All of the Damning Details of Everyday Dress you Might've Missed in ‘The Drama’
Fashion
TSS Creative
Katina Danabassis
Fashion
TSS Creative
Katina Danabassis
If Charlie’s eyeglasses look suited for everyday life, that's because Robert Pattinson took them off his tailor's head, as costume designer Katina Danabassis shares in conversation with The Set Set.
Katina Danabassis.
Rebecca Fourteau
In A24’s genre-bending “The Drama,” costume designer Katina Danabassis fashions a subtly symbolic wardrobe for the “perfect couple” on the brink of collapse. At face value, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) resemble your average Northeastern power duo, adorned in Patagonia outerwear, Tiffany jewelry, and all the other signifiers of prep school prestige. But beneath the realism of a deceivingly simple wardrobe, every color, graphic, and silhouette signals a deeper story for those who know where to look.
As A24’s go-to costume designer, Danabassis has been known to plant symbolism in her characters’ otherwise familiar costumes. In “Materialists,” this meant mixing metals to signal incompatibility. For Charlie and Emma in “The Drama,” character-interiority takes the form of color theory and cross-dressing. “When you're in a relationship, you find a mirror within that person, and it can become a bit of an echo chamber,” Danabassis says. “It can really happen where all of a sudden you guys are both wearing the same shoe brands or the same shoes, sharing a wardrobe a little bit.”
Throughout the film, Danabassis styled Charlie and Emma to look like “a cohesive unit,” and so they both wear unisex flannels and interchangeable basics around their mid-century living room. “House clothes are always a funny realm of costume design because there is such an interesting variety of things you can do and [ways] people choose to live in their private spaces,” Danabassis says. For the scenes in their South End apartment, she styles the pair in a rotating selection of utilitarian basics suited for gloomy East Coast weather, like grey sweatpants and gorpcore athleisure.
For basic t-shirts and sweatpants, Danabassis opts for natural fibers and well-worn vintage. “I love to source from everywhere that's sensible. It could be Target and Gap, but it could also be something like Lissette or Soak Laundry, depending on what the character needs,” Danabassis says. In “The Drama,” many of her best basics came from the thrift store to give the look of lived-in, well-loved loungewear. “It's really not about fashion. It's about what is real,” Danabassis says.
Up until the film’s final scene, the “normalcy” of the duo’s shared aesthetic masks their increasingly perturbed interiority. By making the costumes one of the film’s least dramatic elements, Danabassis leant into the Bostonian ethos of “simple city dressing,” weaving in Harvard merch and Rodin references to give ordinary pieces an academic edge. Charlie leaves the impression of someone who would say he graduated from a ‘small liberal arts school just outside of Boston’, humble, bookish, and like his family just might own an estate in northern England. “The man knows how to dress for rain,” Danabassis says, styling him in a Barbour jacket for “a touch of the English sensibility.”
Zendaya in "The Drama."
A24
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in "The Drama."
A24
Zendaya in "The Drama."
A24
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in "The Drama."
A24
“Because we're in Boston, the approach for [Charlie’s style] was grounded in a contained, tight palette, simple, timeless, Ivy League-inspired, but modern. A touch of REI-type clothing where it makes sense if he bikes to work or doesn't always wear a proper dress shoe,” Danabassis says.
For Emma, who works in the literary world, Danabassis leaned towards an “effortless writer chic style” where it is evident that “fashion is not the first thing she thinks of in the morning.” She privileges comfort throughout the film, and is often showcased in oversized silhouettes that could have easily been lifted from Charlie. In one of the film’s many fashion easter egg moments, Emma wears merch from the leading couple’s implied alma mater, Harvard, while lounging in her apartment.
When it came to dressing Hollywood A-listers for everyday life, Danabassis put herself in the audience’s perspective. “[Emma] has a very elegant but simple style. It is quite relaxed and practical for living life; it would be really absurd for someone like Emma to be in outfits akin to something like ‘Emily in Paris.’ We'd be like, what is going on here?” Danabassis says.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in "The Drama."
A24
While adhering to an unassuming sense of aesthetic realism, Danabassis referenced canon theory to complicate the subtext of Emma’s New England style. The film criticism book “If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die” informed Emma’s color palette, who is introduced in a green sweater during her meet-cute with Charlie. “Green can often symbolize that there's some type of mental instability there,” Danabassis says. “I'm suggesting that there is perhaps a little bit more than meets the eye when it comes to her mental positioning in the story. That there's going to be a reveal, so to speak.”
For Charlie, Danabassis selected a graphic t-shirt with Rodin’s The Thinker to foreshadow the groom-to-be’s pending emotional turmoil. “You can barely catch it. But that t-shirt is kind of like a precursor to what's about to come for him…that he's gonna be in his head,” Danabassis says, “Rob took that one with him at the end of our shoot, but it's just a classic art style shirt which felt very fitting for him. It's chic enough to be worn with a blazer and jeans if you want, and it still looks kind of like you're doing something kind of cool and hip. But it's also like classic art vibes. Timeless.”
That shirt wasn’t the only item Pattinson stole from shooting. As it turns out, Charlie’s signature eyeglasses were lifted straight off the head of the actor’s tailor during one of the fittings. “I'm pretty sure [the glasses] were just random off of Amazon. It was an elevated version of readers,” Danabassis says. Pattinson’s costuming choice reminded Danabassis of a similar moment from the set of “C’mon C’mon” when Joaquin Phoenix brought in glasses from his own therapist for his character in the film. “There's this funny, sort of natural clamoring for what is pedestrian at times, and little surprises and spontaneity go a long way,” Danabassis says.
