Marty Supreme Costume Designer on Timothee Chalamet Menswear Inspo

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A short film from the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, documenting the predominantly Jewish immigrant life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1955, served as a main reference point for Josh Safdie and costume designer Miyako Bellizzi when building out the bustling downtown world in “Marty “Supreme.”

“Obviously I was looking at the young cool kids,” Bellizzi tells Variety about the short film, which she says Safdie showed her after stumbling across it at the Museum of Modern Art. 

In the colorized vignette, boys wear pleated trousers, white tanks, slim ties, sleeveless knit vests. Girls wear culottes and vintage tees. “They almost look contemporary to us,” Bellizzi says, noting that downtown New York was the epicenter of style, even then. Women weren’t wearing pants in the 1950s but “the girls in the Lower East Side were.” 

The grotty tenements of the Lower East Side — and the distinct fashion within — is as much of a character in A24’s drama as the eponymous ping pong player himself. In the film, Timothée Chalamet plays the mousy, arrogant and delusionally ambitious Marty Mauser as he hustles for the chance to prove his greatness at a sport that nobody takes seriously.  

Authenticity and historical accuracy is of utmost importance to both Bellizzi and Safdie, who previously worked with each other on “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time.” For production design, this meant using the…