Dressing a professor in crisis: The designer behind Julia Roberts’ outfits in Luca Guadagnino’s new film ‘After the Hunt’
By Kati Chitrakorn, CNN
(CNN) — In Luca Guadagnino’s new psychological thriller “After the Hunt,” Julia Roberts stars as a Yale professor who is forced to choose sides when a star pupil accuses another faculty member of sexual assault.
Each scene that unfolds is thorny and tense. And as the cast — including Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield who play the accuser and the accused, respectively — engage in an unflinching battle of wits, navigating one knotty maneuver after another, what stands out is their clothes, which are as sharp as the dialogue.
“After the Hunt” brings Guadagnino into more volatile territory as a filmmaker, but it has similarities to his past work in the visually rich sartorial choices of its cast, where the clothes contain deeper meaning and expresses the power dynamics between its characters. The result is made possible by the film’s costume designer Giulia Piersanti.
Whether teaching a class at the pristine Ivy League institution or grabbing a drink at a bar after hours, Roberts’ character Alma Imhoff has an unmistakable penchant for preppy, tailored cream-colored pieces, achieved with a wardrobe of luxury labels like The Row, Celine and Lemaire, though she also occasionally opts for vintage Ralph Lauren and L.L. Bean. And her style is mimicked throughout by Edibiri’s character Maggie Price (who wears clothes by young British designer Grace Wales Bonner, which is just as classy but not at the same extortionate price point). It is through these subtleties that viewers can deduce she has a yearning for Alma’s approval, and possibly more.
“I wanted to play around with the idea of the same type of looks but worn by different personalities and therefore with different styling and proportions,” said Piersanti in an interview with CNN in August from the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered. “If you notice the women in the film, they all wear very similar items: blazers, button downs, it’s very academic. But Alma is the chicer contemporary version, while Maggie, who emulates Alma, wears a younger version of her looks.”
Paris runways vs the big screen
Piersanti was born in Rome but moved to Paris with her mother and sister, when she was seven. She relocated again, as a teen to Los Angeles for a few years, and then to New York to study at Parsons’ Design School of Fashion. When she turned 20 in the ’90s, she was offered the opportunity to work at Miu Miu, so she packed her bags and headed to Milan.
Piersanti, who today lives between the Italian capital and Rome, found herself gravitating towards knitwear and decided to specialize in the craft, subsequently taking on design responsibilities at Paris-based labels Balenciaga, Lanvin, and Alaïa. Today, she works as the head of knitwear across womenswear and menswear for Celine, the French house owned by the world’s biggest luxury group LVMH, while also continuing her work in costume design.
“Being a fashion designer was my dream ever since I was young, but costume design is something that I fell into,” Piersanti said. In hindsight, however, perhaps it isn’t too surprising. “When I was a teenager, I loved movies and used to skip class to go to the nearby theater by myself, and with my lunch money I watched film after film,” she said.
Piersanti’s professional relationship with Guadagnino stretches back to 2015. After meeting in Milan through mutual friends, the Italian film director approached her to work on “A Bigger Splash,” starring Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson. Impressed by Piersanti’s understanding of complex human social behaviors, Guadagnino felt she was a natural fit for the film’s costume design. But instead of leaping at the opportunity, “I was worried it would be too big of a responsibility,” Piersanti recalled. Back then, she had never worked on a project of that scale, and there was much to be done, but she remembered getting straight to work. “I got stressed out for time, so I started making phone calls and research,” she said.
The film turned out to be a critical success, garnering favorable reviews for its visually arresting style rather than just the acting or the plot. The costumes, particularly Swinton’s wardrobe and the pieces designed by Raf Simons during his tenure at Dior, were celebrated as a key element of the artistic narrative and established the movie as a source of style inspiration. Piersanti has since become a go-to collaborator for Guadagnino, working on the costumes for several of his films in the years that followed, including the critically acclaimed “Call Me by Your Name” and gorier “Bones and All” and “Suspiria.”
Each project or collection Piersanti works on requires thoughtful consideration as she juggles designing for the big screen and for everyday people — or at least, the customers who buy Celine clothes. “Creating looks for movies and designing for fashion are two very different things,” she stated, observing that while both draw from historical references, “most movies stay in the past or the present, to tell a story about a character. Fashion, on the other hand, is about the future.”
Nonetheless, both mediums challenge her creatively, Piersanti said. “They both need empathetic observation to understand people and why they dress in one way or another.” And while Piersanti often experienced “culture shock” due to moving around as a child, it ultimately “opened my mind to different worlds and realities, which has very much fed my work,” she added.
Subtle choices that speak volumes
Guadagnino’s latest film presents messy characters navigating a 2019 landscape shortly after the rise of the #MeToo movement, which held men accountable for the sexual abuse and exploitation of women, and a time of heightened debate around cancel culture and social justice. Unlike his past projects, there is little exploration of sexuality or love; instead, the focus of the movie is on power dynamics and optics.
Piersanti said she used the script as the starting point. Typically, at the beginning of any film’s production, Guadagnino “will talk me through the characters and what he wants to say about them,” she explained. From there, she’ll have carte blanche on the clothes. Piersanti’s process then unfolds through visual research, which she’ll plaster on the walls of the costume department, “so that when the actors come in for fittings, they are surrounded by visuals of what their characters will look like,” she said.
Beyond what a person might wear, Piersanti said she thinks about “their psychology” including “what they might like and what music they might listen to.” The goal, she continued, is to ensure the viewer “understands the character without making too obvious choices but still adding personality where the script allows freedom.”
For “After the Hunt” in particular, Piersanti watched the 1988 American drama “Another Woman” starring Gena Rowland (who also plays a professor) for inspiration in creating a “higher bourgeoisie mood,” she said. Primarily, Piersanti wanted to convey “upper-class chic,” with a touch of “edge and rigidity.” As she noted: “No soft fabrics, no knitwear, no dresses.”
That resulted in much of the cast wearing blazers, trousers and loafers — anything that could create an angular feel. Though, it was a different approach for Alma’s psychologist husband, whose clothing inspiration was “less new England academics,” according to Piersanti, and more in the style of music composer Philip Glass and the late filmmaker David Lynch and “how they wear lightweight Japanese suits with no ties.”
It is these finer details that act as a prescient form of non-verbal communication, which excites Piersanti most. Some naysayers may dismiss fashion as frivolous or an unessential part of daily life, but for Piersanti, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Everyone makes choices, whether consciously or subconsciously, when choosing what they wear or buy,” she said. “To understand that allows me to design for a customer who will buy the garment and for a character in the script.”
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