- Sometimes imperfections work brilliantly,
and sometimes when you're recreating iconic moment,
the imperfections just look like
you didn't know how to do your job.
So you kind of have to lean into making it more perfect
than maybe it was in reality.
♪ Well, you may go to college ♪
- Hi, I'm Catherine Martin,
and this is how we created
and designed the costumes for "Elvis."
I'm a costume designer
and I co-costumed "Moulin Rouge!" with Angus Strathie,
"Australia" I designed the costumes for,
"Gatsby" I designed the costumes for,
and now I've designed the costumes for "Elvis."
With "Elvis" we created an enormous chart
of all of Elvis's jumpsuits that we pasted up on the wall.
It was a very long chart,
and those kind of things allows you
to conceptualize a little bit
how you're gonna deal with that part
of Elvis's costuming history.
Because we only have two and a half hours to tell the story
and it takes place from late '40s
through 'til the late '70s,
you've gotta find a way of compressing
a whole lot of story points.
You can basically draw from the legacy of Elvis's costumes
and sort of synthesize a look out of what he actually wore
and imagine what he would've worn in this particular scene.
♪ The warden through a party in the county jail ♪
♪ The prison band was there and they began to wail ♪
- There are moments
when you're recreating historical costumes.
We had an aha moment when we started working
on the black leather costume and appears in the '68 special.
If you just imitated it slavishly
without taking into consideration what Austin was bringing,
you know, he was never gonna become Elvis per se,
so we needed to find a way of making the historical costumes
really work with him.
And Baz was always talking about it's not imitation,
it's interpretation.
So the fabulous archivists at Graceland
measured the suit for us.
We knew the width of the cuffs.
We knew how long the jacket was.
But through the process of fittings and experimentation
we came to see that we needed to adjust
all of these details subtly
to make sure they were fitting Austin.
His movement and his characterization was supported
rather than swamped by the pressure
of having to make something exactly like Elvis wore.
Things like the collar height.
If you look at Elvis, his collar hit him at a certain point
and hit an exact angle,
and so we needed to get that feeling on Austin.
But obviously everybody's neck length is different,
so it was really about thinking, okay, Austin is Elvis.
This is the suit we wanna put on him.
How do we make that feel germane to him?
And also there were practical considerations.
So we needed different pants
for each particular movement style.
So when he was throwing himself on the ground,
the pants needed to be altered
because we needed to fit knee pads under the pants.
When he was sitting down,
I hate it when you can see people's socks
in the top of the boots,
so we made the pants longer for sitting down.
Butt-hugging pants for when we see him from the back
walking down the corridor.
We also wanted pristine pants for when he's standing up.
Similarly with the jackets.
The jacket ended up having all these pieces of elastic
that rigged it to the pants.
In reality, Elvis's jacket did ride up with wear.
You did see the top of his boots.
But I suppose we wanted ideal perfection to the moment
'cause that's how people remember it.
♪ To the Jailhouse Rock ♪
[audience cheering]
♪ Dancing to the Jailhouse Rock ♪
- And I think we worked on three leather versions
in different weights of leather,
because originally his suit was made out of horse leather
and it was a very heavy leather.
The first suit we made Baz was concerned
the leather wasn't heavy enough,
so we went up a level in thickness and heaviness.
And then we weren't sure.
Maybe that was too heavy and was too constrictive
in terms of the movement.
So then we went somewhere between the two
and then we had to make multiples.
You always have to take into consideration
the practicalities of a costume
that's gonna be used over and over and over again.
There's a saying in costuming which is, "One is none."
So you're not supposed to only be able
to make one of anything.
Multiples are incredibly important.
♪ Well, listen and I'll tell you, baby ♪
♪ What I'm talking about ♪
- Along with making reproductions of costumes or outfits
that Elvis wore, Baz was also focused
on how his costumes reflected his sexuality,
his rebelliousness, and created a kind of wildfire
amongst his fans.
Like for instance, the lace shirts.
Elvis in the mid '50s wore a lot of lace shirts
in different colors,
and that kind of connected to what we know
as kind of rockstar today.
And also that interesting juxtaposition
of the feminine and the masculine.
Similarly, Elvis's favorite color combination
was black and pink.
So finding a way of incorporating that
and to be true to the boxy nature of the '50s look,
but at the same time, respect the body underneath.
We started experimenting with all of these jackets
that were kind of cardigan-like,
hung off shoulder pads, very soft.
Elvis, very interestingly, always did up the second button,
and what it meant was there's more room
to move your shoulders.
And so through the process of moving
and putting the jackets on,
we discovered by studying photos
how to integrate the jacket and the movement together.
It was like an aha moment for Austin and I.
We went, "Hang on a minute.
"We can't get the shapes
"to feel what the clothes would be like."
Just button the second button and it changed everything,
and he could move, the jackets looked different.
- What are they hollerin' at?
- The wiggle!
- The what?
- Them girls wanna see you wiggle.
- Elvis was known as Elvis the Pelvis.
Obviously his pants were important,
and it was a lot about the drap, how the fabric worked.
In these pants that we coined the squirrel pants,
because that's one of the insults that was leveled at Elvis,
it's really about the balance of the back and the front.
More fullness in the front, how much pleat you have,
where the pleats fall at the front,
whether you move them more in towards the fly
or you bring them more out towards the pocket.
Our pants were quite bun-hugging at the back.
That's one of the specialties of our tailor Gloria Bava.
She likes a nice bottom.
And then it's allowing enough fullness in the front
so that you could get all that shake.
And then we pegged the legs, as it's called.
So they narrowed towards the shoe.
There's more air in the top of the leg
than there is at the bottom.
And basically the pegging allows the top to move,
but there's a kind of anchor at the bottom.
And it's just a process of experimenting
to make sure you're getting exactly the right balance.
You have to buy the right fabric.
So it was a combination of all those things put together.
You spend a lot of time trying to emulate fabrics
that existed in the time.
One of the interesting things about '50s suiting
is there was a lot of texture,
a lot more texture than we have today.
And that was really hard
because you just spend your time
looking through tailoring fabric books
just hoping that you're gonna find something
that's gonna match or fit what you want.
I go online a lot desperately searching.
So we were in the middle of COVID
and supply chains were disrupted.
There were lots of restrictions
and things weren't that available.
So going and having natural fabrics digitally printed
to replicate the texture or the print on a jacket,
this is one of the tricks we use.
We get a base cloth that has some kind of texture
and then digitally we reproduce the texture
and then we print it on the fabric.
So photographically it looks like it matches,
but the texture is actually printed on to some extent.
♪ Come on back, won't you come on back ♪
♪ So we can do what we did before ♪
♪ Now baby, come back, baby ♪
- And if you look at the illustrations,
Elvis, who was blonde,
and you look at Captain Marvel Jr.,
Who has dark hair and has a big pompadour,
you can really see the influence of his hairdo,
and also the lightning bolt and the cape and these motifs.
I think that he aspired all his life
to overcome his humble beginnings.
He was someone always searching for the Rock of Eternity.
It is incredible that he was able
to overcome his background, find his own style,
and synthesize all these influences
and create something that hadn't been done before.
It's like a flash of lightning, literally,
'cause you just go like, "How did he do that?"
It still boggles my mind.