Inside the making of Timothée Chalamet’s mid-century menswear in ‘Marty Supreme’
“I love that brown suit with the blue tie. I wish all men dressed that way.” – Miyako Bellizzi, costume designer
THERE’S A LOT to drool over in Marty Supreme. Since its star Timothée Chalamet was seen running through the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in set photos a year ago – wearing voluminous pleated trousers, padded up double-breasted pinstripe suits, knit polos and sweater vests – the film’s mid-century menswear was already making waves online. Shared on menswear forums with users wondering where they can buy similar-looking pieces, the costumes also resonated with people with a ravenous appetite for vintage Armani; the late Italian designer looked to the era as a perennial reference point, after all.
It’s the kind of response costume designer Miyako Bellizzi’s work attracts, whose other projects – Good Time, Uncut Gems, and Scenes from a Marriage – also garnered studied frenzy. Collaborating with the Safdie brothers on the former two films, Bellizzi’s anthropological approach has shaped the sartorial language of the brother auteurs’ commitment to the gritty verisimilitude of New York City dread. For Josh Safdie’s solo directorial debut, which is loosely based on the late American table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Bellizzi took to the idiosyncratic pleasures of tailoring to tell the greatest New York story of all: how to reinvent yourself.
The film also hits close to home for the San Francisco-born, New York-based Bellizzi, who lives around the corner from the Lower East Side street Chalamet runs down in the film. “That’s my world. New Yorkers are our people,” says Bellizzi on her decade-long collaboration with the Safdies. “We have an understanding of the energy of the city, and we try to bring that energy to the film. We’re all crazy psychos.”
Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, covers sourcing deadstock tank tops and Brando-era tees, rare Cartier watches from the ’50s, Uptown versus Downtown tailoring, the glasses that almost turned Chalamet blind, and more.
On her approach to dressing Marty
“Marty is a kid from the Lower East Side who has this life plan in his mind and he’s trying to figure it out. And I think we’ve all been there. So in terms of the way that he thought about himself and the way he dressed, it’s like dressing like the man you want to be, or dressing for the job to get the job. It was important for me to show that he has this job at a shoe store, and he hates it. He has to wear a suit there. But that was his uniform. It’s this thing he doesn’t care about.
And in his personal life, I was trying to show the different versions of who Marty is. There’s his everyday, which back in those days, everyone wore suits. Most young men would be in trousers, a button-down shirt, and a pullover. Men weren’t casual in the sense that they are today. But I wanted to show that he was a little different, and he did dress a little bit differently, that he has a sense of style without being overly eccentric. I mean, we tried it, but it didn’t really work. His shirts were blousier; they’re a little more oversized. Which wasn’t wrong for the period, that’s just how he liked to wear them, slightly big for him.
It reminded me a lot of Good Time in the sense that Marty’s not really dressing as himself. He has the shoe store uniform; he has his table tennis uniform; he’s travelling the world and he buys this special suit. And so I wanted that suit to be the suit that he got for this tour, almost like how I am and I prep an outfit when you want to dress super nice. That’s not how you dress every day, but this is the one suit that he wants to wear for every time he’s out in the world at these fancy restaurants and stuff.
I think the only time you see his real style is at the bowling alley. That really feels like Marty, because he’s different and he likes to be a little different from everyone, or he thinks he’s different. Honestly, it’s kind of how Timmy feels about himself now. He’s very similar, I would say.”
On Uptown versus Downtown tailoring
“Milton’s [played by Kevin O’Leary] more classic. But they were similar in the sense that they were both double breasted with peak lapels. But Marty’s lapel shape and the shoulders were different. I chose very expensive fabrics for Milton. We got a lot of his fabrics from London, very traditional navy pin stripe to make a more classic, rich man suit. That’s why I love Marty’s brown and grey suits, they’re your non-traditional stripes for that period. It felt younger, a little different, a little more eccentric.
We had a new white shirt for every time Milton was on camera. Like a classic white shirt with the collar bars. We also chose these beautiful silk ties that I found, whereas Marty’s ties weren’t shiny. I mean, Milton has six suits in the film because I wanted to show that every time we saw him he’s in a new suit because he has the money to be able to have a suit for every day of the week. They very much mirrored each other as the high and the low, Uptown versus Downtown.
