Vitals

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, folk singer-songwriter

New York City and Monterey, California, Spring to Summer 1963

Film: A Complete Unknown
Release Date: December 25, 2024
Director: James Mangold
Costume Designer: Arianne Phillips
Jacket Maker: Jimmy McBride

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Happy 84th birthday, Bob Dylan! Born as Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, the iconoclastic musician’s early career was recently depicted in James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet’s extensive work to achieve Dylan’s distinctive voice, mannerisms, and playing style resulted in a characteristically dedicated performance that earned the actor his second Academy Award nomination—one of eight total for the film, including Best Picture.

A Complete Unknown begins in early 1961 when the young Minnesota-born troubadour arrives in New York City, seeking out his ailing idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). As Dylan’s star power evolves among the Greenwich Village folk scene, so do his tumultuous relationships and friendships with contemporaries like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook)—who had previously been the subject of the Mangold-directed 2005 biopic Walk the Line starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Adapted from Elijah Wald’s nonfiction volume Dylan Goes Electric!, the film spans these four crucial years of Dylan’s early career leading up to his controversial performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, fifty years ago this summer.

Dylan’s primary motivation through A Complete Unknown is presented as total musical freedom, often at the cost of public popularity or traditional friendships. Baez and other characters bemoan their struggle to know Dylan on a deeper level; indeed, some reviewers even cited this as a flaw of the film—however, I see it as part of its overall thesis: even after a career of 60+ years and hundreds of compositions and recordings, Dylan remains the titular “complete unknown”, to borrow a lyrics from his 1965 hit “Like a Rolling Stone”. The only human connection that never frustrates the cinematic Dylan is his bond with Woody Guthrie, centered purely around music—and no doubt helped by the fact that Woody’s medical condition has rendered him all but mute, never asking Dylan anything about himself that he doesn’t want to answer.

After his self-titled first album is comprised primarily of cover songs, Dylan embraces the opportunity to make a stronger musical signature by recording more original tracks on his follow-up record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. A Complete Unknown very briefly depicts CBS staff photographer Don Hunstein’s cover photo shoot on the streets of Greenwich Village in February 1963, with a casually dressed Dylan and his then-girlfriend, Suze Rotolo—renamed at Dylan’s own request to “Sylvie Russo” (Elle Fanning) for the screen, citing that the late Ms. Rotolo was one of the few people in his life who never sought fame.

The brief cover shoot vignette is part of a sequence scored by Chalamet’s excellent rendition of Dylan’s own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”—one of my wife’s favorite songs—which the artist wrote during Rotolo’s extended trip to Italy. Recorded on November 14, 1962, this was released as the B-side to Dylan’s protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind”—one of his most celebrated compositions but also presented as a symbol for Dylan’s resentment of the expectations placed on him to constantly be a voice of protest when all he truly wants to do is make music.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released by Columbia Records on May 27, 1963, three days after Dylan’s 22nd birthday and ten days after his and Baez’s performance at the inaugural Monterey Folk Festival.

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What’d He Wear?

By this point in A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan’s style has slightly evolved from the beatnik troubadour aesthetic of his corduroy jacket and “Huck Finn cap” when he arrived in New York in 1961, though he’s still more closely rooted in workwear that reflects his then-current folk sound before adopting the flashier mod-influencer black suits, leather jacket, and ubiquitous sunglasses of his electric era through the mid-’60s.

Even Dylan’s early looks are the result of a closely cultivated persona that Dylan created in the Americana-informed image of working-class idols like Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “Bob really curated that look for himself,” Rotolo writes in A Freewheelin’ Time.

To keep up with Dylan’s visual rebrands through even just these four years in his career, the film’s Oscar-nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips and her team crafted a whopping 67 wardrobe changes for Timothée Chalamet. “We broke Bob’s transformation into three distinct beats: his arrival in New York (1961-62), the Freewheelin’ era (1963-64) and the slim, mod silhouette of 1965,” Phillips explained to Spencer Williams for The Art of Costume. “These beats informed everything—the costumes, hair, and overall silhouette. For example, the early ’60s silhouette was looser and baggier, whereas the mid-’60s style became more streamlined and modern.”

“That is encapsulated best on the Freewheelin’ album cover,” Phillips elaborated to Ingrid Schmidt for The Hollywood Reporter. “His silhouette got slimmer, and he wears classic Levi’s 501s, sometimes with cowboy boots. I made versions of three different brown leather jackets I found in research… [they] look like they were made for him, maybe by a cobbler in Woodstock, who probably made his belts and shoes as well.”

The Freewheelin’ Suede Jacket

The Freewheelin’ jacket was made for A Complete Unknown by Jimmy McBride in a rich tobacco-brown suede, weathered and aged to a smart patina that follows Dylan’s scrappy street image—distinguishing him from a fellow New Yorker who hesitated to wear suede in the rain. The boxy, hip-length cut resembles a shortened chore coat, with set-in sleeves finished with plain cuffs and only a welted breast pocket. The jacket has five large buttons up the front that Phillips described to The Hollywood Reporter as “beautiful scrimshaw bone buttons,” with the flat collar pulling the revers over the top button and coordinated buttonhole.

