Luca Guadagnino has employed the talents of fashion industry powerhouse Jonathan Anderson as the costume designer for his 2024 films, Challengers and Queer.
For the past several years, Luca Guadagnino has made his name as a director by being a disruptor of the film world. His films range from heartfelt and touching, like his 2017 hit Call Me By Your Name, to strange and challenging, like his 2018 adaptation of Suspiria. His movies dissect culture and humanity in ways that have proven him to be completely singular as a creative mind. However, in his two most recent films, Challengers and Queer, it seems Guadagnino has found a kindred spirit in the collaboration process that understands his vision entirely: costume designer Jonathan Anderson.
Jonathan Anderson, much like Guadagnino, is a singular talent in the fashion industry. His creative vision has turned the fashion world on its head and he has made Loewe, a brand that was once dormant, the show to be at each fashion week. Collecting the most exciting names emerging across all creative channels as brand ambassadors and loyal Loewe devotees, the collaboration between Anderson and Guadagnino feels not just natural, but kismet.
Who is Jonathan Anderson?
While Anderson has dominated the world of fashion in the last few years, his venture into the fashion industry was charged by a passion for acting. When Anderson was 18, he left Northern Ireland to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He moved to Washington, D.C. to take acting classes at the Actors Studio, but ultimately did not continue to pursue this dream. It did, however, introduce him to the realm of costume design in a minor, yet foreshadowing way.
Upon returning back to Northern Ireland after giving up on his dreams to become an actor, Anderson worked in a men’s wear department store before applying and being accepted to the London College of Fashion. His first major mentorship came about during his time as a visual merchandiser at Prada under Manuela Pavesi, a close personal friend of Prada’s head designer Miuccia Prada.
In 2008, Anderson started his own brand, J.W. Anderson. Just seven years later, the J.W. Anderson brand would go on to earn the “Menswear” and “Womenswear Designer of the Year” awards at the British Fashion Awards in 2015, marking the first time a brand had ever won both awards in the same year.
Anderson has most famously been making headlines and stealing the spotlight each fashion week for his work as creative director of Loewe. In 2013, LVMH, a French multinational luxury goods conglomerate, bought a minority stake in J.W. Anderson and appointed Anderson to be at the creative helm of Loewe, a Spanish brand founded in 1846 that had been a low revenue driver for the fashion conglomerate. Anderson has managed to blend the world of ready-to-wear and avant-garde during his time as creative director, creating pieces of fashion that derive inspiration from art, culture and history.
His understanding of history and art in a deeply nuanced way is what made Guadagnino interested in collaborating with Anderson in the first place. Their partnership is a full-circle moment of sorts for Anderson, from first being attracted to fashion through film and now getting to have his hands in both worlds. Anderson’s work in both Challengers and Queer shows his not only deeply in-touch understanding of culture but in storytelling as well.
Challengers: Jonathan Anderson and Luca Guadagnino’s First Partnership
Challengers is the first collaboration between Guadagnino and Anderson. This partnership showed the depth of understanding and capability Anderson has as a costume designer, making him truly someone to look out for in both the film and fashion space.
The film follows the lives of three deeply entwined tennis players over the course of 13 years. Art (Mike Faist, of West Side Story), a talented, yet on the decline tennis player is encouraged by his coach and wife Tashi (Zendaya, of Dune 2) to enter into a low-stakes challenger’s tennis tournament to gain some confidence back into his game. Little do they know, a shared ghost from their past, Patrick (Josh O’Connor, of La Chimera), is also competing in the tournament.
Partick and Art used to be best friends, having grown up going to the same elite tennis academy until they met Tashi at the Junoir US Open where both men fell in love with her. The story chronicles the trio’s relationship and rocky history through flashbacks during this climactic tournament that serves as the ultimate moment of truth.
There is endless intentionality put into the costuming of Challengers. Anderson dresses each character to reveal the inner workings and complex lives in a more subdued way.
Art’s character and wardrobe are perfectly put together. When he plays as a professional he is head to toe in Uniqlo, the same brand that real-life tennis superstar Roger Federer is an ambassador for. Through the success he’s found in his career, Art has been molded into the perfect tennis product to be sold. In his younger years he wears Adidas when he plays, but the minute the audience learns he’s committed to Stanford, he’s swapped all of his Adidas clothing for Stanford merch.
Through this switch, we see that Art understands how to play the game of tennis both on and off the court. He understands he must be both a stellar athlete and a public figure, available for advertisements and ambassadorships as needed.
Patrick, on the other hand, refuses to bite. He sees things like sponsorships, ambassador programs and marketing campaigns as beneath him. He does wear logo’d sportswear, and most notability clothing labeled with his private tennis academy’s name, but his lack of commitment to brands and fashion as a whole symbolizes his greater inability to play by bureaucratic rules.
Similarly to his serve, he refuses to do things the way that he is expected to. He shows up to the challenger tournament with absolutely nothing on the line, just the need for some easy cash, and his costume not only perfectly reflects but completely epitomizes who he is.
His athletic shorts look so much like boxers that you’re not sure they aren’t when you first see them. You also think at first glance his shirt and his shorts might match in the vague sense they’re both navy blue, but even that is too much coordination for him to handle as you come to realize his shirt is actually black. He is the opposite of the perfectly tailored image that Tashi has created out of Art.
