By Sara Bright
So, another Luca Guadagnino film is out. After the Hunt. And you know what that means. Beautiful people in beautiful places having a terrible time. That’s the brand.
This time it’s Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield as a pair of Yale professors caught up in a sexual assault accusation that threatens to tear their department, and their lives, apart. It’s all very tense and thorny and intellectual.
And in the middle of all this psychological warfare, what’s the thing you can’t stop looking at? The clothes.
At first, you think, well, of course. It’s a Guadagnino film. The clothes are always a character. The hazy, sun-drenched shirts in Call Me By Your Name, Tilda Swinton’s incredible Dior wardrobe in A Bigger Splash. He’s a director who understands that what people wear is not just decoration. It’s information.
But this time, it feels different. More subtle. More… weaponised.
The costume designer is Giulia Piersanti, and she’s worked with Guadagnino on most of his films. But she’s not just a costume designer. Her day job is head of knitwear at Celine. One of the most powerful, most influential fashion houses in the world. And that feels important. She’s someone who spends her days thinking not just about character, but about what real, extremely wealthy people actually want to wear.
And what do they wear in this film?
Julia Roberts’ character, Alma, is a study in what you might call ‘quiet luxury’. A very 2024 idea for a film set in 2019. Her wardrobe is a sea of immaculate, tailored, cream-coloured pieces. The Row, Celine, Lemaire. It’s a uniform of power. It’s not flashy, it’s not loud. It’s the kind of expensive that doesn’t need to shout. It just knows.
And this is where it gets clever. Because the student who makes the accusation, played by Ayo Edebiri, starts to mimic her style. She’s wearing the same kind of things – blazers, button-down shirts – but the younger, less extortionately priced version. Piersanti says, “Maggie, who emulates Alma, wears a younger version of her looks.” It’s a tiny detail, but it tells you everything. It’s not just about a student looking up to a professor. It’s about ambition. About a yearning to occupy the same space, to wield the same kind of power. The clothes are a clue to her intentions, a warning of what’s to come.
The whole thing is like a perfectly brewed, very bitter cup of tea. Every element is precisely controlled to achieve a specific effect. You look at the other characters, and they’re all coded in the same way. The husband, the colleague, they’re in more relaxed, vintage-y things. They are not part of this particular power game. They are outsiders.
And this is Piersanti’s real talent. She thinks about the psychology of it all. She says she thinks about “what they might like and what music they might listen to.” She’s not just dressing a character in the script. She’s building a person.
I remember when A Bigger Splash came out. The clothes in that film became a story in themselves. They launched a thousand articles, a thousand mood boards. But what’s interesting is that Piersanti says she was terrified to take on that job. It was her first big film. She felt it was too much responsibility. But she clearly has an incredible instinct for how clothes can tell a story without saying a word.
And it’s that tension between her two jobs that’s so interesting. Fashion, as she says, is about the future. It’s about creating desire for something new. But costume design is about the past or the present. It’s about revealing something that’s already there in the character. One is about invention, the other is about archaeology. And she seems to be able to move between those two worlds with incredible ease.
So what does this film tell us about the way we dress now? Or at least, the way a certain kind of person dresses.
It tells us that in a world of heightened debate and constant scrutiny, the most powerful people are often the ones who dress the most quietly. Alma’s wardrobe is a kind of armour. It’s unimpeachable. It’s tasteful, it’s expensive, it’s correct. It gives nothing away. In a film where everyone is constantly trying to read each other, her clothes are a blank, beautifully tailored wall.
Actually, scrap that. They’re not blank. They are a statement. A statement of class, of intellect, of a certain kind of rigid, upper-class chic. Piersanti said she was inspired by Gena Rowlands in the Woody Allen film Another Woman. She wanted “no soft fabrics, no knitwear, no dresses.” It’s all about creating an angular, rigid feel.
It’s a masterclass in how to use clothes to build a world and reveal the power dynamics within it. You could almost watch the film with the sound off and still understand who has the upper hand in every scene, just by looking at who is wearing what.
It’s a reminder that fashion, in the right hands, is not frivolous. It’s a language. And Giulia Piersanti is one of its most fluent, most subtle, and most devastating speakers. She knows that sometimes, the quietest jumper can make the loudest statement of all.