The Shirts They Are A-Changin’

Chalamet’s screen-worn shirts as Dylan were a mix of vintage Pendleton flannels sourced by Phillips’ team from “dealers, costume houses, flea markets, Etsy, and L.A. shops Mothfood, The Way We Wore, [and] Melet,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, as well as custom-made shirts from Anto Beverly Hills, who also crafted parts of Boyd Holbrook and Edward Norton’s costumes as Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger, respectively.

During the brief vignette on the street suggested to be part of Don Hunstein’s cover shoot, Chalamet actually wears one of those plaid shirts, with a rust-orange and white check criss-crossing against a dark-green brushed cotton ground.

The pair of shirts that the real Dylan had layered for Hunstein’s famous February 1963 photo shoot are actually recreated on screen when Chalamet’s Dylan joins Joan Baez on stage several months later for the inaugural Monterey Folk Festival in May 1963.

The base layer is a navy-and-cream horizontal-striped T-shirt, styled with long sleeves and a wide boat-neck like the Breton-striped jerseys made famous by the French Navy and once sported by Dylan’s fellow mid-century rebel icon James Dean. Buttoned over the tee is a solid cornflower-blue shirt that features a breast pocket and front placket, with contrasting white buttons that Dylan wears unbuttoned at the top, wrinkling the shirt’s soft collar over the jacket collar—revealing the shirt collar’s unused buttonholes, presumably for a button-down collar that he rakishly wears undone for a less polished appearance that maintains his desired aesthetic at the time.

Later in ’63, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan‘s massive success begins taunting the once-anonymous musician, who now can’t even leave a gig without being mobbed by fans literally painting him as a romantic messiah. For this brief sequence that follows Dylan from the venue to his plane, he layers the Freewheelin‘ jacket over a mini brown-and-white gingham-checked shirt with a western-style snap-up placket—though this uniquely follows the traditionally female right-over-left style, adding another dash of studied insouciance to his wardrobe. This shirt also features two chest pockets with double-snap “sawtooth”-style flaps.

Bob Dylan’s Blue Jeans

Arianne Phillips identified the progression of Dylan’s jeans as central to his musical identity at the time, describing it to Fawnia Soo Hoo for W Magazine as “the through-line that really grounded my design.” During his early folk years in New York, he sported stock blue denim just like the workingmen he studied and sang about, before transitioning to the trendier black Levi’s “Super Slims” of his electric era. When production of A Complete Unknown began in 2019, Phillips collaborated with Paul O’Neill of the Levi’s Vintage Clothing (LVC) specialty line to research—and ultimately recreate—the jeans that Dylan had worn through the early-to-mid 1960s.

“Paul’s like a historian, he knows everything about Levi’s, so he was able to vet Bob’s jeans. So yes, indeed, on the cover of Freewheelin’, he’s wearing 501s that were popular at the time,” Phillips explained to Ella Joyce for HERO. “One of the gems that Paul pointed out to me was that, when [Suze Rotolo] and Bob were living together, she put a patch on the inside of his jeans because his jeans didn’t fit very nicely over his cowboy boots, so she made this denim insert. Once he told me, I realized I had seen tons of pictures where he’s wearing jeans with the insert.”

Rotolo’s DIY “boot-cut” fix was incorporated into the reissue of Levi’s 1955-era 501s that were released in a limited run of 501 pairs as part of LVC’s A Complete Unknown collection developed in collaboration with Phillips. “I made a suggestion to the studio that we do a partnership with Levi’s because I was already organically putting Levi’s in the film,” Phillips shared with Dhani Mau for Fashionista. “The beautiful thing about this collaboration with Levi’s is that it’s part of Bob Dylan’s story.”

And, of course, the fix made it to the screen as a subtly authentic nod to the real Dylan’s denim. Chalamet strolls through the Village in those mid-blue denim Levi’s 501® jeans, rebuilt to 1955 specs and sizing with a more relaxed “anti-fit” style but otherwise familiar to modern 501 wearers with its five-pocket configuration of two curved front pockets, watch pocket inset on the right side, and two patch back pockets—both detailed with the brand’s signature arcuate stitch and telltale red tab sewn along the right-back pocket.

Dylan holds the jeans up with a simple dark-brown leather belt that closes through a silver-toned “D-ring” single-prong buckle, which was also replicated and reissued as part of the LVC x A Complete Unknown collab line.

Boots of [Possibly] Spanish Leather

“In the beginning, he wears work boots, then he wears these kinds of rough outs and cowboy boots, and then ends up in these very mod-looking Chelsea boots,” Phillips describes to Ella Joyce for HERO. “He’s not wearing tennis shoes or loafers, he’s a boot guy.”

