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“I was really looking for threads of continuity in Bob’s character and his taste level,” Phillips says, “and one thing I can say for sure in that excavation was denim. Bob has always worn jeans.”
During pre-production, Phillips connected with Paul O’Neill, the design director of Levi’s Vintage Clothing, the brand’s sublabel that recreates and reimagines archival designs. Back in 2019, O’Neill and his team developed a capsule collection based on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s called “Folk City,” and he’d already done a good deal of research into the wardrobes of Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Joan Baez (who also features in A Complete Unknown, as portrayed by Monica Barbaro). While reading A Freewheelin’ Time—a memoir by Dylan’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a version of whom appears in the film as Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo—O’Neill uncovered a great sartorial tidbit: In the mid-1960s, Rotolo used to sew inverted-U-shaped panels into the inseams of Dylan’s 501s, widening the hems so that he could more easily wear the pants over boots. In other words, Rotolo was DIY-ing bootcut jeans years before Levi’s started manufacturing them in 1969.
Courtesy of Levi’s
Courtesy of Levi’s
“I can remember me and my colleague high-fiving each other when we found that out,” says O’Neill. “Arianne said they had Dylan experts consulting on the film, and none of them had even heard about this before or seen it.”
It was a lucky nugget for the costume team, one that not only explains one of the musician’s style idiosyncrasies but also adds narrative depth to Dylan and Rotolo’s dynamic. (The real-life Rotolo also appeared on the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; for that photoshoot, Dylan himself wore a pair of 501s.) Once O’Neill and Phillips discovered the detail about Dylan’s custom flares, they started noticing them everywhere—including on the album artwork for his fourth LP, Another Side of Bob Dylan. To commemorate A Complete Unknown and its costumes, Levi’s Vintage Clothing produced a capsule collection featuring a reproduction of Dylan’s customized XX 501s complete with hand-sewn bootcut inserts and a D-ring leather belt, as well as toffee-hued suede work jacket based on a jacket Dylan wore during the era. The full assortment will hit the brand’s website on December 20.
In A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s classic denim also contrasts with Baez’s trendier silhouettes, which often included Levi’s with a white or black logo tab on the back pocket, which the company produced in the early 1960s to denote hipper styles geared towards young people. In this case, that meant more denim storytelling: Dylan, like his customized jeans, was sly and rugged; Baez, fresh and forward-thinking.
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