The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
EUNICE JERA LEE
COSTUME DESIGNER
FOR BLUE BAYOU’S ANTONIO, APPEARANCES are deceiving. His wardrobe of stained white tank tops might declare “tough guy,” but he’s as gentle as a lamb. As a tattoo artist, he struggles to land extra work not only because of his record for theft, but also because his full-neck tat, with wings framing his face, lends him an air of menace, despite his attempts to stay on the straight and narrow.
“The tattoos actually made my job a lot easier,” says costume designer Lee, “because no matter how you dress, to put tattoos in such pronounced places, you are really telling a story about yourself and the decisions you make.”
Lee, 34, was born in Anaheim, California, to Korean immigrant parents. She refers to her father, who headed his own engineering business, as a feminist: “He made my sister and myself believe we can do anything we wanted.”
For Lee, that meant studying design and management at New York’s famed Parsons School of Design, working as a stylist for such publications as Vogue, W and Women’s Wear Daily and earning her master’s in fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins in London, where she lived and worked for five years until the desire to discover her roots led her to Seoul.
Amid commercial work for clients like Samsung, Lee also ended up working on her first feature film set, as key costumer for the 2015 coming-of-age indie Seoul Searching. She struck up a friendship with the movie’s lead — Justin Chon — and soon found herself in L.A. working with the multihyphenate on Gook.
As a costume designer, Lee finds inspiration in “the realism of Thelma & Louise” and “the fantastical aspect of Death Becomes Her” as
well as the resourcefulness of Larry Clark’s 1995 cult classic Kids, for which designer Kim Druce-Sava, operating on a micro-budget, thrifted a lot of the clothes.
In a way, Lee takes all three approaches— realism, fantasy, practicality — in Blue Bayou. The characters in the movie, which largely takes place just outside New Orleans, live life on the margins, and Lee’s approach to the clothes is thoroughly unromanticized. And although Antonio was born in South Korea, his identity is completely tied to his upbringing near Baton Rouge. “We needed him to feel very American,” says Lee.
To authentically capture the look for Antonio’s wife, Kathy, who works as a nurse, Lee dressed down Oscar winner Vikander in “scrubs with Danskos or worn-in Tevas in her everyday wardrobe that people in the area would wear.”
Designing costumes for productions like Blue Bayou is a far cry from the high fashion in Lee’s continuing editorial work as a stylist, but she sees herself “having to choose a path very soon, and I think that path’s been a little more obvious these days. I just love working in film and television.”
And while “there’s a new generation of costume designers that’s more diverse,” says Lee, “there’s a massive lack of diversity in Hollywood crews. I do see it changing, but if we’re doing the numbers game, then it needs a lot of work there.”
OTHER CREDITS Assistant costume designer for Netflix’s Kevin Hart crime drama True Story
NEXT UP Chon’s Netflix K-drama Carter (U.S. unit costume designer)
“THERE’S A NEW GENERATION OF COSTUME DESIGNERS THAT’S MORE DIVERSE, BUT IF WE’RE DOING THE NUMBERS GAME, IT NEEDS A LOT OF WORK.” EUNICE JERA LEE