How Catherine Martin Crafted Elvis’s Dazzling, Vegas-Worthy Wardrobe
In one scene from Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s riotous remixing of the life of the man considered the king of rock ’n’ roll, Austin Butler, assuming the role of Elvis Presley, is made to perform in a tuxedo with tails. He had, until then, been raising eyebrows (and heart rates) with his onstage gyrations, flying in the face of 1950s social mores—so the new look was devised to make him seem more respectable.
Returning from the set, Presley rips off his jacket, visibly bothered by the costume’s inauthenticity—and, all-importantly, how difficult it was to move in it. “I can’t sing if I can’t dance,” he declares.
In that moment, the film’s audience sees the monumental significance of clothing to the performer—an idea that costume and production designer Catherine Martin handled with the utmost care, having worked with the Elvis Presley estate and studied the holdings at Graceland, Presley’s Memphis, Tennessee home.
As Martin explains, perhaps the most remarkable element of the Elvis look—the billowing trousers, dainty lace shirts (he owned them in several colors), dandified neckerchiefs, drooping eyeliner—was that it was completely self-invented. “I think one of the things the Graceland archive allowed me to see was a world that formed Elvis,” says Martin. “Both his mother and father were products of the Depression, and his father kept every single receipt and every single check that ended up back at the bank. I saw the kind of financial simplicity that he came from, and how extraordinary his fashion choices actually are because he’s completely self-created. He lived in a time before stylists and before people helped to create the image. This was totally Elvis creating the look himself.”
As Presley’s career evolved between the ’50s and the 1970s, so too did his style. There’s Rockabilly Elvis, a fresh-faced, blue-eyed teenager with a God-given pout that sent knees buckling. There’s Army Elvis, who cut a cool figure in his nationally issued uniform. There’s family-man Elvis, a squeaky-clean, Hollywood leading man dressed in Hawaiian shirts and slicked-back hair dyed dark as shoe polish. And then there’s the version most easily remembered (for better or for worse): Vegas Elvis. In the final era of his all-too-short life—Presley died in 1977 at just 42 years old—the “Jailhouse Rock” singer zipped himself into leather jumpsuits bedazzled all over. Martin costumes all of these iterations, as well as the many characters in Presley’s life—from his wife Priscilla Presley (played by Olivia DeJonge) to his hollow-hearted manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).
Given Martin’s careful work, viewers will come away from Elvis with a heightened appreciation for how Presley presented himself. His look was scrappy, unconventional, and completely uninhibited—it took his unique sensibility to bring clashing elements into alluring harmony. “He just put things together because he thought they worked,” Martin adds. “Baz has a great saying: ‘Taste the enemy of art.’ Like when you get so self-conscious about doing the right thing, it kind of takes all the wind out of your sail. [Presley] was never worried about wearing things that skewed camp. Somehow, he transcended those things. He just thought they were beautiful and powerful and strong, and he felt good in them—and people loved seeing him in those outfits.”
Ahead of the release of Elvis this Friday, Martin talks us through her research process, the biggest challenges she faced, and the details to look out for in the film’s jaw-dropping costumes.
Photo: Trent Mitchell/Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures1/9Historical accuracy was crucial—up to a point
“It all starts with knowing your subject as well as you possibly can, but the internet is a blessing and a curse. There are so many fan photos and ‘Super 8’ movies that people shot at the time, along with the most well-known images. Even though hundreds of people spent days, weeks, and months looking for images, every day someone would send me something new. It was overwhelming. Baz, Austin, and I quickly came to see that just being historically accurate wasn’t enough, because it ended up sucking the life out of the performance when you started copying things without taking Austin’s physicality and interpretation of the role into account. He’s trying to reveal the humanity of this man who we only know as an icon. That’s not to say we didn’t try to reproduce the clothes as closely as possible, but they had to undergo subtle shifts. For instance, there were changes in fit with the jumpsuits, and with the black leather suit Elvis wears for the ’68 comeback special, we adjusted the length of the jacket, the scale of the pockets, and moved everything slightly further in.”
Photo: Hugh Stewart/Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures2/9Elvis’s sexual magnetism is front and center
“It needed to be really clear to the audience that ’50s Elvis was a rebel. He was the punk of his generation—something shocking and new, a part of this youthquake that was happening—and his sexuality was part of that. It was all about how the clothes worked on his body and worked with his sensual movements. Nowadays, we tend to think of Elvis’s style in the ’50s as kind of classic and not confrontational in any way whatsoever, so it was about finding the historical references but reinterpreting those clothes to emphasize that sexuality. We leaned into things like the lace shirt. He would wear them tied up at the midriff, and that was a specific choice on Elvis’s part. He wasn’t scared of wearing eyeliner or dyeing his hair to create a stage persona, even though off-stage, he was incredibly sensitive, shy, and had stage fright all his life.”
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures3/9Elvis had a special way of buttoning his jackets
“The oversized look is something that was very fashionable in the ’50s, and Baz really wanted to be true to that boxy nature, but find a way to communicate a sense of the body under the fabric, so that the kinetic movement of the cloth would echo the movement of the body underneath. So there was a really deliberate exploration to find something that allowed for those things, and it came from real research and real clothes that Elvis had in his closet. He loved black and pink; black pink was a color combination that Lansky Bros., the Beale Street men’s clothing store, also championed. And Elvis would only button the bottom button. Typically the suits had two buttons, and men would do up the top button. But by only doing the very bottom button, it kind of liberated all the movement across the chest, which meant Elvis could do all those kinds of incredible shoulder moves.”
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures4/9Elvis’s mother’s influence is everywhere
“In the scene following Elvis’s mother’s death when he sits in her closet, you see the connection between his lace shirts and her lace dresses. He and his mother had such a special relationship. Elvis projected this sense of masculinity that was kind of overwhelming, but so many of his sartorial choices had this femininity and flamboyance. I think his ability to connect with that feminine part of himself came from his overwhelming love of his mother.”
Photo: Hugh Stewart/Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures5/9A famed costume house (and one of the King’s own collaborators) pitched in to recreate his Vegas era
“I was really lucky. There was a point when I was thinking, ‘How are we going to make like 36 jumpsuits, all with different embellishments? Surely there is someone who does this.’ I went to Graceland and they had some reproduced Elvis stuff and, surprisingly, it was great quality. There was the white suit that he wears in the ’68 special, in the gospel sequence, and it was just hanging there. I looked at the tag and it was from BK Enterprises. I started reading about them online. Basically, Elvis met Bill Belew, who was NBC’s costume designer, on the ’68 special. Between them, they developed that Napoleon collar which Elvis started wearing at the time. The husband-and-wife team who own BK Enterprises, Butch and Kim Polston, then found Bill and asked for his permission to recreate pieces and he agreed. Eventually they also met Gene Doucette, who worked with Bill, stitching and adding studs to the jumpsuits. I went to Indiana to meet the Polstons and they were willing to work with us so we collaborated on the jumpsuits. The most touching thing was that Gene was on hand, too, to chain-stitch Austin’s jumpsuits, just as he had Elvis’s.”