Marty’s more inspired by, dare I say, the Lower East Side mobster. To him in the Lower East Side, those are the guys that he sees. Marty’s suits are based off of Abel Ferrara’s [who plays mobster Ezra Mishkin] because he is the guy who Marty references in terms of suiting. He’s that seedy, wise guy, cool guy. They’re hustlers. In Marty’s world, [as is] in real life, the table tennis world was where people would go to bet on fights in New York City.”
On the ’50s table tennis uniform
“It’s mostly polo shirts. It’s crazy to think about, but I’d designed the uniforms for 16 countries throughout the world for that one shot where we had a few hundred people to stand on that stage and then flip the paddles. And because I had researched so much for Marty, we looked at what the Brazilian team is wearing, for example, which is very different in where they get it and how they’re dressed. I made sure that every country’s polo was different so that when they were playing each other, you could tell the difference. Even if it’s a subtle difference of the buttons or the shape or the fabric, the colour. So that’s how I differentiated everybody.”
On sourcing ’50s deadstock polo shirts, tank tops and Brando-era tees
“I was reaching out to every collector of ’50s [fashion]. Because they’re all design references, a lot of them exist in Japan, and they’re really expensive. Like the Team USA sweatshirt that Marty wears, that was from a collector. Designers collect them, and those things are like $2000 vintage sweatshirts.
The polos were not cheap, everything’s expensive because we’ll use them to reproduce for doubles or quadruples. And they were really hard to find. They do not exist. I scoured the world for vintage polos because Josh is very particular about using the real thing. I wanted to find the original tank tops, too, the ones Marty wears all the time. I found those from a collector and it was deadstock in the original box.
And I just collected a vast amount of the Marlon Brando vintage tees, which were very important to us. It’s a big pet peeve of mine when I see it in films set in the ’50s and T-shirts aren’t period correct. I hate it. You can tell the difference because cottons are the one thing that are built differently. There’s an opacity to the fabric. Fabric now is kind of like 50/50 poly. But back then, it was mostly 100 per cent cotton, always.”
On referencing TIME magazines and documentaries from the period
“Josh and I love photography. We had a huge collection. I had started buying photo books of different Life photographers, photojournalists, because it’s very important to see real people, not how they’re depicted in films or anything because they were very glamorised. I started collecting TIME magazines. Because this film takes place in many countries, and we needed to have an understanding of the world just in general: what was happening, what were the major events of the year of each year.
For the Lower East Side, there was this incredible documentary that was made, we used it as our Bible. It was Orchard Street (1955) by Ken Jacobs. Josh saw it at MoMA a few years ago and reached out to the filmmaker. [Jacobs] made this documentary of people walking around the Lower East Side. It was incredible. It’s the most special film.”
On the watches
“The watches and glasses are typically props, who was Michael [Jortner]. He and I would have big meetings about who was wearing glasses; everyone needed a watch 100 per cent. And then we started making piles of what watches were more Marty versus Milton.
Milton’s watches were insane. Milton wore a watch on each wrist like [O’Leary] does in real life. The watches he was wearing in the film was worth half a million dollars, at least. They’re collectable watches from that time period that [O’Leary] owns. He had this one rare watch from 1952 that he wears in the film that’s worth millions of dollars. The glass goes up into this diamond shape.”
On giving Marty beady eyes
“[Chalamet] wore contact lenses in the film. So the lenses were -0.10, and then the glasses were +0.10 because they wanted Marty to look like he had bifocals on and to make his eyes look really small in the film. It was really insane, but the whole point was that he looks partially impaired. We wanted to show that he was actually wearing glasses that were real. He was always like, ‘I can’t see!’”
On her favourite looks
“I would say both of Marty’s suits. I love that brown suit with the blue tie. I wish all men dressed that way. He’s a dream character, he just looks so good in everything. The grey suit is to die for. And we used it all the time. Josh and I would always talk about, ‘brown or grey?’ Marty wears the grey suit for 50 scenes. So that ended up being the hero suit because he wears it for over half the movie. Another favourite look is when he’s in Japan, when he’s incognito. I love that outfit, that sweatshirt with the purple lavender trousers. That colour was so beautiful to me. I feel like that’s so him. It’s him in Japan. I wanted to make it his Japanese look.”
Marty Supreme is out in Australian cinemas on January 22, 2026.
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