The Making of a Manchester Heart Throb With ‘Finding Emily’ Costume Designer Sara Hassan

In “Finding Emily,” Spike Fearn plays a guitar-playing romantic named Owen with an earring, chain, and steadfast allegiance to Manchester football. He’s the type of self-styled, quintessentially British musician—what some might call a “performative male”—that runs rampant across university campuses in the UK. Yet this particular archetype of heartthrob is rarely rendered on screen with the specificity that costume designer Sara Hassan brings to the styling: a vintage striped knit, an electric blue jersey, and two omnipresent silver rings that seem to never come off.

If Owen’s style feels reminiscent of Oasis’s Gallagher brothers, that’s because Hassan drew from Manchester’s rich musical history. Rather than reference any one specific band or musician, Hassan lurked around the city’s universities to find, and photograph, what the youth are actually wearing. “His style is based on the feeling of what it means to be a boy from Manchester and someone that's been surrounded by so much music and creativity and football,” Hassan shares.

Hassan took a method approach to sourcing Owen’s wardrobe, pulling mostly from vintage shops and independent labels in the city’s hip Northern Quarter. “He would be a guy that would shop in that area, so it felt really important that we source everything he wears from there as well,” Hassan says. Like every decision Hassan made, the repetition of pieces was intentional. Notably, Owen wears the same pair of pants throughout the entire film—a baggy pair of dark grey carpenter jeans. “There's always temptation to throw it all in there. But really, if you want to keep it realistic and think about what a 23-year-old would wear who's working in a uni, he probably only has one pair of trainers and one pair of trousers,” Hassan says.

After trying on lots of different footwear, Hassan landed on a classic pair of black and white Adidas Superstars for Owen. “Spike put them on and they just felt like the most Owen shoe,” Hassan shares, attributing the shoe’s “unassuming” silhouette and popularity within Manchester as a proper character match. “They're just nice and kind of simple. That's why we like them.”

Hassan prioritized building a cohesive capsule closet over sourcing individual pieces. “We started to build a wardrobe for a character, not necessarily looking at outfits, but you know, what is in Owen's wardrobe,” says Hassan. For jewelry, Hassan wanted to stick to a small selection of basic pieces. The costume designer envisioned Owen’s silver chain to be a hero piece that the character received as a gift and never takes off. “It was important that everything felt really worn in and really lived in,” Hassan says. “[Owen] is a very caring person, so we wanted to show that even though he's had these items for a long time, he's looked after them and everything's still in good condition.”

In one scene, Owen flippantly asks Emily what he should wear on a date, to which she immediately responds with a specific shirt in mind. The green check shirt in question was originally written into the script as blue, but Hassan and Fearn fell in love with a different lightweight shirt during the fitting. “It was just so unusual because it was green, but with a purple and orange check too,” Hassan says. “It felt so much like Owen, it was just such an unusual shirt but the way it sat on him was just absolutely perfect, like it was made for him.” 

The film’s love interests juxtapose each other in both style and demeanor.  Whereas Owen’s identity is rooted in Manchester, as illustrated by the football teams he reps on his sleeve and the broader boy band music scene that has come to culturally define the city, Emily dresses like an American outsider entering his world. “She's got influences of Manchester, but she's not a true kind of Manchester girl. I suppose she's more preppy whereas Owen's a bit more relaxed,” Hassan says. 

Manchester seeps into every corner of the film, which was shot on location. One of the film’s central plot points involves all of the university’s Emilys being connected over email, which Hassan took as an opportunity to showcase different iterations of Manchester style. “Having the storyline of all of the Emilys was kind of a perfect opportunity to actually [demonstrate the diversity of fashion in Manchester] because you've got hundreds of women that all have the same name, but look completely different.” When all of the Emilys convene for a pizza party, no two guests look the same. “They all had to have their own style just to really celebrate individuality and celebrate women and celebrate Manchester,” Hassan says.