For the Freewheelin’ shoot, he wears low-stack cowboy boots with tobacco nubuck leather uppers with an even more weathered finish than his jacket, detailed with ornately stitched shafts that comfortably fit under the panel inserts that Suze/Sylvie sewn into the legs of his jeans. These boots also may have been crafted by Western Costume Co.’s head shoemaker, the late Mauricio Osorio, whom Ingrid Schmidt credited with making his Chelsea boots.

This is one of the few cinematic divergences from what the real Dylan wore for the Freewheelin’ shoot, where he appeared to wear black boots. (Personally, I like the intentional divergence of dressing Chalamet in brown cowboy boots that better harmonize with the warm tones and working-class spirit of his outfit.)

Reel vs. Real

He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that, I put on a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage. Every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat.

— Suze Rotolo to Anthony DeCurtis for The New York Times, 2008

The real Bob Dylan’s jacket for the Freewheelin’ shoot appears lighter in both cloth and weight than the suede coat sported by Timothée Chalamet for the corresponding scene in A Complete Unknown, but Arianne Phillips’ costume design echoes how Dylan and Rotolo dressed when photographed by Don Hunstein on that chilly February day in 1963. Chalamet even keeps the jacket “artfully half-buttoned” (as described by DeCurtis) with the lowest two buttons undone as he jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans against the cold.

Cameron Crowe included a more melancholy tribute to the famous cover photo in his 2001 film Vanilla Sky, featuring stars Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz as the jacketed couple taking refuge together against a snowy New York street populated only by period automobiles like that familiar VW bus.

The Other Suede Jackets

As mentioned earlier, Phillips focused on three suede jackets from the real Bob Dylan’s wardrobe, all recreated for the film by Jimmy McBride:

1. The Freewheelin‘ jacket in a mid-tobacco suede, with five buttons and a welted breast pocket, worn through the spring and summer of 1963.
2. A camel tan suede snap-front trucker jacket, briefly worn when visiting Joan Baez in Monterey in ’63 and then later that year after returning to New York. (This jacket was later recreated for the authorized Levi’s Vintage Clothing x A Complete Unknown collab line.)
3. A darker chocolate-brown suede hip-length jacket with large buttons up the front, which could initially be mistaken for the Freewheelin’ jacket save for its darker color, different buttons, and lack of a breast pocket. This is the only of these suede jackets that wears both in the 1963 scenes and 1965 scenes.

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How to Get the Look

The Freewheelin’ era was a transformative period for Bob Dylan—musically and sartorially speaking—as he still represented the Americana roots that influenced his music with his hard-worn suede jacket, layered work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, though his increasing success made him more susceptible to fashion trends that narrowed his clothing’s silhouette.

Or you could simply brave the cold in a thin jacket… as Angie Martoccio reported for Rolling Stone in November 2023 in response to a TikTok trend that had reached the surprising traction of nearly 12 million searches for #BobDylanCore.

• Tobacco-brown suede hip-length jacket with flat collar, five scrimshaw bone buttons, welted breast pocket, and set-in sleeves with plain cuffs
• Cornflower-blue cotton shirt with button-down collar (worn undone), front placket (with white buttons), and breast pocket
• Navy-and-white horizontal-striped long-sleeved boat-neck T-shirt
• Mid-blue denim Levi’s 501 1955-era five-pocket blue jeans with self-made “boot-cut” insert panels
• Dark-brown leather belt with silver D-ring single-prong buckle
• Tobacco-brown nubuck leather low-stack cowboy boots

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie and Bob Dylan’s landmark album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. You can also find many more of Hunstein’s photos from the February 1963 shoot here.

Looking for something to read? In addition to the below sources relevant to Arianne Phillips’ costume design for A Complete Unknown, relevant titles include Suze Rotolo’s memoir A Freewheelin’ Time and Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! which formed the basis for much of A Complete Unknown‘s narrative.

Sources:

• The Art of Costume — “Dressing ‘A Complete Unknown’: Arianne Phillips on Crafting the Costumes That Defined Bob Dylan’s Iconic Style” by Spencer Williams
• Fashionista — “An Oscar-Nominated Costume Designer on What Makes for a Worthwhile Film-Fashion Brand Collaboration” by Dhani Mau
• GoldDerby — “A Complete Unknown costume designer Arianne Phillips interview” by Christopher Rosen
• HERO — “He was just a 19-year-old kid who happened to be a genius” – costume designer Arianne Phillips on transforming Timothée Chalamet into Bob Dylan” by Ella Joyce
• The Hollywood Reporter — “A Complete Unknown: The Making of Costume Designs of Bob Dylan Film” by Ingrid Schmidt
• IndieWire — “‘Complete Unknown’ Costumes: Dressing Bob Dylan, Joan Baez” by Jim Hemphill
• W Magazine — “What Bob Dylan Wore: How ‘A Complete Unknown’ Captures the Style of a Generation” by Fawnia Soo Hoo