Mark Bridges, the twice Academy and BAFTA award–winning costume designer, has “always been a sucker for glamour,” he says. “It’s ironic because, in this age that I’m making films, they’re so much more down-to-earth.” Among those he’s worked on is the San Fernando Valley–set Licorice Pizza, from 2021, which happened to be playing the night before our interview; Bridges caught, and very much enjoyed rewatching, the last 45 minutes of it.
Bridges, who learned his craft under the late Richard Hornung (whose work was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s), has an extensive list of iconic film credits to his name—8 Mile, I Heart Huckabees, The Artist, Silver Linings Playbook, Jason Bourne, Joker, Marriage Story, The Fabelmans—not to mention his 25-year working relationship with the acclaimed filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson.
Bridges’s latest project, however, does dip a bit more into the world of traditional glamour: Bradley Cooper’s stunning Maestro, which opens in theaters this month and streams on Netflix in December. A musical biopic framed around the marriage of composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan), Maestro charts the complexities of their love and life from the 1940s through to the 1980s, articulated by a wardrobe as compelling as the film’s immersive sound. (Beyond impassioned orchestral moments, the characters’ constant cross talk creates an absorbing rhythm in the film all its own.)
“We had to tell everything about the passage of time with a hem length and a color palette,” Bridges says. “We didn’t put any dates on there.” So the job became about sorting out “whether there were shoulder pads or not. Were the men’s trousers straight or flared? Just using those little languages as a hallmark of every decade to try to tell a story.”
Of all of them, he notes, “it was very fun to try and duplicate the 1940s,” when Lenny and Felicia first meet at a fabulous party. Because the sequence—like others from the beginning of the Bernsteins’ relationship—was shot in black and white, Bridges relied on contrast and texture, like nubby wools or sparkly beads, to make the costumes sing. (He had learned certain lessons from working on 2011’s The Artist, another film that largely eschewed color.)
Take a look back at the classics, and that’s what they all did: The female lead is either in the palest or darkest dress. “It helps a lot,” Bridges says. “The higher the contrast in the outfit, that’s where the audience’s eye will naturally go. So I used that level to focus the scenes a little bit more.”
For each scene, he sought reference images to convey the look and feel he wanted, making collages from which to work. “You can’t just talk about clothes,” he says with a laugh, “because I’ll say a black dress, and you’ll think one thing, and I’ll think another. But if we’re both looking at a photograph, it’s yes or no.” These he went through with Cooper, who, as well as starring in the film, also wrote and directed it. The pair had previously worked together in 2012, on Silver Linings Playbook, and then again on Licorice Pizza, in which Cooper sports a louche billowing-shirt-and-tight-trouser combination. “I think there was a level of trust because of our previous collaborations,” says Bridges of the relationship.
Besides trawling costume warehouses for inspiration pieces (it is important to Bridges that he feels the clothes’ fabrics and sees their construction), part of the creative process also involved visiting the Bernsteins’ Connecticut home, where Bridges could see photographs of Lenny and Felicia (including on refrigerator magnets) as well as their real-life wardrobes. While the former’s contained a lot of silk robes and outrageous jackets, there was a blue gingham dress that, according to their eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein, Felicia would wear whenever she was at the country house. “It went straight onto Carey,” Bridges says, and featured in a heated, pivotal moment. “It was cool to have that energy on set,” he adds.
Among the project’s biggest challenges was coming up with outfits when photographs from the time didn’t give away too much. It’s what Bridges terms “forensic costume design.” In the film, Felicia wears “that beautiful gown at the opening of Mass”—a work composed by Bernstein in 1971—“and there are only two photographs of her that evening.” One was in color, the other—revealing just a hint of ruffle—in black and white, but neither of them were full-length. “You imagine what the dress could be like,” he says. “I’m thinking: What’s going to tell the story best, and what’s going to be interesting to look at and also serve the piece and the actor?”
Another creative highlight came by way of a collaboration with Chanel on a suit Felicia wears near the end of her life. (She died in East Hampton in 1978.) Bridges points out that she “was a very chic person,” someone who would wear an Adolfo jacket and a Chanel blouse. “I just wanted to make sure we understood that she was of a certain class in New York.” So Bridges went straight to the source: “[Chanel] kindly gave us fabrics and trims to choose from, and they loaned us the buttons.” They also sent a prototype from the period so Bridges and his team could see how it was made. It fits right in.
Maestro is in limited theaters from November 22. It debuts on Netflix on December 20.