《Wild Horse Nine》服装设计师如何打造本季最出人意料的时髦电影

It isn’t every day that a film about tortured friendships and existential despair set on a remote, storm-lashed 1920s Irish island also sparks a menswear frenzy. Yet that’s exactly what happened when Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin hit screens in 2022: audiences were as invested in Colin Farrell’s sweaters as they were in his emotional undoing. (Even the winsome presence of Jenny the Donkey struggled to upstage those pullovers.)

I certainly wasn’t immune, becoming so distracted by Farrell’s collared red knit and chunky waffle-stitches that I ended up writing my own ode to them, titled (in hindsight a little dramatically) “Bury Me in a Banshees of Inisherin Knit.” The film’s humble woolens became a genuine online phenomenon, prompting TikTok tutorials, a New York Times interview with the 83-year-old County Wicklow great-grandmother who knitted them, and a global run on authentic Aran knits—a whirlwind that costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh watched with bemused delight.

“It was kind of fun!” Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh laughs, speaking over Zoom from her home just outside Dublin. “It was just a little moment, and I enjoyed it while it was there.” She isn’t one to dwell on past triumphs, it turns out. “I have a few of the jumpers in my drawer, but that’s kind of it,” she says. “It’s much more about: What’s new and interesting? You have to forget about the jumpers for the moment. Even though I love them!”

Indeed, when McDonagh called Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh back for his latest venture, Wild Horse Nine, they didn’t even discuss sweater-gate. Having already developed a creative shorthand while filming out on Inishmore—and working on a tight pre-production schedule—the pair dove straight into their new project. “Things often fall into place last-minute on productions like this, so there’s always a crazy scramble,” Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh says. “But having worked together previously, you can move much faster in prep. You just hope the director trusts you a bit more.”

Trading the windswept crags of western Ireland for the political powder keg of ’70s South America, Wild Horse Nine—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival before arriving in theaters last week—marks a radical aesthetic departure. Set against the looming specter of the 1973 Chilean coup, the film follows a pair of unorthodox American CIA operatives, played with gonzo charm by Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, whose assignment unspools from the febrile streets of Santiago to the sun-baked isolation of Easter Island (or, to correctly use the indigenous name—as Malkovich’s character consistently struggles to do throughout the film—Rapa Nui).

The dramatic visual contrast between those two landscapes was a gift for Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh: She spent a week in Santiago immersing herself in photojournalism and newsreel archives covering the coup, eventually figuring out the right sartorial balance between the militaristic dread about to engulf the capital and the lush escapism of the Pacific hideaway where the majority of the film is set. “They’re polar opposites,” she notes. “For a costume designer, that’s great news: you have the serious, dark world and then the happy-go-lucky, colorful stuff on the island.” To establish those worlds, Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh relied on her preferred medium: exhaustive mood boards. “I’m not the best sketcher in the world,” she admits cheerfully. “With a period film with a big ensemble, mood boards are brilliant because you can put images, color palettes, and fabric swatches in front of people very quickly. You can immediately drill down into who these characters are.”

That clarity was essential for her and McDonagh to subvert a few long-standing cinematic clichés. Picture a Cold War spy, and you probably imagine the drab, buttoned-up bureaucracy of a John le Carré novel—all stiff gray tailoring and fedoras—or perhaps a trench-coated asset sliding a briefcase across a park bench in East Berlin. McDonagh and Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh gleefully tore that playbook to shreds. “We have this idea of the 1970s CIA guy as a very specific American archetype, but what are these two guys even doing in South America?” she muses.

Malkovich’s character, Chris, is a seasoned (but deteriorating) operative muttering conspiratorially about JFK, leaving us to wonder if he and Rockwell’s character were dispatched abroad simply to keep them out of trouble back home. While Steve Buscemi represents the agency’s directorate in impeccably cut linen suits, Rockwell and Malkovich are hopelessly incapable of blending in. “When they’re taking photographs outside a church in Santiago, they’re meant to just look like two guys on holidays,” Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh says. “It’s their deeply flawed idea of being undercover! We didn’t want them looking like they were involved in Watergate, but rather: ‘Who on earth are these two?’”

Bringing that wardrobe to life required a global scavenger hunt. Early hopes of scouring Santiago’s secondhand markets yielded little authentic material (most everyday garments from the period had long since worn out or vanished, largely supplanted by ’90s American sportswear). Eventually, some of the Chilean crew members connected Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh with a collective of local designers who opened their private archives in a warehouse, where she discovered an original Donegal tweed jacket that had somehow crossed the Atlantic decades prior. Back in London, she trawled market stalls along Portobello Road, unearthing two pristine 1970s suits that served as the blueprints for Buscemi’s and Malkovich’s wardrobes.

Given Malkovich is an avowed fashion connoisseur—his flamboyant style has seen him walk the runway for Comme des Garçons and even briefly launch his own menswear lines—did she feel a little pressure dressing him? “John is a complete clothes horse,” she says. “He would stand in a fitting and talk all day about jacket pockets, canvas interfacings, how tailoring has evolved, and what someone like Dries Van Noten would be doing if he were designing in the 1970s. He’s a total sponge for fashion.”

Though she’s quick to note that Rockwell, too, was a joy to work with: “Sam just struts his stuff: He puts something on, struts around, and goes down to set dancing until people notice how great he looks,” she recalls, laughing. “He knows how to wear clothes.”

On the subject of Rockwell’s outfits: while watching the film, I noted one piece in particular that, if I saw it in a store, I’d snap up immediately. The garment in question? A short-sleeved knit polo in a rich espresso brown, featuring a retro striped orange-and-mustard collar, which Rockwell wears during one of his and Malkovich’s escapades across the island. According to Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, it was also her favorite vintage score—and even became the anchor for his character’s sartorial persona. “Once you find a key look like that, the whole costume pivots around it,” she says. “He looks like he could be in Shaft, dancing in Studio 54, or about to jump on a horse—anything except a CIA agent.”

That’s without even mentioning the costumes worn by Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Sala as the Chilean left-wing student activist characters, which capture the earthy, defiant romance of early-’70s South American youth culture: all high-waisted wide-leg flares, crochet vests, and peasant blouses. “We wanted the students to feel grounded and real, not like a costume party,” Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh says. “There’s a natural beauty and political defiance to how they look—it’s practical, but inherently romantic.”

There’s also something strikingly contemporary about it all: Rockwell’s jazzy shirts could have come straight off a Prada catwalk, while Di Girolamo’s high-waisted denim and hand-woven knits have more than a touch of Bode or Chemena Kamali’s Chloé to them. The eternal dialogue between the worlds of fashion and film has never been more porous—just take Jonathan Anderson designing the costumes for a spate of Luca Guadagnino films (including this year’s Artificial), or the likes of Sandra Hüller and Olivia Colman walking for Miu Miu. Could Wild Horse Nine spark its own runway ripple effect?

It’s a question that makes Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh light up. “Just the other week, I saw a sweater in a shop with that exact Banshees collar and thought, ‘Would they have made that five years ago?’” she says. “It’s lovely when something you make filters down into mainstream culture. When people take inspiration from a film and make it part of how they dress every day—there’s nothing more flattering than that.” Watch this space.