How ‘Vinyl’ costume designer John Dunn gets those vintage (or vintage-seeming) ‘70s looks
HBO’s new period drama “Vinyl,” which airs its Season 1 finale Sunday and counts Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese as co-creators, hasn’t just been a behind-the-scenes look at record industry excess circa 1973, it’s been a veritable smorgasbord of ‘70s-era style — the good, the bad and everything in between (lapels wide enough to take an eye out, anyone?).
The costume designer behind that look — from the second episode on — has been John Dunn, who took over from Mark Bridges, who worked on the first episode. We recently got Dunn to dish on all things “Vinyl,” including which costumes came from Topshop, L.A’s go-to vintage haunts and why Juno Temple’s character, Jamie Vine, is the most fun to find clothes for.
What was it like to step in to a project where someone else had already basically defined the look of the characters?
I was hesitant because I remember doing [the pilot of] “Mad Men” and sort of feeling like a surrogate when I gave up that baby [to costume designer Janie Bryant]. Normally I wouldn’t have done such a thing, but this was such an intriguing project that I just couldn’t pass it up.... [And] Mark [Bridges] had laid out really a wonderful template for all of the characters so everyone was sort of at their starting places. Since even he didn’t know where the characters were going to be going [story-wise], that made me realize that I had the freedom to tell their stories — through their clothing — as the scripts came out.
What’s an example of one character’s journey told through clothing?
I had to take Devon [Finestra, played by Olivia Wilde] to a different place. At the beginning, she’s primarily seen ensconced in her home up in Connecticut. The [flowing robes] were very practical — Olivia was pregnant at the time — but they also fit with her character. Or she was really dressed up — like when she was throwing the big birthday party for Richie. But, as the series progresses and she moves back down into the city, she has a sea change that had to be reflected in her clothing. Her back story in the series was that she’d been deeply involved with the Warhol scene, so for that we looked to Edie Sedgwick.
Andy Warhol, who is a recurring character on the show, famously wore Levi’s 501 jeans and Brooks Brothers. If you as a costume designer know something that specific, do you feel compelled to put the actor in the same pieces?
For the well-documented iconic characters like that, I’m certainly going over every photograph with a microscope to see exactly what the trim was, what studs were used, what rhinestones, that kind of thing. But I’m a really strong advocate of not doing carbon-copy, wax museum reproductions. You don’t want to straitjacket an actor into feeling like they’re just a wax museum reproduction of someone. Instead, I always try to be inspired by the real character — and use that as a launching point for the actor.
Do you have a favorite character to design costumes for?
I do love doing the [record company] office because there is a full range of people there — people on their way in, people on their way out — and that means there’s a whole range of characters and styles in just that one space. But the one character I really do love doing is Jamie [Vine]. She’s got a cool wardrobe for the ‘70s, and I think she’s very accessible as far as fashion today. This period — the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — was the first time people really started wearing vintage clothing from other periods. Prior to that no one was really interested in wearing some old thing from four, 10 or 20 years ago.... Jamie is one of the characters where we get to demonstrate the mixing of contemporary [‘70s] stuff with an amazing ‘40s jacket or a 1920s piece she introduces into her wardrobe. She’s reinventing herself every day, trying to get her foot in the door, and that means morphing herself into the person people want her to be.
How much of what we’ve seen on screen is actual vintage clothing?
About 50/50. And of the 50% that’s not true vintage, it’s often a piece that I have had constructed or built from a real piece. It used to be that you were dependent on the rental houses in California or local vintage vendors, but vintage commerce has expanded so dramatically that now we get pieces from all over the country and all over the world. When we’re trying to track down an amazing pair of platform boots, for example. We can reach out to London, to South America. We have access to pockets of vintage that weren’t [previously] available to us.
What was the most difficult thing to get your hands on?
The one real golden fleece for us, and something we were always searching for, was really great men’s platform shoes. That’s because they were really popular for about three years, and then they just disappeared. And, being shoes, they got beaten up, lost and damaged. Because 90% of the men [on the show] wear platform shoes, whenever we could find platform shoes, we’d buy them.
What are some of your go-to places in Los Angeles for vintage?
When we went into Andy Warhol’s Factory [in the series], we used a number of great mid-’60s pieces from Decades. They were very helpful. Playclothes [in Burbank] is another place we use frequently, and Catwalk is another. And the one I absolutely love is the Way We Wore.
With the ‘70s look on-trend again, have you had the option to buy anything for the show off the rack at a regular retail store?
There are these weird pockets of ‘70s reproduction pieces that [brands] are doing. In [Episode 4: “The Racket”] there’s a set of tangerine satin jumpsuits that some of the backup singers were wearing. Normally, I would never have been able to find those, but my shopper, who was in desperation, wandered into Topshop and came out with a set of amazing tangerine halter-top jumpsuits, and the cut of them was completely dead-on to 1973. The other thing we’ve found is great women’s bell bottoms by Madewell that we’ve used on some of our principal [characters] because the cut is just so fantastic.... [And], in the last episode Richie [Finestra] wears a contemporary piece that’s spot-on ‘70s. It’s a John Varvatos leather jacket.
Since you were actually living in New York City in the ‘70s, which “Vinyl” character did you dress like?
I moved to New York from Chicago in 1976 so I felt like I’d arrived five years too late and just missed this really cool period.... But I’d probably either have dressed like [Max Casella’s] Julie [Silver] or, sadly, like Jack [Quaid’s] character [Clark Morelle]. But the wonderful thing about doing “Vinyl” is that I get to go back to the New York that I never got to live in.
