Designed to Move

BRADLEY COOPER’S “Maestro” is anything but an action movie, but costume designer Mark Bridges designed an outfit for the director-star that could accommodate a lot of it. Cooper plays legendary composer Leonard Bernstein in the movie and one key scene re-creates the musician conducting Gustav Mahler’s second symphony at England’s Ely Cathedral in 1973. “He was very physical,” says Bridges of Bernstein at that moment. “He’s swept up in the music and you witnessed that in his clothes not being quite perfect.”

The costume designer paid extra attention to the construction of Bernstein’s jacket in the scene. “It needed to hang right and not be gimmicky,” says Bridges, who used wool barathea to create it. “We didn’t use wool stretch or anything — it would not have hung correctly, and we were trying to be as accurate as possible to what he would have worn.”

But the costume designer did experiment with the jacket’s cut. “We tried funny things like adding gussets for more shape under the arm, but that didn’t quite work,” he says.

Over the years, Cooper’s silhouette as Bernstein evolved in keeping with the styles of respective eras. “There’s a broader shoulder in the 1940s,” Bridges observes. “There is a difference in the shape of the tailcoat from the mid ’50s, where we see the silhouette, in the 1960s he wears slimmer trousers, and the ’70s has less shoulder.”

Bridges used a dozen different watches to indicate different stages of Bernstein’s life. “There was the 1940s, there was a graduation gift,” Bridges says. “There was a story behind them, because you’re coming from a place of motivation: you’re making money here, this is a dress watch, this is particularly chic.”

Watches were a signifier of who you were, he observes. “Whether you had the Rolex or the Timex said a great deal.”