What you think you know about 1920s fashion will change after you watch “Babylon,” the three-hour epic retelling of the nascent and outrageous Los Angeles film industry. Packed into a script double the average size is a movies-within-a-movie tale that begins in 1926 with six lead characters, 100-plus speaking parts and 250 cast members. The 7,000 costumes involved tend to speed past in a blink, especially in massive scenes of cocaine-fueled orgies, chaotic movie sets and deadly encounters.
“Babylon” costume designer Mary Zophres was determined to make every millisecond count. While the rest of America was baking sourdough bread during the pandemic lockdown, Zophres was immersed in historical research for the project, her career’s largest. Production was set to begin January 2020 but delayed until spring 2021. That gave her time to source internationally for materials to make costumes for medieval warriors, silent-movie stars and even elephant wranglers, who will variously be drenched in blood, vomit or poop, because, of course, this is Hollywood.
Zophres could have populated sets with beaded flapper dresses, cloche hats and other fashion cliches of the 1920s. However, writer-director Damien Chazelle gave his department heads a different take.
“He said, ‘Be historically accurate, but find things that are surprising and don’t feel like 1920s costumes from a movie.’ That was a very helpful directive for us to have,” Zophres said. “It was like a challenge.”
Her cellphone now contains an impressive archive of ‘20s movie posters, publicity stills and candid photos that reveal just how revealing the ‘20s were, with skimpy shorts, crop tops and high hemlines, a vast change from a decade earlier.
“Here are my overalls without anything underneath,” Zophres says, showing a modest ‘20s version of the pair she put on Margot Robbie, shirtless, to wrestle a rattlesnake. “I could back up every costume with research.”
Yet the images don’t always reveal exactly how the costume designers from a century ago translated historical time periods for the movies. As a modern designer aiming to interpret those antique interpretations, Zophres enlisted a worldwide army of costume experts and her remote control. By freeze-framing the silent version of “Robin Hood,” Zophres deduced that an open-weave knit coated with metallic paint stood in for chain mail. She copied the technique.
To capture the crinkly feel of ‘20s raincoats for the “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence, Zophres followed costume supervisor Laura Wolford’s suggestion to use shower curtain liners, which she found at the 99 Cents Only store.
“We sent anyone who lived near a 99 Cents store all over L.A. County to get 400 or 500 of them,” she said. Western Costume milliner Patrick Rogers made 150 rain hats and a shoemaker cut the leather tabs. “And every costume has a story like that,” Zophres said.
For example, crew members dug dirt samples from Piru, the location of the silent-movie studio set near the Santa Clara River and California 126, and the Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, then custom-mixed theatrical dirt to distress and age costumes with a perfect match. Zophres and several departments became experts in elephant poop that splats voluminously over the actors in the opening scene. In filming, an elephant rig stands in for the real thing that’s later computer-generated with its own poop and process.
“You have to have the right color and texture. And we had to match it to the poop that was coming out from special effects. We couldn’t use the special effects poop; we made our own,” Zophres said, adding dryly, “it’s such a glamorous occupation.”
The compensation is dressing Brad Pitt like a ‘20s matinee idol. Easy. He’s gorgeously casual in head-to-toe cream sportswear, the occasional tuxedo and couture knitwear. For Pitt’s character, Jack Conrad, Zophres had a local artisan hand-knit a blue, shawl collar sweater like one silent movie star John Gilbert wore in a publicity still. Like all of the principals, Pitt’s entire wardrobe was custom-made, a process that could require disassembling a vintage suit coat to understand the exact placement of buttons, shoulder pads and seams.
Even the tiniest costume was a massive undertaking. Robbie’s character, Nellie LaRoy, wears a skimpy red dress that’s little more than a scarf and tap pants. Zophres and pattern cutter Dale Wibben watched dance rehearsals to engineer successive prototypes. They added malleable boning front and back so the dress miraculously stays put while Robbie swirls and bodysurfs through an orgiastic party.
Only a few characters were spared the film’s grit and filth. Statuesque Jean Smart plays Elinor St. John, a powerful gossip columnist who is modeled on 1920s novelist and screenwriter Elinor Glyn, whose sister was a fashion designer. Zophres imagined that St. John would want to stand out as much as the celebrities she’s covering and enlist her sister’s designs. The columnist practically transforms into a living Erté statue, with spiky headdresses that match her beaded, floor-length gowns.
Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu in homage to such stars as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Her caped sheath dress and sexy tuxedo and a cheongsam dress inspired by early Hollywood actress Anna May Wong get ample screen time, but her tasseled golden bra top and a huge headdress that appears in a black and white photo get a few frames as well.
Those and hundreds of costume details flash past so fast that even Zophres wants a review: “I kind of want to watch the movie in slow motion.”
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