To craft the looks of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,”Mark Bridges, costume designer and frequent collaborator, turned to many references including store catalogs and yearbooks from high schools that show how the San Fernando Valley’s middle-class residents might have looked in 1973.
“The yearbooks would verify we were on the right track and were incredibly valuable. I’m kind of a method costume designer,”Bridges makes fun of his approach.
he also found himself leafing through the offerings of Montgomery Ward and Sears.
Alana Haim plays Alana. She is a 25-year-old girl who lives with her siblings and parents. She embodies the period wearing her very 1973-styled Peter Pan collars.
halter tops. Bridges believed that the character would borrow clothes of her sisters. The scene in which one of them wears an outfit later worn by Alana is a great example.
With Cooper Hoffman’s Gary, a 15-year-old going on 30, the idea was that the character is a savvy high schooler who’s also an actor who goes to auditions and meetings. He liked the look of vertical stripes and collared shirts. But Gary straddles a fine line where he’s still a teenager. “He dresses more mature than his peers, and you can tell who’s the boss, but he also runs around in sneakers and trousers, not always jeans,”Bridges: “The color palette at that time was a rollicking good time. It was quite a colorful period, grounded with navy and brown,”He adds.
While Bridges has worked on ’70s-era clothing in films such as “Blow” “Inherent Vice,” he hadn’t focused on that specific year.
Bridges designed the outfits of the stewardess in a double-knit fabric made in gold to emphasize the spirit and time. “No other time except 1973 could you have put stewardesses in gold,”He says. “That gold is more buoyant than, say, a navy stewardess. It
was about constantly looking for ways to emphasize the vibe and the period.”