There’s a moment, right at the start of the third act of A Complete Unknown, when everything shifts drastically. The mood. The music. And, perhaps most drastically of all, the jeans.
It’s 1965, the year that Bob Dylan famously—and disastrously— “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival. He’s recently returned from England with a new Fender Stratocaster and a revamped look. His black sunglasses are practically glued to his face, a fixture between the wild crown of curls on his head and the smirk on his face as he writes and performs songs destined to alienate the folk purists who fostered his meteoric rise in the Greenwich Village music scene. And the denim? It’s tight. Very tight.
“You see him in the Columbia studio and his hair’s longer. He’s got these bespoke shirts and the skinny jeans and the Chelsea boots,” says Academy Award-winning costume designer Arianne Phillips, who helped transform Timothée Chalamet into a dead-ringer for early-to-mid-1960s Dylan for the movie. “And that is really the rock-and-roll archetype that we associate with Bob Dylan.”
Chalamet’s Dylan in 1965.
It’s also a far cry from the Dylan we see in the film’s opening in 1961, when a mysterious young man with a guitar case and not much else hitchhikes his way to New York in hopes of finding his hero, Woody Guthrie. He’s dressed in scruffy workwear and loose Levi’s 501s, a snap-brim cap hiding his (considerably shorter) hair.
“That look, when we first meet him, was fashioned after the Woody Guthrie look,” Phillips explains. “And that that was very considered by Bob. It wasn’t haphazard. It was something that he curated for himself.”
Early on in her research for the film, Phillips realized how crucial self-creation through clothing—and its evolution—would be. Most biopics, after all, cover a considerable chunk of the subject’s life. As you watch, you’ll see cars and technology and even architecture shift in the background. In A Complete Unknown, you only see the four years in which Dylan transformed from an ambitious teenager into a bona fide star. For the audience’s sake, a few visual cues were needed to establish the beats of the story.
Dylan’s Woody Guthrie-inspired look in his earlier days.
“His denim story was really my thread,” says Phillips. “One of my initial impressions after reading the script was, ‘Oh, my role is to show the character arc of this 19-year-old kid to this 24-year-old man who’s really set on his path to becoming the artist we know today.’ And the through line for me, after doing the research, was the denim, his boots, and his hair. Those really changed. The people around him change a bit, but not as dramatically as he did.”
A couple years after his arrival in New York, Chalamet’s Dylan has become embedded in the folk scene. His songs are gaining notoriety, and he’s dating Sylvie Russo, the movie’s stand-in for Dylan’s real-life girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo. His look has shifted, but slightly. Gone are the baggy clothes, replaced by the slightly more streamlined jeans and jacket you’ll probably remember from the album art for 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. (Yes, that’s Sylvie/Suze on the cover with him.)
While she was researching this period, Phillips got in touch with Paul O’Neill, the design director of Levi’s Collections and, for nearly a dozen years before that, the head designer of Levi’s Vintage Clothing. As it happened, O’Neill had designed a whole LVC collection based on the early ‘60s folk scene in Greenwich Village back in 2019. And as he was conceiving and executing that collection, he noticed something that even Phillips had initially missed.
Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival.
“I’d found during my research that his girlfriend from the early ’60s, Suze Rotolo, had written in her memoir that she customized his 501s by sewing patches into the bottom of them so he could slip them over his boots,” O’Neill says. “I can remember when I read that, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is amazing. I have to try and find the imagery of this.’ I searched everywhere and I kept finding all these images where you could see the inserted U panel at the bottom of his jeans. And now everywhere I looked I could see it; it was fantastic. I passed that piece of research on to Arianne, and I made some jeans for them, including the U panel in the bottom of the jeans.”
“Once Paul pointed it out, I couldn’t unsee it,” Phillips says. “I was so excited to share that with Jim and with Timmy—this very personalized, unique thing that became part of how Bob dressed. And even if the audience never saw it—you do see it in the movie; you have to look for it—but even if they don’t see it, it was something that really helped us and Timmy as well, because costumes, they serve a narrative, visual purpose to help inform the audience where we are, who the person is. But costumes, I believe, are also a physical manifestation of the character that help the actor get there.”
Lucky for Chalamet, then, that the folks dressing him as Dylan got even the easy-to-miss details right. And even luckier, perhaps, for the rest of us. Because after all that research and work, Levi’s decided to release a recreation of those very jeans to the general public under the LVC banner, along with Dylan’s somewhat peculiar “D” buckle belt—it’s a package deal with the jeans—and a dupe of the suede moto jacket worn in the movie. “People are always asking me, ‘Where can I get that?’” Phillips says. “And oftentimes we’ve created the pieces uniquely for the film. So being able to have someone own a piece of the film is really special.”
LVC’s recreation of Dylan’s customized 501s.
And the dupe of Dylan’s suede moto jacket.
As for those skinny jeans that signal Dylan’s break from the traditional folk scene? Neither Phillips nor O’Neill is exactly sure who made them or what the style might be. “But in the archive, we have these Levi’s Super Slims, which came out around ‘64, ’65,” O’Neill says. “To me, that’s the closest that I could see that really looked like what he was wearing. They’re basically the skinniest jeans you could make without using stretch fabric. The bottom opening is so small, you can just about get your heel through there without dislocating your ankle or something.”
Those aren’t part of the LVC collection, but don’t be shocked if you see something similar in the not-too-distant future. “People are going to like them, and I do think that as much as baggy jeans are all the rage right now, I’m sure there’s going to be a shift pretty soon,” O’Neill says.
Dylan’s look near the end of the film: Big hair, skinny jeans, and sunglasses (of course).
Who adopts them, and when, is still to be seen. But more than likely, it’ll be people expressing the same kind of impulse Dylan does in the final third of A Complete Unknown—bucking against expectations by going hard in the other direction. Which is, of course, exactly the point that Phillips was trying to get across with her costuming decisions.
“I love that we can tell that story of him finding his voice, musically, just in terms of the kind of music he wants to make and how he’s presenting himself to the world,” she says. “That maturity, the arc, the difference was a real wonderful challenge and opportunity for me as a costume designer, in terms of storytelling.”
“This is really a time in a young man’s life where those style choices that he gravitates towards really imprinted his future style, and as we know him today,” she continues. “And I think it can be said for all of us: We find out what works for ourselves once we figure out our relationship to the world, our personal style, what makes us feel right, and we adopt that in different iterations throughout our life.”
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