Marty Supreme’s Handcrafted Costumes Capture Grit, Drive—and NYC History

By the time the Timothée Chalamet table tennis epic Marty Supreme reached production, costume designer Miyako Bellizzi had been living inside its world for years. The Josh Safdie-directed film, set mainly in 1940s New York with key scenes in postwar Japan, demanded not just period accuracy but a fully realized world inhabited by characters relentlessly on the move. For Bellizzi, that meant making almost everything from scratch.

“With a movie that’s so action-packed, there was no way around it,” she tells W of making thousands of costumes for the film, which lands in theaters on Christmas Day. “We needed doubles. There are shootouts. In every scene, someone’s getting stabbed, someone’s running from something, there’s a car chase.”

That constant motion, a signature of any Safdie brother-directed film (in this case, just Josh), dictated Bellizzi’s process. “We did have to build most of our main characters’ wardrobes,” Bellizzi explains, especially for the top 20-ish characters of the sprawling ensemble who appear most onscreen. “Obviously, if it doesn’t exist in the world, you have to create it.”

That meant working with a team of 50, both on-set and off-site, to tailor each look. Even recognizable uniforms couldn’t simply be sourced. “The Harlem Globetrotters, for example—you can maybe find one vintage Globetrotters uniform from the ’50s, but if you want a full team, you need to make 10 warmup uniforms,” Bellizzi says. The same was true for the table tennis looks. “Those things don’t really exist anymore. So we created them for the film.”

Listening to Bellizzi talk about Marty is a behind-the-scenes look into her long-standing, fruitful collaboration and friendship with the Safdies. She’s been working with them since 2017’s Good Time, and was the costume designer on Uncut Gems (other recent credits include Scenes from a Marriage, Bonjour Tristesse, and The History of Sound). Though she’d known about the premise for Marty Supreme since Josh first started dreaming it up around 2018, she only had a few months to execute the costumes.

“This is the kind of movie you could research for years,” she says. “It’s never enough time."

Recreating the 1940s Lower East Side

To envision the lively, chaotic, and at times cramped texture of postwar Lower East Side, Bellizzi and Safdie relied on a mix of documentary and photography. One reference, in particular, became foundational: 1955 footage of the neighborhood shot by Brooklyn native Ken Jacobs, which Safdie came across at MoMA. “That became our Bible,” Bellizzi says.

She supplemented that with still imagery from photographers like Ruth Orkin and Robert Frank, but almost all of it came with the same limitation. “I would say 95 percent of it was in black and white,” Bellizzi says. “It’s a good base, but then you’re like, okay, how do you envision this in color?”

Dressing Marty: Timothée Chalamet’s Hustler Suits

Marty’s clothes were designed to telegraph aspiration as much as period. (Chalamet’s “dream big” press tour is a nod to Marty’s unrelenting drive to win at all costs.) “Abel Ferrara is a big character in this film, and he’s one of the reference points Marty would’ve seen,” Bellizzi says. “Marty was inspired by the neighborhood wise guys, hustlers like himself.”

She put Chalamet in boxy suits with shoulder pads, drawing on the era’s Zoot suits. “He saw himself as an outsider,” she says. “He didn’t want to just work in a shoe store. He’s greater than that.”

That attitude mirrored the energy of the Lower East Side itself, an incredible cultural melting pot that was experiencing a boom during the period in which the film takes place. “Just being a New York City person in general, you see things that not your normal person in the middle of America sees,” Bellizzi adds. “That’s why we dress differently in New York compared to other people in the world. It’s the same today.”

Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone: A Woman Trapped in Time

As a former silent film star trying to find relevance in a new era, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Kay Stone, exists in deliberate contrast to the rest of the film’s world. Bellizzi looked to actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Grace Kelly for inspiration for Paltrow’s look. “I wanted to present her as regal, chic, sophisticated,” Bellizzi says. “I didn’t want to make her this kooky, super fashionable, Upper East Side woman.” Since the film is set during winter, Bellizzi wanted Paltrow to have her fur coat moment (and she does, when she drapes one over a set of white lingerie, for her first rendezvous with Marty). But the costume designer also wanted to draw a distinct visual line away from Paltrow’s iconic Royal Tenenbaums look.

Some of Paltrow’s wardrobe came directly from Bellizzi’s own closet. “She and I are the same size, and some of the things she wears are from my personal archive. She wears my shoes and my skirts.”

Bellizzi says Paltrow’s character also tells her own color story. “She starts in this grayscale world of black and whites,” Bellizzi says. Meeting Marty is a revelation, and his lust for life (and for her) inspires a change. “It’s in the red dress she’s wearing in Central Park with Marty where she admits, ‘I hate my relationship.’”

Above all, Bellizzi wanted the audience to understand the character’s confinement within her era. “Even as a big movie star, you can feel trapped in your situation,” she says. “Divorce isn’t an option. Being on your own isn’t really an option.” Visually, that meant restraint, a philosophy that extended beyond clothes. “Josh was like, ‘No makeup. I want her to feel raw in this moment,’” she says.

Japan, Family History, and an Intimate Point of View

The film’s Tokyo sequences carried personal significance for Bellizzi, whose family is Japanese. “After the war, they were in America, but they were in internment camps. [Later], they relocated to New York City,” she says. Her personal family photos and archives from that time became key references for the film’s costumes. “I referenced my family albums just because one, it’s part of the story, and two…it’s such a tricky and interesting thing in our history.”

The images offered an intimacy that typical reference materials couldn’t. “[I looked at] photos of my great uncle in a uniform, and the family that he's taking a picture with in the house, how they were dressed,” Bellizzi explains. “That formed a lot of the looks for the everyday people in the Japan scenes.”

Designers Dressing Designers

Marty Supreme’s cast includes a number of fashion and cultural icons, which Bellizzi admits was both thrilling and intimidating. Working with Isaac Mizrahi, who plays Paltrow’s character’s agent, felt like a creative partnership more than anything. “He’s a costume designer [himself], having done costumes for theater,” she says. “So he gets it. I’m texting him, and I’m like, ‘What do you think about this bias [cut]?’”

Fran Drescher, who plays Marty’s mother, presented a different challenge: “How do you dress someone who is ‘The Nanny’?” Bellizzi says. She also worked closely with Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler, the Creator), whose own personal style is “of this time period,” she notes. “That was almost the harder part,” how to make Tyler’s character distinct from his public persona. “We had to really tone him down because if it were up to him, he would be wearing red and blue and yellow.”

Bellizzi points to one particular scene as emblematic of the film’s spirit. “The scene of [Chalamet and Tyler] dancing after they got all that money…to me is one of the most iconic scenes in the movie.”