I recently was given the chance to interview Arianne Phillips, the Oscar nominated costume designer for Walk the Line who also worked on this fall's 3:10 to Yuma. Phillips has been working in the industry for many years, and works as a stylist to some of the biggest names in music, including Madonna, Courtney Love, and Justin Timberlake. Costume design is a hazy field for most of us, we know that costumes exist, but the thought process ends there.

Phillip's job is quite complex, and the enlightenment begins now:

How did you get involved in the film business?

I went to San Francisco State, and studied film and art, but I dropped out of school because I was in a very bad accident as a passenger. I was flat on my back for six months, and I spent that time soul searching on what I wanted to do. I was very interested in pop culture and fashion and music, and after I was incapacitated, I got money from the insurance company and I went to Europe [this was at age nineteen]. I met some people in London who were working in the fashion industry and it was then that I found out about being a fashion stylist. After that, I started in New York as a stylist. By serendipity I met Lenny Kravitz before he was recording his first album. We ended up being great friends, and he ended up being my roommate before he recorded his first album.

Professionally, I started working with him as a stylist when I was struggling. And then I made a name for myself, alongside him, for the work we did on his first album. Then I was working with other musicians as a freelance stylist and I got bit by the narrative when I was doing their music videos. Some videos are pure performance and some are more narrative. The narrative videos took me by surprise because it was about story, not just about being provocative. The ball just kept rolling... Eventually I got my break because Brandon Lee was going to do the movie The Crow. I had met Brandon through doing photo shoots and he asked me to help with The Crow. That was my first real film.

How do you go through the process of styling someone?

It's very organic. When working with a musician usually it's motivated by the material. I've been working with Madonna for ten years. We've gone through many transformations and characters, if you will, with her. I've worked in a lot of disciplines, styling her tours, album covers, her videos, photo shoots. We have a similar sensibility, much like Lenny Kravitz and I [do].

We approach it from more of a narrative point of view. Perhaps we're influenced by a movie we saw, a book we read, or some art. We did a whole Japanese period with Madonna; having both read Memoirs of a Geisha, we were really inspired by that. We did a kind of Western period: we were kind of trying to be ironic about American music. A lot of tongue-in-cheek, never really as calculated and vain as just looking good. It has to have some kind of substance. Working with a musician it has to come from the material, from the music. You listen to the album first, and there's some kind of context. When working with Courtney Love, there's always a dialogue going on about more philosophical ideas, a larger context and archetypes, and it can get very heady and intellectual, but it definitely helps that creative drive.

Is there one particular period that you love to costume, or feel more comfortable costuming?

I've only really had the pleasure to work in a few periods, mostly 20th century. With 3:10 to Yuma, I got to work in the 1880s. I think I have a sensitivity to the 1970s and the '60s because I was born in the '60s. I feel as if I have a natural understanding of those years; it's kind of emotional and intangible because I was a kid during that time, and in the movies I've worked on like The People vs. Larry Flynt, Girl, Interrupted, and Walk the Line, I got to explore different aspects of the '60s and '70s. Also working with Lenny Kravitz in the early years when we were using all '70s clothes you really get familiar with the period. Of course you have the obvious brush strokes: the bell bottoms, the fringe jackets, all the stuff we remember, but when you go deeper there's so many subtleties and so many different silhouettes.

I've been able to go very deep in the '60s and '70s, and I've tried to stay away from the kind of retro silhouettes. You want to use the clothes that the contemporary eye will most understand, but at the same time, you're making a cinematic film. In 3:10 to Yuma I avoided certain coats and kerchiefs around their necks, and that stuff did exist, but I had to take it out of my language because I felt like it had become cliché.

As a costume designer I have to be really sensitive about what's happening on screen and Jim Mangold's movies are very intimate. His camera shots are very close; his movies are almost shot in close-up. I never want the clothes to eclipse the emotion for the scene, but I need them to have authenticity. So, it's a wonderful challenge of having a light touch and trying to go deep into these periods. Everything is as it exists, I just choose to edit things out of 3:10 to Yuma that perhaps we've seen too often in the Wyatt Earps or the Tombstones, that all exists. It just became larger than life iconography. I wanted to give the actors a chance to not have to carry the burden of those visual clichés.

Read part two Here!

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