In an early scene in Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s tightly wound She-EO Romy Mathis anxiously prepares for a motel rendezvous with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). She wears a sheer blouse, a considered attempt to be sexually appealing to her much younger subordinate. Samuel doesn’t seem so concerned with his own appearance. He barrels through the door in a white ribbed tank top and hoodie, a thick gold chain hanging around his neck. But perhaps unexpectedly, the chain eclipses every other piece of clothing in the room—maybe even the film. “The chain is a Figaro link and I don’t know why, but Figaro for me always means New York,” says Bart, one-half of the film’s costume design duo, Kurt and Bart.
We don’t learn a lot about Samuel over the course of the film, but his fashion marks a clear divide between work and his personal life. “Samuel has two sides. The work costume is a monkey suit of sorts,” Kurt adds. “His board had a lot of real images of NYC interns: backpacks instead of briefcases, cheap winter coats, an un-tailored ‘my first suit’ and ubiquitous too-blue office button shirt.” Kurt and Bart’s mood board for Dickinson’s character also featured Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. “We did fit a few more tailored suits on Harris and they just didn’t feel right. We wanted him to feel almost like a boy in a man’s suit,” Kurt says. The pair put Dickinson in an Army Surplus jacket with the idea that it would be his warmest winter coat, function over fashion. “The Army Surplus parka in the fitting was when it really all started to fall into place and feel grounded,” Bart says. “All the other little details like the gold chain kind of came out organically after that.”
Samuel is an enigma by design. His is a deliberately opaque character; we can never get a total read on him. But we can assume that he chose to wear the chain, if not to impress Romy then because it’s important to him. It makes him feel good. “You’re either given a chain by someone who loves you or you’re buying it for yourself. Either scenario pulls focus to the wearer,” Bart says. “Whether given or self gifted, it translates to value or worth, so I guess that projects a kind of confidence that can distill into sex appeal.”
The chain also translates as a quiet, self-assured masculinity—something that comes across in Samuel’s actions. (In one scene late in the film, he schools another character on outdated notions of female sexuality.) Babygirl isn’t the first time we’ve seen this phenomenon. In 2020, Normal People sent the internet into a tizzy over Paul Mescal’s character Connell Waldron and his signature silver chain. “Why is there such unbridled lust for Connell’s necklace in Normal People?” The Guardian wondered. “Is This the Sexiest Thing About Normal People?” The Cut posited. Vox offered to explain. Someone even made an Instagram account called @connellschain, a catalogue of every time he wore it, and then some.
Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz wrote in The Cut that Connell’s chain was “a delicate piece of jewelry at odds with the rest of his Achillean body.” Samuel’s chain in Babygirl is not that (in fact, it’s kind of the inverse), but it still feels like its natural successor. Perhaps it is that the two actors are something of sex symbols themselves, transposing their allure onto their characters—and, by default, their accessories. If anything, it may just be another projection onto the unknowable Samuel. “One of the best things about Samuel is that we never really know anything about him,” Kurt says. “We hoped in his wardrobe that there might be these small nods that one could start to distill who this guy is outside of work, but in the end he really is a mystery.”
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
