Like Durran and Patch, Zophres studied art in college; on day one of her first film job, as a production assistant on Born on the Fourth of July, she was asked to separate a giant pile of clothes into eras—Fifties, Sixties and Seventies—and bingo, a career path was found. After her mentor, the late Richard Hornan, fell ill (he designed the costumes for Raising Arizona and Barton Fink, among others), Zophres was tapped by the Coen brothers to do Fargo, set largely in wintry Minnesota. “What we like about Mary is she reads the script and she goes, ‘Okay, it’s this story; it’s these characters,’” says Joel Coen. “It’s not like she brings some signature thing. What she brings is a sensitivity to what [the story] should be.”
“The first thing I said to them was, ‘I think this movie is beige,’” says Zophres of Fargo. “There’s nothing exciting about this place, and it’s a lot of coats. The main silhouette that stuck in my mind was a puffy jacket. So everyone who belongs in that environment, like Frances McDormand’s character, wears one. The ones who don’t belong wear something else, like Steve Buscemi, who wears some impractical shearling. I started that movie like the others, heavily researching it. I found a great book on small towns in the Midwest.”
After poring over a script, Zophres typically scours costume-rental houses and thrift stores (“I’ve been a thrift-store rat my whole life”) and “builds,” in costume-speak, specific outfits for each character. She takes into account not just the director’s vision and the film’s era but also the actors’ personalities. “In No Country for Old Men, Kelly Macdonald, who plays Josh Brolin’s wife, is at the bus station and she has on this beige floral dress that has this muslin quality,” says Zophres, who designed that film’s costumes in addition to those for the Coens’ upcoming feature, Burn After Reading. “The dresses we found from that time period, the Seventies, were really kind of grotesque, so I designed one. Kelly is very sweet and genuine, and you couldn’t put her in anything trashy or too Seventies. It’s a very subtle dress, and it needed to have those qualities. Sometimes you have to costume based in part on what’s written on the page, and in part based on what the actor they cast brings to it.”
And what if the actors are, well, literally plastic? Karen Patch encountered that dilemma when she costumed the humanesque puppets of Team America: World Police, the wickedly funny send-up of action flicks directed by South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker. “Everything just got incredibly scaled down,” says Patch, who, like Zophres and Durran, often turns to photographs and old movies for touchstones of what a particular character should be wearing (a certain perfectly aged button-down here, a dyed-four-times bias-cut evening dress there). “I treated the puppets as if they were real actors. It all had to be real—the patterns on the fabrics, the tiny pinstriped suits. The difficulty was finding buttons and zippers to use. It would take two hours to dress one puppet, and we had over a thousand costumes. It was an engineering feat.”
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