From Joker and Harley Quinn to Dylan and the ’60s, these costumes had a lot to live up to
LA TimesWhen you’ve designed Madonna’s clothes for multiple tours, films and videos, styled Lenny Kravitz and Justin Timberlake, and costumed thousands of Broadway, film and opera performers, you aren’t likely to be intimidated by dressing a criminally insane couple and a Nobel Prize-winning music legend. In back-to-back films, costume designer and three-time Oscar nominee Arianne Phillips designed the far-ranging wardrobes for Joker and Harley Quinn as a song-and-dance duo in “Joker: Folie à Deux” and for “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan. The sequel to 2019’s blockbuster “Joker” has Joaquin Phoenix reprise and expand his role as Joker/Arthur Fleck and introduces Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel, also known as Harley Quinn. Throughout the five years that “A Complete Unknown” took to get finished, with interruptions for the pandemic and the actors’ strike of 2023, Phillips became encyclopedically fluent in all things Bob Dylan. For the “Joker” sequel, Phillips purchased vintage clothes as inspiration but custom-made nearly every costume, including the dozens of threadbare prison uniforms, Lee Quinzel’s harlequin-patterned jackets, specially knitted hosiery and many baby-doll dresses.