When I was an unpaid intern at a big, important magazine in 2011, it was very important to look good in the office. It was the height of Mad Men fashion. Everyone dressed smartly—ties, tailored suits, good shoes. I couldn’t really afford this stuff working for free, but it’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it industry, and I faked it as hard as I could. One day, I wore a button-down, classic light-blue shirt from J.Crew under a royal-blue-and-white striped cardigan I had bought on a trip to Italy years prior, all brought together with a navy-blue tie. I was walking back to my desk from lunch when I passed the editor in chief, who shall remain nameless, in the hallway. We nodded at each other. He had no idea who I was. At my desk, I opened Twitter on my computer and saw that he had posted a new tweet:
“Whenever I see a guy wearing a half windsor knot, I always want to smack the back of his head and retie his tie for him. #4inHand4ever”
I can’t confirm that this tweet was about me, but the timing was suspect—as was the shoddiness of my tie knot.
In Halina Reijn’s buzzy new movie, Babygirl, Romy (Nicole Kidman) is the tightly wound CEO and founder of a robotics company who has her world thrown upside down when she encounters a mysterious intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who knows how to push her buttons. Awkward and charged interactions eventually lead to a full-blown affair in which the power dynamic in the office is completely inverted. “I think you like to be told what to do,” Samuel playfully tells Romy in their first mentorship meeting. It’s a statement that more than bears out in a story about desire, repression, control, female power, and the contradictions that exist within all of us.
For such a nuanced, biting, wickedly funny movie to work, the characters within its central relationship need to be crystal clear. And while Samuel is intentionally a cipher—textually, we aren’t told much of anything about who he is or where he comes from; in many ways he’s almost supposed to be a cosmic being—the subtextual ways the movie builds him up are ingenious. Since the audience lacks any distinct information about him, what he wears—or tries to wear—speaks to who he is and who he’s trying to be. And in painting Samuel as a fake-it-till-you-make-it intern, Babygirl’s costume designers, Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller—who simply go by Kurt and Bart—ace the assignment.
When we first meet Samuel, he’s in a suit that doesn’t quite fit, you can tell he hasn’t seen a tailor, and you might even wonder whether it’s his suit. His tie is poorly knotted and not cinched to the top of his collar, the top button of which is never buttoned. On top of it all, he wears an ill-fitting, military-esque parka that definitely doesn’t go with the suit, plus a backpack that’d be more at home on the floor of a freshman dorm than in the lobby of a Fortune 500 company. If you’ve ever ridden the New York City subway during rush hour—or had the fortune to be a fancy-shmancy editor at a Condé Nast magazine—you’ve seen this look before. According to Kurt and Bart, that’s not a coincidence. “The funny thing is we initially googled ‘intern on the subway,’” Kurt says. “I see them all the time when I’m on the subway, and they’re not wearing really expensive suits. They’re not wearing the best shoes. The picture we googled, the guy had a big backpack that had nothing to do with the look. He was wearing a mismatched coat that he was probably just wearing because it was cold and it was his only coat.”
“Our mood board was half Google images and then half stealth photos of interns on the subway. And you just start to collect and see these different ideas in recurring themes: the ill-fitting suit, the cheap belt, the slightly incorrect shoe,” Bart adds. “And the fit became really, really important, too, because we wanted it to be kind of big. It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I need a suit for work. Where am I going to get the suit?’ Maybe it’s from his uncle, maybe it’s a thrift store suit. It definitely doesn’t fit him. It’s never been tailored to him. And it also played up—I think [Samuel] has a boyish quality—and so we also wanted to play up that boyishness.”
For Dickinson, Samuel’s clothes were integral to feeling out the character. “It’s funny, [Harris] is a great-looking guy, and if you put him in really nice, tailored clothes, he goes really fashion, really fast,” says Kurt. “We did try on some other suits that were more fitted and more tailored, and he kind of had the same [unconvinced] reaction we did. … Until he put on this kind of baggier suit, that’s kind of when he started to, I think, feel that that was who Samuel was.”
“I think our first fitting with him was the day after he had just shot a huge Prada campaign,” Bart laughs. “So I think he loved that we had these used suits and these secondhand suits for him to try on. He was really into it. And I think that we explored that idea, that character, and it kind of came together over the course of a couple of fittings. But that’s always the fun part.”
That clumsy look—that sense of I’ve never stepped foot inside a Brooks Brothers, or even a Bonobos—is crucial to the surprising nature of Samuel’s interplay with Romy. She ends up completely in the thrall of a boy whose entire outfit likely costs three times less than one of her shoes. “I love the contrast,” says Bart. “All of Romy’s clothes either had expensive price tags, or we made them out of really expensive fabrics—clothes that are well cared for.”
Looking at Romy—the dresses she wears, the coats that drape over her shoulders—you would never think that she’d fall for a guy who pairs Doc Martens oxfords with his two-sizes-too-big suit, let alone even deign to look at him. But it’s that assumption that makes Babygirl so interesting. Desire often can’t be explained by reason. Romy’s role as the powerful leader in every facet of her life is exactly why she’s so desperate for an outlet that allows her to cede control.
“That’s one of the things I love about Halina’s movie: It’s not like a straight line,” says Bart. “That power dynamic is shifting, and it was fun to help support that confusion through the costumes.”