinny ties and sleeveless knitted vests. Girls wear culottes and vintage T-shirts. “They seem almost contemporary to us,” says Bellizzi, noting that downtown New York was already the epicenter of the style. In the 1950s, women didn't wear pants, but “Lower East Side girls did.”
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Atsushi Nishijima
Atsushi Nishijima
The creepy tenements of the Lower East Side—and their distinct fashions—are as much a character in the A24 drama as the eponymous ping-pong player himself. In the film, Timothée Chalamet plays the timid, arrogant and wildly ambitious Marty Mauser, who rushes for the chance to prove his greatness in a sport that no one takes seriously.
Authenticity and historical accuracy are of utmost importance to both Bellizzi and Safdie, who previously worked with each other on Uncut Gems and Good Time. For production design, this meant using exactly the right typeface for the Delancey storefront. For suits, this meant no modern brands anywhere.
“Even down to my underwear!” Bellizzi jokes. The women's tights in the film, for example, were purchased at the Hasidic Jewish Center of Williamsburg.
But once those criteria for historical accuracy were established, it was really about getting into the mind of Marty Mauser. “What did he look at? What did he look up to? Who did he look up to? What kind of people did he see regularly?” According to her, these were the questions that worried Bellizzi when putting together her wardrobe.
The hustler subculture was particularly attractive to Bellizzi, who looked to 20th-century “Wise Guy” gangsters to evoke Marty's rugged swagger. This reference eventually influenced his looser, larger suits; Tailored two-piece sets with strong padded shoulders, done in dark colors such as charcoal and midnight blue, became his uniform for much of the film.
“It's like dressing for the job you want,” she says. “It's not even 'Fake it 'til you make it,' he just wants to show that he's in the know.”
Of course, real-life table tennis sensation Marty Raisman, who “Marty” Chalamet is loosely based on, was also on her mood board. “The real Marty was eccentric, so I wanted to give him a little flair and style without being overly stylized,” she says. “It’s quite classic – more in the shapes and small details.” One standout fashion moment is the pair of red leather gloves he wears while shoving a hot dog down his throat in the middle of a busy street.
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Of course, I'd be remiss to write about the costume design in Marty Supreme without mentioning Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), the former movie star whom Marty intends to seduce. Kay's sophisticated style of ivory wool coats, pillbox hats and delicate facial veils is an ambitious counterpoint to Marty. Although we mostly see her in neutral tones, her most striking ensemble is the red satin evening coat she wears to the opening of her play and later on her secret date with Marty.
“It was the end of her when she felt most alive again, and that’s why we chose red,” Bellizzi says. “This dress is her moment. She's so excited – it's a party for her new big theater show, and then we find out it's not doing well or getting good reviews.”
“This emotional, living feeling is destroyed,” she continues. For Bellizzi, this moment almost sums up the whole point of the film: “Sometimes you have big dreams, and sometimes they don’t come true the way you want.”