This poignant understanding of the main trio’s costumes perfectly mirrors the biggest issues within their relationship as well. Art and Partick both want to be with Tashi, but Art is willing to be molded into who Tashi wants him to be whereas Patrick refuses.
Tashi’s costuming is interesting because while she starts off in pieces that seem deeply unique to her, the iconic blue Louis Vuitton party dress and her signature Adidas sports dress, by the time we meet present-day her, she is indistinguishable from any other rich woman. It symbolizes how over the years Tashi has dulled from a once one-of-a-kind tennis player to someone who has been forced to take the back seat in light of her career-ending injury.
In Challengers, Anderson shows a deep understanding of American sports culture. He shows the audience, much like Guadagnino does, that talent is not enough to make it. If you want to become an icon, you need to align yourself with iconic brands. Anderson’s involvement in the fashion world truly emphasizes his understanding of the culture the film’s central trio is a part of.
Queer: Jonathan Anderson and Luca Guadagnino’s Most Recent Partnership
Jonathan Anderson and Luca Guadagnino’s second collaboration of 2024 is the hotly anticipated Queer. Queer, based on the semi-autobiographical William S. Burroughs novel, is a story told in three parts and an epilogue. The film takes place in 1950s Mexico City following American ex-pat William Lee (Daniel Craig, of No Time to Die). Lee, in his later forties, leads a life in a small American community within Mexico City where he is desperate for connection and afflicted by addiction. When he encounters a beautiful young Navy man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, of Hellraiser), Lee believes he has found salvation in this land of lost souls.
Lee spends the first act of the film desperate to get to Eugene and find the connection he has longed for with him. In the second half of the film, after convincing Eugene to take a chance on him the two men go on a South American adventure trying to find a drug that Lee believes will finally set him free from his heroin addiction.
If Anderson’s ambition in Challengers was to get people to understand the inner worlds of its characters through the context of American fashion, his ambition in Queer is to expose the inner worlds of its characters through the context of history.
Anderson’s approach to Queer was seeped in a desire to be both historically accurate and referential to queer painters, artists and photographers’ work at the time. Similarly in his work as a creative director, in order to achieve this he did the research to find precise works of art to reference. He’s listed artists like Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French and their works as some of his major points of reference to creating costumes not just of that time period, but accurate to the fashion of queer men in that era.
Beyond historical accuracy, Anderson’s costuming in Queer also creates a visual representation of Lee’s ongoing struggle with addiction and unrequited love. Lee is dressed in a white linen suit throughout the duration of the film’s first act. The suit feels like an attempt by the character to appear put together, but his steady stream of sweat and poor bedside manner makes it impossible to see this man as suave.
Lee’s white suit is an attempt to signal his virtue to those around him. It’s like someone told him one day to put this on in order to look sophisticated and he’s been wearing it ever since. There’s an innocence in Lee that at times is hard to bear. His deep, unflinching desire to be in and experience love feels like the one pure, untainted thing about him. The white of his suit stands as a physical marker of his openness to the world around him and a sign that he is still trying, even in his late forties, to find his place in this world.
As the film continues, his wardrobe darkens showing the audience how the light of innocence we once saw in him is being dimmed to the reality of what his life has become, specifically due to his crippling addiction. He turns to wearing browns and blacks, occasionally after sex with Eugene he will wear something white in his wardrobe furthering the idea that his longing for love and affection is still somewhere deep inside him, but the majority of his costumes after Act One are in a darker color scheme.
Lee’s costuming is specifically interesting when compared to Eugene’s. Eugene has an effervescent aura to him. He is effortlessly cool and almost unbearingly handsome with clothes that feel tailored to perfection and a quiet ease in his stride. His style is the direct antithesis of Lee’s in that it feels genuinely true to him and reflective of his character whereas Lee’s dedication to the singular white suit in the first act feels like a clear indication this man is still desperate to find himself.
Anderson’s work in Queer adds depth and nuance to a film that thrives in the moments of the unsaid to carry the story along. Lee is not a great communicator and Eugene feels, at times, impossible to read. Having their costumes so specific and so true to who they are as people allows for a sense of levity and clarity that the film succeeds because of.
The Future of Anderson and Guadagnino’s Collaborations
There’s a cosmic kinship between Jonathan Anderson and Luca Guadagnino. Anderson entered fashion through the realm of film and fashion remains one of Guadagnino’s greatest passions outside of film. The two creatives share a mutual love for the potential of youth and the power of art.
When Anderson talks about his collections for Loewe and J.W. Anderson, they are rich in references to the history of fashion, queerness and culture. Guadagnino similarly has a deep knowledge and range of film references that influence his work and the way he tells a story.
Their partnership has not just elevated the work of Guadagnino’s films but lent itself to two of the biggest cultural moments in film this year. As for the future of this partnership, with the news that Guadagnino will be readapting American Psycho, I have high hopes he will be doing so with Anderson by his side. That pairing for that particular subject material seems like a match made in heaven and a natural progression of this creative collaboration.
Header credits: Luca Guadagnino and Jonathan Anderson at the New York Film Festival premiere of Queer on October 6, 2024 (Lev Radin/Sipa USA/Alamy Live News)
