Visual anthem
For his work on The United States vs. Billie Holiday, costume designer Paolo Nieddu collaborated with Prada.
Chronicling the complicated life of pioneering jazz singer Billie Holiday was always going to be a big task, but director Lee Daniels is one of the few filmmakers up for the challenge. For his 2021 biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday, in cinemas now, Daniels found the perfect screen ingenue to portray Holiday in Andra Day (in her first major film role), but the 1940s and 50s costuming was always going to be the second-hardest thing to nail.
The ideal scenario presented itself when Daniels approached Prada, at the suggestion of Anna Wintour, to design Holiday’s outfits in the film, culminating in a rare collaboration that produced nine custom looks.
Costume designer Paolo Nieddu couldn’t have dreamed of a more serendipitous pairing.
“Prada basically said to me: ‘We’re not building [gowns] from the ground up. We want to use pieces from the Prada archive that we can then use as the springboard to build upon,’” he explains over the phone from Los Angeles. From there, a simple trawl of Vogue Runway’s dizzying Prada archives made the costume designer realise just how much synergy already existed between Holiday’s personal style and the iconic Italian house.
“I would send a black-and-white image of Billie and say: ‘Could we do this in red lamé?,’” Nieddu says. “Then I’d have their runway photo that looked the closest to [what Billie would wear].” Thankfully, the almost exclusively black-and-white photography of Holiday’s era allowed for some liberty when creating the colour palette for her on-screen wardrobe.
As with many female performers, onstage fashion helped Holiday emphasise the visceral stories told through her songs. Her signature anthem, Strange Fruit, sombrely addresses the lynching of black people that took place in America’s southern states in the first half of the 20th century. The song was written by Abel Meeropol and also borrows lyrics from his own 1937 poem by the same name. Unsurprising for the time, Strange Fruit also led to extensive police subjugation for Holiday, and she was ostracised by government officials before her death in 1959. Though from different genres, black female powerhouses like Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Beyoncé would pick up from where Holiday left off, shining a light on injustice and racial empowerment through music and performance.
Holiday’s dazzling appearance – accentuated by her gowns and gardeniaadorned updos – lives on in the minds of many, but her historical political relevance is often left by the wayside. With the film set when Holiday was already an established star, it was important for her costumes to radiate power, and Prada went to pains to illustrate her strength.
This curatorial process meant tailoring Prada’s past runway looks, often designed for wearability, to fit Holiday’s high glamour on-stage aesthetic. “I would see a bodice, and maybe the dress would be cocktail-length,” Nieddu says. “I’d say: ‘We want this bodice, but we want it to be on a gown,’ and then they would come back with that.”
One of the most instrumental looks was produced after Nieddu spotted it in a decades-old Look magazine purchased on eBay – before production, and “even before the Prada discussion”. He ended up melding it with a similar look from Prada’s autumn/winter ’17 collection, imagining the dress in a marigold satin.
Nieddu asked Prada to copy the beading of the original gown and to add sleeves and a plunging décolletage, culminating in one of the film’s many indistinguishably accurate fashion moments. “I just loved the dress in that photograph and thought, ‘I’d love to press play on this picture,’” says Nieddu.
As a costumer, he was spellbound by the process as well as Prada’s attention to detail. Take, for example, something as apparently small as choosing the perfect colour. “I drew a turtleneck that Billie ends up wearing backstage – that had to be Prada, because
I feel like Prada cashmere is a thing – I asked for it in green and they said: ‘We have many greens, could you show us another example of the actual green you’d like?’ I Pantoned a [specific] shade of green, and they said ‘No problem’, and did it,” Nieddu says.
Despite the lasting images of Holiday in her performance garb, her dresseddown moments were more difficult to nail. “The ‘everyday Billie’ was one of my biggest challenges, because most research of her, or a lot of it, is Billie on stage and doing this, but what is she wearing in her dressing room backstage when she’s about to go on? What is she arriving in?” Nieddu asks. “Keeping the balance of offduty looks but still keeping it true to her onstage persona [was important].”
Additionally, Nieddu descended on LA’s vintage haunts, as well as nabbing niche finds from Etsy and second-hand site 1stDibs. Spontaneous before-bed internet trawls brought new pieces to help create Holiday’s hypnotic presence, and finding rare jewellery to complement her looks. This historical influence often meant creating new versions of outfits from the ground up; “80-year-old dresses are becoming rarer and rarer that would be in usable condition,” Nieddu says.
To some, Prada may seem like an unexpected match for Holiday’s life, a European fashion brand with a modern-day success that’s far removed from the revolutionary American performer. However, two things Holiday and Miuccia Prada share are their embrace of modernity and the future, and openly flouting traditionalism and currency.
“I always thought of Billie as avant-garde, and thinking about that in terms of dressing her – she would be unique, and she would go there. She was doing something that was ahead of her time and she didn’t even know it,” concludes Nieddu. “Obviously, she was a woman who loved clothing, and she was a star, and she was a showgirl. All of those elements helped shape her.” The United States vs. Billie Holiday is in cinemas now.
“I always thought of Billie as avant-garde, and thinking about that in terms of dressing her – she would be unique, and she would go there”