Colleen Atwood’s career as an Oscar-winning costume designer has spanned from Jazz Age Chicago to a fantastical world down the rabbit hole. But with Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, Atwood stayed firmly planted in reality, fashioning revolutionaries, white supremacists, high schoolers, migrants, skaters, weed-growing nuns, and a freedom-fighting Sensei. “It’s one of the movies I’m most proud of,” she says.
Atwood, who says she knows Anderson from “around town,” connected with the director thanks to a serendipitous lunchtime run-in. “I walked out, and he was there with his family. He said hi and goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just hanging right now.’ And he goes, ‘You want to do my next project?’” Indeed, she did.
In a film that bombards the viewer with gripping visuals and a heart-racing score, the costuming is not as in-your-face. But just because it’s subtle doesn’t make it any less powerful. “It was unconscious-conscious dressing,” Atwood says of her method. In fact, when dressing revolutionaries living in hiding, subtlety is the key to a believable costume. “It’s always a possibility in that world to over-romanticize, to look at somebody as charismatic as Che Guevara and want everyone to look like him,” she says. “They’re living off the grid, so they don’t want you to notice what they’re wearing.” Take Regina Hall’s Deandra, whose uniform dressing strikes Atwood as Madonna-esque purity. “What does a really good person wear?” she says. “She isn’t sitting around thinking about her clothes.”
In the early days of the costuming process, Atwood and the actors would gather at Anderson’s Los Angeles home. “We did these fittings with Leo [DiCaprio] and Chase [Infiniti] up at Paul’s place, and Paul would shoot them on 35 [millimeter film] and we edited out stuff as we went along,” she says. “You don t always have the availability of the actors and the director and stuff in order to do that on films, but in this case, it was what Paul was doing with the story.”
That was how DiCaprio came to adopt Bob’s stoner dad uniform: his checked bathrobe, which Atwood made custom. “The robe I had was an old one, a rental,” Atwood says of the look that’s sure to launch a thousand Halloween costumes. “I ended up taking that idea of a JCPenney-type robe and making multiples for him.”
Willa’s primary costume was inspired by a student Anderson saw in Eureka, California, who wore a petticoat skirt to a school dance. In place of polyester, Atwood fashioned Willa’s blue skirt in an airier silk gazar. Cognizant of Willa’s arc, the designer ensured that it would be a dynamic, action-ready piece. “I cut it in a way that it had enough volume to it at the bottom that it would catch air,” she says. “I kept it two layers and a modesty layer to keep the idea that light could almost pass through it, because we had a lot of dark exteriors.” She contrasted her sweet, dynamic skirt with a tough leather jacket, which Atwood describes as Grease-esque. “It felt right for her to have this beat-up jacket—that was her treasure. That was probably her only jacket,” she adds.
Atwood’s group of white supremacists, The Christmas Adventurers Club—a secret society of upper-class WASPs, led by Tony Goldwyn—came straight from real life. One scene finds high-ranking Christmas Adventurers in an emergency clandestine meeting, all dressed for different occasions—some for golf, others in pajamas. “I went to Orvis one day in Pasadena, and I saw one of the guys there who looked just like that,” she says of a golf enthusiast who inspired one of the meeting scene’s costumes. “I went and bought exactly what the guy had.”
Sean Penn’s Colonel Steve Lockjaw, an aspiring Christmas Adventurer, struggles to fit in with his would-be brethren. Atwood made sure his clothes reflected that by dressing him in awkward, out-of-place formalwear. “It was what his mother would’ve put him in for church on Easter Sunday,” she says. For one meeting with the leaders, Lockjaw wears his best: a navy blazer, khaki pants, and a tie, which Atwood wanted to look brand-new. “There was that sort of sadness to it that I think was great with Sean’s performance.”
Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos—a self-described “Harriet Tubman” figure for undocumented immigrants in the community, as well as Willa’s karate instructor—was a particular costuming highlight. Originally, Atwood planned to keep Sensei Sergio in his gi for the film, taking inspiration from a photo of a martial artist who layered a turtleneck underneath his uniform. But del Toro himself influenced the look’s direction: “He said, ‘Why would I be hanging out in my gi doing my paperwork?’” Instead, he kept his gi pants, but swapped the bulky top for a sleek Puma track jacket that Atwood had been saving for the car scene.
Instead, she let her scouting trip inform Sensei’s other look: the same pair of gi pants with an indigo denim jacket and cowboy boots. “I’d gone on a little scout to El Paso to see the vibe of the people there,” she says. “I saw these amazing cowboy boots.” As for the jacket, Atwood turned to Jimmy McBride in New York, who made a denim iteration of one of his leather jackets.
In Atwood’s eyes, Sergio’s piecemeal, rooted-in-reality look was indicative of the entire process: “It came in a very fluid way.”
