When Miyako Bellizzi was designing the costumes for “Marty Supreme,” the new Josh Safdie movie, she spent a lot of time thinking about Timothée Chalamet’s underwear. His character, Marty, a Ping-Pong champ from the Lower East Side, might have worn a one-piece union suit, the conventional male undergarment of 1952, when the movie is set. But boxers and briefs were just coming into style, and although most of Marty’s shabby wardrobe was likely a few years old, Bellizzi opted to put him in the newfangled undies. She explained her logic: “It’s kind of like how our grandmothers aren’t wearing thongs, but we are.” (She added, “And, to be honest, the union suit is not the greatest look, right?”)
In costume design, the term for clothes that accurately reflect an era is “period correct.” Most of the garments worn by “Marty Supreme” ’s main characters were custom-made, but all the other clothes in the movie are vintage, bought or loaned from costume-rental houses. “These characters probably got their clothes in the late forties,” Bellizzi said. “It’s kind of like present day—we’re probably wearing clothes that we’ve had for a few years.” One exception is the wardrobe for Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Kay, a fading movie star who gets entangled with Marty. Her clothes are completely au courant, Bellizzi said, “because she’s rich.”
A few weeks after “Marty” began filming, in 2024, Bellizzi was in an office in Chelsea that served as the production’s closet, preparing for a shoot at a town house on East Sixty-ninth Street—a stand-in for the London Ritz. It was Halloween, and some members of the creative team were dressed up—as a jester in a tulle skirt, as Wednesday Addams—but Bellizzi wore street clothes, an oxford shirt cinched at the waist and track pants with racing stripes. The head tailor, Miwa Ishii, was finishing a silk gazar shirt for Paltrow. Bellizzi headed to a corner where garments were being aged and distressed, to assess the progress on a sweater. “Fuzzier,” she told an aide. “More snaggy.”
Bellizzi, who is thirty-seven, first worked with Safdie and his brother, Benny, on their movie “Good Time,” from 2017. She always does a lot of research. “This is my dream era,” she said, of “Marty,” “so I knew a lot about it already.” She boned up by studying mid-twentieth-century photography; the fitting room was stocked with books by Helen Levitt, Ruth Orkin, and Weegee.
Born in San Francisco to Japanese American and Italian American parents and raised in Alameda, Bellizzi is tall and thin, with long hair dyed strawberry blond. Unlike most Hollywood costumers, she started in fashion, studying at F.I.T. and taking jobs at T magazine and Vice. “I wanted to be a fashion editor—until I worked in the industry,” she said. “I thrive in chaos, and I don’t like consistent normalcy. That shit is just not for me.” Earlier, she’d worked at two hotel bars, the Bowery and the Jane (“I was a bottle girl—heels”), and considered becoming a professional softball player. Her designs for the Safdies, as well as her prolific Instagram cataloguing of clothes worn by regular people on the street, have earned her a reputation as a doyenne of verisimilitude. A series of boards in the office were pinned with her costume illustrations and photos from fittings. “Forties collars are kind of like seventies collars,” she observed. “They’re really big and pointy.”
There’s a psychological aspect to the job. “Getting someone vulnerable, getting them talking about their clothes and what they don’t like about their body, straight off the bat,” she said, “it’s almost like a customer-service skill.” With Chalamet, she said, “you could tell, even in the beginning, he was still Dylan. My first fittings with him in L.A. were really tricky. He wasn’t fully involved yet.” The job is transforming people, but Bellizzi also wants them to feel like themselves. “Actresses, I feel for them,” she said. “Gwyneth looks good in everything, but how you want to be seen on camera—it goes deep.”
She headed uptown for the shoot with a carful of clothes. “Seventy-first and Madison,” she told the driver. “Ralphie’s.” (She meant the nearby Ralph Lauren store.) At a trailer on site, she ran through necktie options for Marty—a blue one was deemed too boring, another “too dandy,” in the words of Chalamet’s dresser, Hassan Boone. (He had a button on his cap reading “I WEAR DEAD FOLKS’ CLOTHES.”) Bellizzi kept rummaging: “I’m just looking to see if there are any other weirdo ties.”
Outside the honey wagon (the porta-potty trailer), she stopped to inspect an extra dressed as a busboy, checking the length of his apron. He looked nervous, but she relaxed him with a joke. “Of course, it’ll be a closeup of your butt,” she said, before walking over to the town-house set. On Madison Avenue, she spotted an older woman in a beige skirt, a black leather jacket, and platform boots, with a mod printed scarf tied around her head, carrying two shopping bags. “O.K.,” she said, snapping a photo. “Incredible.” ♦
