It’s often times a little understated how much work goes into thoughtfully crafted costume design. When we invest in an established world and start to appreciate a slick aesthetic, its easy to overlook how much work went into that look that is objectively cool, adding worlds of depth to moviegoing experience as a whole—especially with period pieces as subtle and vibey as Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding.
Love Lies Bleeding (very recently dropped with more accessibility on Max) is trip of a ride that fully delivers on all that love, and lies, and bleeding. I absolutely love it, and part of what makes it so successful is all the little details giving this homoerotic, subversive thriller the depth of world building needed to pull off its ambitious narrative.
If you’ve ever thought about pursuing costume design—or, like me, think its super fascinating and curious to know more about the process—Love Lies Bleeding costume designer Olga Mills was kind enough to go in depth with us at the deeper art of costume design.
Read on for Olga’s break down of conceiving looks, sourcing threads, and getting into the minds of characters.
Editor’s note: the following quotes are edited for length and clarity.
How to Break Into Costume Design
“From point A to point B, my family’s always been super supportive, but I don’t come from a family that works in film where it was a normal entry point. The idea of it was actually really intimidating and felt super out of reach.
My family moved to the states from the Ukraine when I was five and we would go to the theater and things like that. So I think at first theater was more tangible and you can touch it or you can see the humans that makes it felt more accessible. So got into that. I went to the performing arts high school in New York for acting, which very quickly I was like, oh, this is not for me, not my cup of tea, but you had to do your own sets and costumes. I felt like I still feel that way, that I think at least the way I get into a project is sort of thinking about it in the same way that I feel like talked about in acting class in high school. And if I am kind of shopping and looking for things, I really will do an acting exercise of pretending to be the person to try to get a visceral feel of if something feels right.
I think for me, my relationship with things tends to be a little bit more linear. I have to really barrel towards something if I want to get there. So I’ve been on a path towards it. I went to college at SUNY New Paltz for theater tech and then took a year and worked at a dye shop at a costume shop as an assistant for a ballet designer. And then went to NYU for grad school for costumes. And again, that was more of the faculty, but got in with some of the film school folks that I’m still friends with.
And then from there worked as a PA, then as an assistant, and then started kind of frankenstein-ing work where I would be an assistant on a big TV show and make some money and then be able to go and design something smaller so the assistant work would subsidize it.
Then I stumbled onto a Paul Schrader set, and that feels like an asteroid that hit out of nowhere. That was super helpful—he wasn’t somebody that I was cold calling or reaching out to. I had a friend who was his collaborator, and then I was introduced to him when he was doing Dog Eat Dog.
I remember my first meeting with him at a diner. Because Dog Eat Dog is a smaller movie he hired really young department heads who were going to be like “this is so cool” and really work really hard. I always thought that was a really smart strategy and I certainly benefited from it.
Although I felt very inexperienced doing that movie. It was my first union film and it was Nicholas Cage and Willem Defoe. I think we were all happy to be there.”
Navigate the Ebbs and Flows of Sewing and Shopping
“I’m not a great sewer or even shopper, or even sewer.
We had a really good crew, so all put together really involved research boards and all of that, and I feel like it was my job to communicate to, our really great assistant, Bailey Gardner, who is great at hunting and gathering and then an amazing tailor, and it was kind of a combo.
So on something like Love Lies Bleeding a big challenge is that it’s a period movie, but there’s also so much action in it. So if it’s an eighties movie and the characters are just reading the paper and having a conversation, you can go to a thrift store and hope to get lucky. But because everything needs multiples, it was a bigger challenge and it was a combo. Bailey found a dead stock vintage dealer, which just means the clothes are kind of bought from a department store that went out of business, so it was never worn, and they have multiples sometimes.
So there’s this kind of network of vintage dealers in the US that deal with costume departments and they know that if they have multiples, that’s such a get. I found this guy who had vintage eighties sneakers in multiple sizes, and those were the sneakers that Lou (Kristen Stewart) wore. So there were costume pieces like that. Another was a loose jacket. I found a vintage one and loved it, and then our tailor patterned it and was able to make multiples of it—or some things were modern, like the striped shorts that Jackie (Katy O’Brian) wears that i found through research. Bailey found a pair of striped modern gym shorts, and then our tailor used them for fabric. At that point I was like, oh, I should have just bought fabric, but we took them apart and tweaked them to go a little higher on the leg.
Anyway, so it’s the kind of hodgepodge of whatever works. It would be super cool to start from scratch and be able to build every little piece, but we didn’t really have the luxury. So you get really scrappy with whatever doesn’t give you away. The “Burning Love” tank top was a regular tank top from the Gap, but then we dyed it that neon and then designed the graphic on it. So everything goes through this kind of assembly line.”
Pros and Cons of Sketching Designs
“I feel like if I was really A+ student, I would do a sketch for every look. Sometimes it’s more like I’ll do a couple of pages of collaged research, maybe 10, 15 pages of research, and then sometimes do a sketch.
My relationship with sketches is complicated. Sometimes I feel like you should do it because then it forces you to make choices really early on. And yes, maybe you won’t find every little piece that you’ve drawn, but it make this pact with the universe where you’re like, I know what I want at least, so don’t get it twisted. Give me the thing that I want.
