While designing the costumes in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”
The attention to historical detail and sheer scale of the production—a surrealistic, seductive reimagining of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novel charting the drug-addled hijinks of gay expats in 1950s Mexico City—were already daunting. But then there was the fact that Anderson, best known for his work as a fashion designer at Loewe and JW Anderson (though he’d also done the costumes for Guadagnino’s previous film, Challengers), was about to spend the next two months overseeing hundreds of outfits that matched these exacting period elements. So he decided to set himself another challenge: to ensure every garment genuinely dated back to the years in which the film was set—and likely could have actually been found in Mexico, where leftover clothes from the States were often shipped.
“I wanted to have a creative journey that was different than Challengers, which was rooted in a period I grew up in, so it was easier for me to navigate,” Anderson recalls. “I wanted something where I was going to learn through the process about that period.” (Right down to the underwear, it turns out: You won’t spot any elastic boxers being yanked off during costars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey’s multiple eye-popping sex scenes, but rather ties on the side and snap buttons being slowly undone.) There are also elements that feel startingly contemporary, which Anderson ascribes to the fact that the 1950s—when the American boom in mass retail allowed European-inspired tailoring to be bought off-the-rack for the very first time—were “like the birth of the modern wardrobe for men.”
The overall effect is dazzling, and one of the year’s most extraordinary costuming achievements—whether it’s he unforgettable cream linen suit worn by Craig that wrinkles and gains a yellowish patina of sweat as his character descends further into his addictions to booze, drugs, and the affections of Starkey’s discharged Navy officer; or the crisp, wafer-thin knits and gauzy button-downs worn by Starkey, who seems to float always just out of Craig’s grasp. (And that’s without mentioning that centipede necklace.) “There was definitely a psychological element to the design,” Anderson says, before adding, with a grin: “But I needed to help set that historical context so that Luca could fuck with it.”
Here, as Anderson also appears on The Run-Through to discuss his work on the film, he sits down to discuss his journey as a costume designer—from the dialogue that has grown between his work in film and his day job (well, multiple day jobs) in fashion, to why relinquishing control has (finally) become something he can enjoy.
Vogue: Hi, Jonathan. I believe I’m finding you in Los Angeles today?
Jonathan Anderson: Yes, we’re in LA. We had the premiere last night, and today we’re doing press. So it’s just jet lag and the usual running around like a headless chicken.
I don’t know how you find the time to do this project—and promo for it—alongside your two other jobs.
At the moment we’re a little quieter, and it’s not too many days here [in LA], so that’s good. We keep everything compacted so that it gives people time in the studio to get everything processed, and I’m not always on their backs asking, “What’s happening? When is it ready?” [Laughs.]
To go back to the beginning: How did you first cross paths with Luca? It was at a hotel in Rome, right?
Yeah. We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.
Were there any shared cultural touchstones or specific interests that you remember bonding over?
I think definitely art. We’re both obsessive collectors and like similar things. I think we have an addiction and an obsession with art, which we meet in the middle with our other projects. It’s quite nice to have someone else to bounce ideas around with, especially about something that is outside of both of our jobs, but filters back into the creative practice.
Where do those conversations tend to happen, where you’re just bouncing ideas around?
I was reading recently an article about how people usually have seven people they talk to every day or something, and for me, Luca is one of those people. I think I talk to Luca nearly every day. If I don’t, then I feel like I’ve missed something. It’s not just about film, and it’s not just about fashion, either—it’s about a whole landscape of different things. If I need advice on something, I ask Luca, and there are not many people that you can find like that in life. Once you find them—especially if they’re in a creative field and share that understanding of what it means to be a creative person—then you want to keep them around.
Are there decisions you make as a designer that have been influenced by feedback from Luca—from things you’ve sent him and had his advice on?
Sometimes, it’s just instinctive. We did a perfume campaign [for Loewe] with David Sims recently, with Jamie Dornan and Sophie Wilde, and I realized he’s helped me to understand how the lens should be on a person. It didn’t feel as foreign as it used to be when we were shooting video or film, and I would be like, “I have no idea what I want.” Through Luca, I’ve learned what I want from a scene.
