‘Challengers’: How Fashion Icon Jonathan Anderson Built ‘Power and Swagger’ Into Tennis Costumes
In 2024, Jonathan Anderson joined a small but illustrious club: famed fashion designers who also headed the costume department on major feature films.
Like fellow fashion-to-costume designers Jean Paul Gaultier (“The Fifth Element”) or Patricia Field (“The Devil Wears Prada”), Anderson did not merely lend a memorable outfit to a movie project, as runway-world icons often do. He fully conceived, designed and fabricated the clothes for “Challengers” and “Queer,” the year’s two fantastic Luca Guadagnino films.
Anderson and Guadagnino first met in Italy in 2017. Guadagnino had just directed “Call Me By Your Name” and Anderson was the creative director of both Spanish house Loewe and his own eponymous line JW Anderson, two positions he still holds today.
Their friendship eventually led to the zesty tennis-circuit love-triangle “Challengers,” starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, which began production in 2022 and was released in the spring of 2024, earning nearly $100 million and some of the best reviews (especially from internet fanbases) of Guadagnino’s career.
The film’s outfits – from different shades of blue on Zendaya to an “I Told Ya” t-shirt worn by multiple characters – have earned the first-time department head Anderson a nomination for the Costume Designers Guild Awards in the contemporary film category.
“It’s a crazy, amazing honor,” he said. “I’m the first one to get swept away by romantic period-film costumes, like in ‘Marie Antionette.’ But what I love about ‘Challengers’ is that it’s contemporary. It can be difficult to get audiences to look at the world that they’re actually in – with newness or freshness or to discover themselves in it. So I love that the guild honors contemporary design too.”
We spoke to Anderson, 40, from his office in London – where he was cramming in work right before Christmas and shrugged bemusedly as the overhead lights randomly flicked off. “I’m looking forward to staring at a blank wall and saying nothing for a while,” he said with a wry smile. “This year’s been a bit of a cyclone.”
Anderson’s speaking voice is a mixture of his native Northern Ireland, London (where he lives now) and East Coast U.S. (he spent a year and a half at Juilliard in his late teens). We began by talking about his mutual harmony with Guadagnino and his “sportswear as psychology” approach to designing the clothes in “Challengers.”
At the New York Film Festival, you were onstage for the screening of “Queer” and Luca referred to you humorously as his “consigliere,” a mafia term. But that indicates how close you are as friends.
We knew each other before we did “Challengers,” yeah. A publicist that I have in Italy introduced us years ago and we met at a hotel, which was meant to be a half-hour introduction. But we were there for six or seven hours, putting the world to right.
What was it about your personalities that clicks so well?
There are not many people that I have met in life where I feel like I have always known them. It sounds so cliché, but I feel like I could tell Luca anything. He’s a very creative person and I think creativity is such a precious thing. And I feel like I’d give everything to him in terms of creativity, as long as it makes a dream come true.
But was is a big leap when he asked you to design for “Challengers”?
I’m the kind of person who will always say yes. I can’t do the recluse thing. And I realized recently that I’ve underestimated that quality in myself. So if someone approached with an idea, as Luca did, I want to make it happen for them.
Still, he did need to convince me that it could work. I mean, I was flying back and forward from Paris to Boston during production. But I’m so happy that Luca convinced me to do it, because it’s was so rewarding and made me enjoy the job I do even more. I have never felt more creative in a process.
The experience has caused me to to recontextualize fashion and realize that there is such an importance to the idea of the psychological act of clothing, which Luca understands. It’s easy to hate luxury or mass market or a brand or logo, but then you realize that clothing has this huge impact on the cinema lens, because it’s ultimately it’s what you’re dressing the character in.
Neither you nor Luca were tennis fans. Scorsese wasn’t interested in boxing before he made “Raging Bull.” And sometimes that matters, for getting fresh eyes on a subject.
I’d done some work with Uniqlo and Roger Federer, but tennis as a sport was never on my radar. I grew up in a rugby family. [Both Anderson’s father and brother were pro rugby players.] But when you begin to research something that you don’t know much about, you’re amazed by how obsessed you might become. Obsessed by something you had no knowledge of.
I became hooked on every small detail. And it became quite forensic, looking at these players who go from young kids to superstars. And the power of brand steps in. And these players become armored in these uniforms – even the shoes, the bag, the jewelry.
But you didn’t partner with any brands in the film, right?
Exactly, we didn’t take any endorsement deals, because we were never going to have the control we needed. We needed the freedom to use our imaginations. And there are all these different things that come into play with brands, you know? It can get slightly ridiculous, because there are rules in tennis where logos can’t be that big actually and I actually learned all this.
One of the great character details is the gray “I Told Ya” t-shirt, which is worn by both Zendaya and O’Connor’s characters, years apart in the story. Where did that idea come from?
I was researching for Patrick [O’Connor’s character] and the first person who came into my head, which was completely out of context of film or period, was JFK Jr. I was thinking of a person who just oozes charisma. And JFK Jr., for me, was one of the hottest guys in history. And it comes with this idea of affluence, sometimes you can’t buy that. And I found this amazing image of him in Central Park wearing this t-shirt which says “I Told Ya.”
And then me and Luca were having a conversation and we thought of this idea that there are moments we’ve all have it in life where you meet someone that you are into and their clothing has this amazing power that we kind of hold onto. And if you still have a piece of clothing, like that t-shirt, it reminds you of that person, the way it smells or the way it brings you right back to a time in your life.
Yeah, we see Patrick wearing it all those years later.
Right, and that goes back to that JFK Jr. reference. It’s amazing what swagger can do. And also the idea of swagger went into the psychology of Patrick’s character. Certainly in contrast to Art.
Art is the Mike Faist character, who is more successful as a tennis player but not nearly as confident. What were your thoughts about him?
You know when people play squash and their shoes make that squeaky sound, like everything feels like there’s an odd type of static in it? That’s him. He’s very squeaky clean, like some sort of a doll, a malleable kind of person that is going to do what he is told.
We even had so many debates about underwear, for example. Patrick, of course, just wears boxers. For Art, his underwear is white and tight and almost like painted on. He’s this sleek vehicle. Everything is about high-performance and precision.
But then there’s a moment later in the film, which I’m always very moved by, when Art is laying on the bed with Tashi and he’s wearing big baggy night trousers. And that’s the moment when he breaks down. Suddenly he’s not so high-performance anymore. The character lets himself unravel and Mike just does that shift amazingly.
Can you talk about the use of color, specifically on Tashi, Zendaya’s character? It’s intriguing that she wears a deep royal blue when she first meets the two guys. Then years later, at the tennis match, she’s in a light powder blue dress.
This is the psychology that I love, these two looks. Ultimately, Zendaya is anchored through the main bulk of the film in this one light blue dress that I made for for the film. And then you have the moment when she’s younger in the early 2000s, where you have her in this darker, unsophisticated blue. And it’s like the moment when she’s discovered that she wants to wear nice clothing.
She’s young and going to a fancy event in that scene, so I wanted it to look like it was made from acrylic. She won a trophy as tennis player and she needs to buy a random dress off the peg, from a shop where there are like 90 of them in a row.
The thing with Zendaya is that no matter what you put on her, Zendaya looks fantastic. But I wanted that dark blue dress to seem kind of ridiculous. It’s not as mature within the context. But when she grows older, she becomes incredibly sophisticated. It’s cashmere sweaters, the perfect luggage. And of course, the lighter blue. We talked a lot about her status. And certainly about her power.
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