But then sometimes I don’t want to close myself off, or you don’t know what really works until you’re in the room with the person. So I really want to try to force myself to do more sketches early on because you’re holding your feet to the fire of making choices. And yes, maybe that will change, but at least you’re coming at it with a strong point of view. But yeah, I would say it’s 70 percent research-y collage and then 30 percent an actual sketch.
So I’ll do the lookbook that’s all these collages, maybe some sketches, and then the director and I will chat. And then the actor and I will chat usually weeks ahead of a fitting just to make sure we’re on the same page. And then I’ll have a meeting with my whole department where we talk through everything.
And then—especially with shopping—I always feel like it’s helpful to do my spiel about the boards. We’ll have a conversation about it, hopefully it’s a back and forth, it’s not just me presenting things. And then I actually find a lot of the design process kind of comes in the conversations with your crew if they’re really good, because let’s say I can be talking to a shopper and be like, oh, Jackie needs a T-shirt. And I think I’m like, okay, I’ve made a choice. Jackie’s in a T-shirt, this is great.
And then the shopper will be like, “okay, do you want a crew neck? Do you want a V-neck? Should it have a pocket? And then you’re like, oh my God, I actually have no idea what I want. But it’s those kinds of questions that prompt a lot of the design work.
Another layer of it is if a shopper comes back with a rack of T-shirts for Jackie, that’s helpful. I’ll have a moment where I’ll look through it myself just to have the space to viscerally respond to it. We’ll have a sort of show and tell where I’ll look through, and then I feel like it’s my job to explain why each piece on the rack either works or doesn’t work, right? Because it’s not helpful to the person if I’m just like, I don’t think we have it. And that helps me congeal who the character is because I’m forced to look at each thing and be like, okay, I think this T-shirt could be Jackie’s because the stitching is this way, the color is this.”
Finding the Character in the Cloth
“With Ed [Harris’] character, the hair is doing so much of the heavy lifting. It’s something we consider with production design and the DP in a bigger sense. In each scene, which department is doing the heavy lifting? Are we all turning the amp up to 11, or is the production design going to be crazy so the costumes can be kind of more grounded, whatever.
With Ed, it was like, okay, the hair is saying a lot, so the costumes can be at a whisper. Although he had some crazy patterns on Love Lies Bleeding, which I’m spoiled by. On every project with Rose [Glass] she has a really killer playlist for each character, and she had a playlist that was just a general vibe for the movie. Jackie’s was a lot of pump up, great workout music. And Lou Sr., Ed’s character, was a lot of acid jazz. That was informative for me.
He’s a fucked up character. But we were like, we don’t want him to be too dimensional in that. He’s immediately scary. It’s like [when he’s] eating yogurt in that trailer it’s terrifying, but that his clothes can almost lean a little bit more “I want to go to this guy’s house for a barbecue. That’s a fun pattern shirt. Grandpa makes a mean margarita by the pool.” There’s a certain aesthetic point of view, or jovial nature, or something to some of his shirts that we picked.
Also his house is so gaudy. He’s a character that has some vanity to him, which I think is really interesting because you meet him in his office, which is this really dingy trailer. And sometimes I think that’s really fun. It happens in life too. The most interesting people are people that inspire curiosity.”
Finding Inspiration for Women’s Bodybuilding
“There’s a really good documentary that I watched that I thought was really helpful. Something I really love about my job is that you kind of dip into all these different, I don’t know, cultures that I normally wouldn’t find myself in—bodybuilding, for example. And I feel like with anything, if you really look under the surface, it’s like, I don’t know, everything’s just really interesting. The documentary is called Pumping Iron: The Women, and it just follows a group of bodybuilders in the eighties.
It just kind of made me look at gender and femininity and strength in this way. That’s a big conversation, but I never expected that to come about through eighties bodybuilding. Anyway, it’s a really good doc if you’re interested, because there’s a few women who are bodybuilders who want to wear earrings and makeup and have a certain sex appeal that’s intertwined with the sport. And then there’s a woman who’s coming at it from the Olympics who is just like, I just want to lift things and I want to be judged in the same way that men are. It just brought up all these really interesting questions of strength and a traditional femininity and how much can that be intertwined? Or there’s also a reaction of like, oh, I don’t want to see very traditionally feminine aesthetic with a muscular build anyway, so it’s all very interesting.”
Olga’s Filmmaking Advice
“In terms of advice, I would just say it’s really find people that you like working with. That’s so hokey, but it’s really true to have relationships with people who you like the way their brains work.
It’s also really helpful to have relationships with people who you can be really honest with when things are scary or uncomfortable. I think in any job you can put on your human mask and you’re like, “I totally know what I’m doing.”
And that’s great, and you need to do that because you have to have a certain layer of confidence. But I think having friends who work in the same field who you can ask, “can you read this email? Does it sound like I’m smart?” is really helpful. Just kind of a hotline of people you can text or call to get their advice. Because unlike other careers where you could be like, I’m at this job for 10 years, you’re constantly at an intersection.”
Catch Love Lies Bleeding streaming on Max.
Author: Grant Vance
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
