In the whirlwind film Anora, a working-class stripper and sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), impulsively marries Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch with unfettered access to his family’s exorbitant wealth in the United States. The tale is the latest in The Florida Project and Red Rocket director Sean Baker’s oeuvre, much of which is marked by his portrayal of sex workers in America.
Jocelyn Pierce, the film’s costume designer, sees Anora as a story of the American dream. Ani and Ivan are each searching for a kind of salvation that the myth of America promises. Ani attempts to hustle her way out of the working class, while Ivan sees America as a hedonistic paradise, an escape from the responsibilities and expectations of life in Russia.
Pierce uses clothing to telegraph some of those ideas of hope, possibility, and ambition. “There are actually very few saturated colors in the costumes,” she says. “There are a lot of blacks and neutrals and metallics, but the colors we did choose to really pop are red and blue.” Pierce points to Ani’s vibrant blue Hervé Léger bandage dress (her personal favorite), which the character wears on her first trip to Ivan’s compound. “The color just pops so beautifully off of the New York winter, the cool neutrals of the mansion, and off of those red sheets. It also feels like a symbol of aspirational dressing—dress for the job you want—and ultimately of the American dream.”
The patriotic colors weren’t the only nod to the American dream in Anora. Pierce and her team, Murrie Rosenfeld and Jonie Bertin, added subtle Western motifs in homage to maverick characters, like Pleasers with Old West pistols for heels on the renegade dancer Diamond. Pierce also used the costuming to mix Ivan’s Russian roots with his desire to make a new, independent life in America. For a New Year’s Eve party, Pierce dressed Eydelshteyn in a gold floral-embellished suit from Russian designer Roma Uvarov but festooned his Chelsea boots with gold spurs.
Pierce began the costuming process by creating mood boards. “The first boards that I had got sent to Mikey,” she says. “We had some same images, which kind of felt [like] kismet.” Eventually, she took her inspiration off the page and into the streets of Brighton Beach, where the film is set. “We were fully immersed in Brighton Beach,” she says. “Our offices were there, the cast was living there, Sean was living there. That’s when we started to ground things in reality and do a lot of research. We hung out at the club where we were filming. We got to know people who were closely representative of the characters in the movie. Then the details started to materialize.” Baker was especially hands-on when the cast and crew arrived in Brooklyn. “Sean and I would be standing on the street on Coney Island Avenue, and he was showing me, ‘Look at that guy and look at that guy,’” she says. “We saw enough evidence in the real world of characters that informed us. Every single thing was grounded in truth.”
While the wardrobe team pulled from brands like Balenciaga, Khaite, Maisie Wilen, and KidSuper, Pierce was also keen to source from smaller brands based in New York and Russia. She was able to exercise this most with Ivan. “As a character, he’s super wealthy, he could have anything he wants,” she says. “But at the same time, you need that feeling that he’s still a kid. We got to mix super-high-end luxury brands that would be easy for him to buy—but totally aspirational for other people—with streetwear that I think a young man of that age would covet.” Nothing underscores that more than Ivan’s wedding outfit: a custom blazer by the New York brand Bontha, which Pierce styled with basketball shorts. “It felt so right on for his character, the mixture of high-end luxury and the recklessness of youth,” she says.
The wardrobe became critical to the character-building process for some of the actors—namely Madison and Yura Borisov, who plays Igor, a gopnik on Vanya’s father’s payroll charged with helping find Ivan when he flees his parents’ pursuit. “What I loved about Yura was that he asked early on if he could wear his costume out,” Pierce says. “He ended up living in it. He wore it to and from work, he wore it on the weekends, all the time. He was totally methodical. He aged it down until it was a second skin. He simply was Igor.” Madison, for her part, wound up performing a scene filmed at Ivan’s mansion in her own skirt and Pleasers (the towering stilettos that many dancers wear). “We had something else completely, and she ultimately was like, ‘This is what I feel like it should be,’” Pierce says. “She was sort of one with the costume.”
Perhaps the most significant piece of costuming is the Russian sable coat Ivan buys Ani after their wedding. The coat—a symbol of her ascent—is a point of pride for her. It’s such an important item that she chooses, rather impractically, to wear it (with a pair of heels, no less) when she searches for Vanya. For Pierce, the moment Ani gets the coat is when she assumes the role of a wife. “It was a moment where we felt like she was trying to take her power back,” she says.