Obviously you worked on Challengers together first, but at what point did the conversation around Queer kick off?
Well, we were in Boston [during preproduction for Challengers], and it was me and Luca and Justin Kuritzkes [the screenwriter of Challengers and Queer]. Luca had finally—after many, many years of trying to get the rights to Queer—found out they were suddenly available. He then turned to Justin and was like, “Let’s make this happen.” Then we all had such an enjoyable process on Challengers that Luca was like, “Will you do Queer?” I was like, “Of course. I will do everything I can to make it work.” Even though I was already thinking: How am I going to do this? I did love the book already, though. I read it at university. It’s one of those go-to books when you’re growing up queer—it’s one of those educational books. It’s a part of queer culture.
Whether being a creative director or being a costume designer, so much of the job is about finding the right team. Are there different qualities that you look for in the people you assemble to work with you between film and fashion?
Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision. Ultimately, I think about cinema as history-making. It’s what I love about movies, when you’re going back and watching films from the 1920s, from the ’30s…. When you’re building an image or a look of a character, ultimately you have to think of how this is going to sit in the landscape of time.
You mentioned that you had read the book already. How did you begin putting the characters’ costumes together? Did you use the book as the starting point, or did you go back through the archives first?
If you take somebody like Eugene Allerton, who is played by Drew [Starkey], in this book, there is this idea of him kind of morphing and melting. With Burroughs, it’s like you’re trying to navigate what is real and what is not real. A lot of things in the book do not exist. They’re fragments of his world that have been reimagined. There are parts of Mexico in it that do not exist, but there are parts that do. If you look at the translucent shirt that I found…everything in the film is from the period, but what I really like about that shirt is that it feels like it could be a figment of your imagination. You’re trying to work out: Is this real, or is this an exaggerated version of what people wore? For me, the shirt was a turning point in [making] the film. I like that psychology being within the clothing, where you have the cigarette packet peering through, or the flesh underneath, or the side of the body’s outline visible.
Luca shoots on film, so I also felt it was very important for the clothing to have this incredible film-like textural quality. That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.
I had wanted to ask you about that sheer shirt, actually. I know it’s period-accurate, but it looks so contemporary. Was that a quality you actively sought out when sourcing the garments for the film?
So contemporary. It was actually a set of nine shirts that were dead-stocked from the very early 1950s by an American department store. There was something so interesting about that fabric. It’s like a crepe nylon, so it’s very textural—almost like thick stockings. The fabric is kind of crunchy. What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.
I also found that in the knitwear in the Chimu Bar [the bar frequented by locals where Craig picks up Omar Apollo’s rent boy]—there’s a guy in the background wearing an amazing knit from the end of the ’40s that has these intarsia angel wings on the back of it. When I found it, I was like, This is just insane. There are only three items of clothing in the film that aren’t original. Two are the matching suits they’re wearing in the shot inspired by a Francis Alÿs painting, where there’s the paper hovering in the middle. That was one part where I liked that it was a facsimile. Then you have the centipede necklace, which I had made with Loewe with the moonstone in the head. That was something that Luca really had a vision about, so it had to be made from scratch.
As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while?
Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”
Did immersing yourself in that specific world and time period feed its way back into your work at Loewe or JW Anderson at all?
I don’t know. I think maybe everything has an effect, and sometimes you don’t know what the effect will be. So I don’t know for sure. But I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.
What are the next steps for you as a costume designer? Are you and Luca already discussing future projects?
There are some projects in the works that will hopefully transpire as time goes on. We’ve got a couple more we want to do, and I want to make it work. I have to try and figure out how to navigate it with my day job, ultimately. I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another. I think there’s an authenticity in how we use Daniel or Drew in campaigns because it really is about relationships, and it’s not forced. It’s like when we were in Rome, and I had never met [Amazon MGM Studios marketing chief] Sue Kroll before, but I just found her really inspiring to talk to. I was like, “Well, I’d love you in the campaign.” [Kroll appeared in Loewe’s spring 2025 campaign, photographed by Juergen Teller.] There’s no hard logic to it. When you meet someone like her, who you find really inspiring as a person, you just think, I want my customer or my audience to look at her and say, “That inspires me too.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
