How ‘Bottoms’ Sneakily Became the Summer’s Coolest Menswear Movie

In Emma Seligman’s new movie Bottoms, coming of age is bloody, absurd, and crammed with style hits and misses. Starring The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri (Josie) and Shiva Child’s Rachel Sennott (PJ), the raunchy comedy follows two self-professed lesbian losers in highschool, who kind an all-girls battle membership simply to get laid. Like many queer teenagers, feeling a scarcity of management throughout such a tumultuous time of their lives, Josie and PJ train company via their outfit decisions. Each characters notably experiment with menswear: rugby shirts, outsized graphic tees, corduroy overalls, and suspenders that make them look, as Kaia Gerber’s Brittany places it, like “a bit Dutch boy.”

Eunice Jera Lee, the movie’s costume designer, collaborated with Seligman to curate seems to be impressed by a few of Bottoms’ timeless teen comedy forebears—like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Heathers, Clueless, and Deliver It On. Starting her profession as a style stylist, Lee now has credit as a designer on movies like Learn how to Blow Up a Pipeline, Gook, Blue Bayou, and the upcoming movie about Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, The Collaboration.

With Bottoms opening large right this moment, GQ referred to as up Lee to speak about sourcing the film’s evocative costumes, her personal historical past of dabbling in menswear, and the one Y2K pattern she hopes by no means comes again.

GQ: What offered you on this mission initially?

Lee: I really like this movie. I imply, even on paper it was simply hysterical. It is so fantastical and surreal that you would be able to’t take the script critically in any respect, by way of the misogyny and the chauvinism within the city. It was simply this hysterical however amplified have a look at the world we dwell in now, and I simply needed to be part of it. I really like Emma Seligman and I am nonetheless a fan after working along with her.

The place did you supply the clothes from? I desperately want the whole lot Ayo Edibiri was carrying on this movie, particularly her Levi’s rugby long-sleeve and the “Artists are the Gatekeepers of Reality” shirt.

We shot the movie in New Orleans, so we did fairly a little bit of sourcing on the market. I needed to ensure that we actually revered the intersectionality of Josie’s character, so I reached out to this native artist and activist Brandan “BMike” Odums. He has this artwork home referred to as Studio Be. That was type of like my ode to New Orleans as a result of his presence is so large there. He is this glorious Black artist who provides again to the neighborhood, and he is so dope.

He sells clothes, so I reached out about getting that shirt, and simply to provide it that classic collegiate spin we added the ringer bit. He’s so cool and I needed to get the whole lot for her from him.

We reached out to some manufacturers. Levi’s was really certainly one of them and so they despatched us loads of merch, however we thrifted the opposite rugby shirts. I needed to ensure that that they had a classic thrift look as nicely, as a result of, , you are highschool college students and it is not like you possibly can afford the world.