“I Want Your Sex,” the long-awaited latest film from queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki, is a colorful, audacious, and very, very kinky state of the (physical) union address. As the declarative title signals, the story follows a provocative multimedia artist named Erika (Olivia Wilde) who takes on her gallery’s latest hire, naïve art school graduate Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) as her sexual muse and subordinate. “During sex, your most intimate and primal self is revealed,” Erika asserts at one point in the film. That may be true, but long before anyone strips down, co-costume designers Arianne Phillips and Monica Chamberlain have already told us everything we need to know about Erika, Elliot and the film's orbit of Gen Z creatives and art-world insiders.

Both designers worked on her sophomore feature “Don't Worry Darling,” where Phillips was costume lead and Chamberlain her assistant designer. As Phillips recalls, while prepping to costume the actor-director’s critically acclaimed third feature, “The Invite,”, opens in new tab Wilde brought up that Araki was looking for a costume designer and "kind of disclaimed it like, 'it's a really small movie, but it's with this amazing director with a great script.’” After learning it was Araki, a filmmaker who had been hugely influential on her early career, Phillips was in and keen to have Chamberlain by her side for this one.

At a smaller scale (and budget) to their recent work, Phillips and Chamberlain say that the costumes were born from the kind of ingenuity that is all too rare in filmmaking today. "It forces you to be resourceful," says Chamberlain. "Borrowing from friends of ours, costume houses, designers, collectors. It really was coming from all over and bringing that all together to create the closets for each one of these characters." The pair even pulled garments from their own wardrobes and called in favors from designers to create the world of the film. For Phillips, the stripped-back process proved unexpectedly liberating. "I love a challenge," she says. "With bigger budget films, the designer can become isolated from the process. Here we were touching the clothes ourselves, pinning garments ourselves and doing the fittings ourselves. It was a welcome refresher."

For Erika, Phillips and Chamberlain looked to a lineage of cinematic dominatrixes, from Doris of “Eating Raoul” to “The Story of O,” before filtering those references through Araki's unmistakably hyper-saturated world. Phillips cites the film’s co-writer, Karley Sciortino, as a key influence, along with Madonna, whom she dressed for two decades. With Erika's hair and makeup, taking cues from photographer and self-portrait artist Nadia Lee Cohen, she too ended up on the moodboard. 

The costumes for the film's central BDSM relationship were built in close coordination with intimacy coordinator Yehuda Dinowitz. "You never want the actors to feel under pressure or uncomfortable," Phillips says, crediting both Hoffman and Wilde for being fully on board with both their revealing costumes and intimate scenes. Chamberlain adds that the designers were careful to chart a "progression of the intensity" in the outfits as the relationship deepens, avoiding anything that read as pure gag.

Yet Phillips was equally interested in revealing Erika's sensuality. Friends and luxury brands rallied behind the production, loaning lingerie and accessories that helped create some of the film's most striking images. Pieces from Fleur du Mal, Kiki de Montparnasse, Atsuko Kudo, and London label Bordelle sit alongside garments from designers Phillips has collaborated with for years, allowing the film's sex scenes to feel sophisticated rather than sensationalised. The BDSM aesthetic itself wasn't treated as costume shorthand. Instead, Phillips and Chamberlain approached it as another facet of Erika's carefully curated identity—one rooted in confidence, craftsmanship and luxury rather than shock value.

If Erika's wardrobe is meticulously assembled, Elliot's is intentionally effortless. "We started out by approaching this character by asking, 'who is this guy?'" Chamberlain explains. A struggling UCLA graduate with little disposable income (“You don’t have a trust fund? What are you, an orphan?” his colleague deadpans), Elliot's clothes needed to feel as though they had been accumulated over years of trawling thrift stores rather than carefully styled The designers looked to photographs of a young David Hockney and Willem de Kooning alongside musicians including Thurston Moore and Mac DeMarco, creating a wardrobe built from worn work shirts, chinos and graphic t-shirts, mainly sourced from LA vintage lover institution, Moth Food. "He doesn't think too much about what he wears," Chamberlain explains. "He has a very limited closet that he throws together. It's very subtly cool."

The t-shirts were, it turns out, some of the production's most personal pieces. “We had fun with some of his t-shirts,” Phillips laughs as she recalls lending Hoffman pieces from her own wardrobe. “There's a masturbation scene where he's wearing my personal Madonna tour t-shirt of which Madonna herself gave us permission to use,” Phillips says. “Which is just hilarious.” Elsewhere, the actor also wears one of Phillips' own Sonic Youth shirts, while Chase Sui Wonders sports a Spahn Ranch tee, a playful nod to Phillips' Oscar-nominated work on “Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood.” 

According to Chamberlain, Apple shares Elliot's thrift-store sensibility, reflecting their shared life as twenty-something roommates and best friends finding their footing. And while we don’t see much of his of perpetually distracted girlfriend outside of her covered-up sleepwear, Minerva (Charli XCX), the duo intentionally outfitted her in simple, grey pieces to offset the other characters’ more colorful wardrobes. Zap's own wardrobe, described in the script as a particularly stylish Gen-Z guy, was Chamberlain's biggest challenge: threading the needle of an over-the-top aesthetic—Y2K references and all—without tipping into caricature. Meanwhile, Viktor (Daveed Diggs), Erika's gallery-world right-hand, got a more authoritative, designer-forward wardrobe pulled largely from the Jeremy Scott archive, including a fashion-forward kilt, befitting his professional standing over Zap and Elliot.

As Elliot evolves, so too does his wardrobe. Following the film's time jump, Chamberlain subtly refines his look—not through a complete reinvention, but with newer shirts and cleaner silhouettes that suggest quiet personal growth. Erika undergoes an equally telling transformation. Her vivid colours give way to a subdued Gabriela Hearst suit, signalling a woman still commanding a room but carrying the weight of experience with her. “We knew we wanted to show her arc and put her in something a little more neutral in color but still powerful,” Phillips says. “And Gabriela Hearst is, I think, the perfect designer for that.”

Throughout the shoot, the final layer of every costume came after the clothes were chosen. Every morning Phillips says she would lay jewellery across trays before dressing Wilde, experimenting with rings, earrings and necklaces from brands such as Lisa Eisner, Alexis Bittar, Sarah Hendler, and Lizzie Mandler until the character felt complete. The ritual reminded her of preparing Madonna for performances, where the final accessory often became "the cherry on top, finishing touch." As she says, "I always think about jewelry as communicating a character's personal aesthetic.”