For the propulsive new film Marty Supreme, costume designer Miyako Bellizzi had to adopt a dream-big mindset worthy of its protagonist to consider the question: Who is the man Marty Mauser wants to project to the world?
“It’s not necessarily who he is at the moment,” she recently explained to Vogue. That would be a Lower East Side shoe salesman (played by a relentless Timothée Chalamet) circa 1952 who is convinced that he’s the world’s best table-tennis player. But for this electric character study of someone chasing greatness through force of will, self-serving manipulation, and self-invention, clothes indeed make the man—and his fake-it-till-you-make-it spirit.
After all, Marty has huge ambitions, and one of the first costume items epitomising that is his grey suit: Still in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, he waves it at a shoe-store coworker with more modest dreams, saying he bought it specifically for a major tournament overseas. That piece, in Bellizzi’s eyes, best represents the character of Marty: “It’s the man he wants to be.”
Filmmaker Josh Safdie approached her about the project after they collaborated on his two previous features, 2019’s Uncut Gems and Good Time from 2017, which he directed with younger brother Benny Safdie. (She’s since worked on films like 2024’s Bonjour Tristesse and this year’s The History of Sound, as well as the 2021 HBO series Scenes From a Marriage.)
“This was Miyako’s favourite era, so the coincidence of my coming to her was ecstatic,” Safdie says. “The synergy of that was so special.”
As a New Yorker herself, Bellizzi treasured envisioning the cramped Lower East Side milieu that opens the film. “That’s Marty’s world, so I thought about being in the city and what influences you,” she says. “Who are his references in his neighbourhood? Who does he aspire to be like? And what doesn’t he want to be?”
Among those are underworld characters Marty encounters as a hustler himself, and in fact, his suit echoes the silhouette of the dog-loving criminal (played by maverick New York City filmmaker Abel Ferrara) with whom he becomes entangled. Safdie learned of a Lower East Side tailor whose clients were Jewish gangsters: “The size of your inseam would be a sign of your wealth—the more money you had, the more fabric you had. That spoke a bit to Marty’s desire and the gangsters’, showing off and presenting themselves as tough men.” Safdie also felt it was important that his shirts had “a real billowy, flowy quality to them because Marty is flamboyant.”
And they quickly realised Chalamet should wear shoulder pads to keep his suits from looking collegiate. “Once we found that silhouette, it really changed everything in his presence, even the way he walked,” Bellizzi says.
Eyeglasses are also important to the character, the filmmaker points out. “They were a nice juxtaposition with the gangster quality of his suits. They were the upward-striving element of him, this reflection of his youth, of vision impairment.” In the service of authenticity, Chalamet wore contact lenses to distort his vision, then actual prescription eyeglasses to correct it. “People who wear glasses are like, ‘Thank you, it always bothered me when someone was just wearing them as a costume,’” Safdie adds, grinning. (He admits that he always wanted spectacles: “When I was a teenager, I lied on my eye exam so I could get glasses. I really hurt my eyes.”)
They also considered how, then as now, money influences what people can afford to wear. “In the Lower East Side at this time, people are wearing stuff they got in the ’40s,” Safdie notes, comparing that to the statistic that the average car on the road is 12 years old. “Miyako thought we should make the Lower East Side feel like it’s in the past, and then the Upper East Side is brand-new haute couture, off the runway.”
For that upper-crust world, inhabited by former Hollywood starlet Kay (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), they looked at early Balenciaga and Dior, two maisons founded around that time. “These are the beginnings of the major fashion houses, and Miyako talked about how everything then was so pure and how it was the beginning of modernity. You know, she schools me on this stuff.”
Bellizzi, who began her career as a fashion stylist, created everything from Marty’s and Kay’s costumes to those for dozens of teens at a New Jersey bowling alley and the denizens of a cheap hourly hotel—not to mention table-tennis uniforms for 16 national teams. Each team’s polo silhouette is distinct, as are their warm-ups and chest patches; she found reference images for some countries but completely invented the rest. All are glimpsed early in the film, as the teams pose for a group photograph. “That is such a testament to Miyako’s eye,” Safdie says. “I love that shot, but we move past it quickly, so people don’t get to savour how much world-building is going on.”
Many costumes were made because both Safdie and Bellizzi find it important for clothes to feel worn and real. “If we make them ourselves,” Bellizzi explains, “then we can fuck them up and make them look lived-in.”
Safdie pipes up: “The most complimentary adjective people can give to a film that I’m a part of is ‘lived-in,’ because when you capture life, it’s not created for the camera—what you’re seeing already exists. Because Miyako has understood personal style for so many years, she knew how to align the souls and essences of the characters to what they wear.” He praises a purple knit sweater that Marty’s irrepressible girlfriend, Rachel (breakout Odessa A’zion), wears to work in a pet shop, for example, as “the type of thing that she’s okay with getting animal piss on, but it still has a colour that feels like her soul.”
Marty’s and Rachel’s costumes during an excursion to rural New Jersey even informed how Safdie directed those scenes, which he calls “the Bonnie and Clyde sequence.” A 1920s photograph of a cosmopolitan-looking couple in a convertible in a country setting translated to Marty’s maroon-brown suit and Rachel’s beige-brown gingham sailor-collared shirtdress. “It felt like the type of thing that somebody who was up to no good from the city would wear to the country,” Safdie says. “When I close my eyes and think of the movie, I think of that paired look, these city slickers in the country.”
Bellizzi’s process began in an office littered with thousands of photographs. “It was a very sacred space, with music always playing, and no windows—it was a vibe,” Safdie says approvingly. “It was a place where the actors could inhabit the roles. Miyako would bring in a rack of clothing that she could see the characters in and see what they gravitate toward.” Chalamet picked up a pair of red leather gloves that ended up being one of Bellizzi’s favourites: “I was like, ‘That would be incredible—you with the red gloves, eating a hot dog on the street.’”
And while she was thrilled to dress notable New York City personalities like Fran Drescher, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sandra Bernhard, her favourite fitting was none other than the Man on Wire himself, high-wire master Philippe Petit, who has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. “I was so starstruck with him,” she gushes. “I will never forget that.”
Many young audience members have told Bellizzi that the looks seem contemporary, which she finds a little dismaying. “They say, ‘This looks like today, this is how everyone’s dressing.’ They don’t really understand the history behind it, so hopefully people appreciate that and the authenticity and are inspired by them.”
Safdie, on the other hand, hopes audiences take away one simple thing from the film’s looks: Halloween costume ideas. He already saw a few Martys this Halloween, donning “the glasses with a moustache, with the flowy, oversized shirt and the white wifebeater underneath,” which the protagonist wears when running from the police. “We talk about that all the time—how to communicate someone’s essence in an iconic way, that can be translated easily to a Halloween costume on a budget,” he says. It’s a dream big enough for Marty himself.
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
