The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Inspired by David Bowie’s Silhouette
Oppenheimer costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, now Oscar-nominated for her work on Christopher Nolan’s historical epic, on creating timeless menswear for the big ensemble cast
Ellen Mirojnick on creating timeless menswear for the big ensemble cast of
Oppenheimer costume designer Ellen Mirojnick took audiences back to the 1940s with her two- and three-piece suits worn by Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists on the Manhattan Project. But the fashion in Christopher Nolan’s historical epic also stayed impressively timeless, which Mirojnick reveals was one of the director’s early requests.
“One of Chris’ first notes was, although we’re traveling through many different periods, can we find a way to make it accessible to a modern audience?” Mirojnick tells THR, adding that she studied the varied silhouettes of different time periods in her research.
Coupled with Murphy’s undisclosed weight loss for the role, Oppenheimer’s look is fashioned after David Bowie’s Thin White Duke era, that “’70s American life,” says Mirojnick. “His exaggerated silhouette at that time was Cillian’s first entrée into Oppenheimer. We looked at the images [of Bowie] and went, ‘Whoa, this is very similar to Oppie’s silhouette,’ unbeknownst to the ’70s, to the ’30s and ’40s. And that being a keynote, we were able to create a silhouette on Cillian’s sculptural body and, taking into consideration [the] frailty, to make it larger. It’s two iconoclasts meeting at different periods of time. There are plenty of men and women that wanted that same silhouette: the voluminous trouser, the wide shoulder.” Top that off with Oppenheimer’s signature wide-brim porkpie hat (which was surprisingly difficult for the costume designer to source), and the look felt timeless, says Mirojnick.
The designer walked every actor who was playing a Manhattan Project scientist (that included Benny Safdie as Edward Teller and Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez) through production designer Ruth De Jong’s massive showrooms, filled floor-to-ceiling with images and research of the era.
“Each actor came in with a very big understanding of every character, every scientist that they were playing,” adds Mirojnick. “Each one took on a different tonality, a different silhouette. I love designing menswear because menswear is not embellished. It is very expressive and informative. It is in a cut of a jacket, the drape of a trouser, the proportions of all of the elements combined, and it really does make the character and it makes the man, by virtue of putting all of those pieces together.”
But Mirojnick’s work was not limited to menswear: She also designed costumes for the women in Oppenheimer, which included Emily Blunt’s Kitty (Oppenheimer’s wife) and Jean Tatlock (his lover, played by Florence Pugh). While there wasn’t much information about Tatlock, Mirojnick was able to gather a lot of intel about who Kitty was, which informed her costume design.
“One of the elements of Kitty was to create a character of a woman who is lost — and who has lost her ambition,” explains Mirojnick. “She’s not happy being a mother, she’s not happy in the place that she’s at and therefore, her salvation is liquor — and in that type of woman, I wanted to make sure that her costumes in what she would actually put on her body didn’t feel like a costume. It was just put together. It was like, if she had to go outside, put a shirt and pants on, and that was not precise but messy.”