2 weeks Ago By Elaina Patton
Following the runaway success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in 2000 ($465 million in business at the box office and five Academy Awards, including best picture), the director fantasized for years about making a sequel. Finally released this Friday, Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal as Lucius, the now grown son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus, who is forced to fight in the Coliseum years after witnessing his father’s death. The sequel delivers blockbuster-worthy action set pieces and sprawling sets.
But also noteworthy are the costumes, from frequent Scott collaborators Janty Yates and David Crossman, who drew on 19th-century painters and the brutality and opulence of ancient Rome for their elaborate designs. “It was a huge, epic to-do—I mean, literally an epic,” Yates, who won an Oscar for her work on the first Gladiator , tells Vogue . “It was an enormous task.
” Crossman, a specialist in military costumes who recently worked with Yates on Scott’s Napoleon , agrees: “There’s not much fun in producing mass armor,” he says. His team pre-fit hundreds of extras for the multilocation shoot. “We had to do hundreds and hundreds of sets, and it all had to be in Morocco by certain times,” he continues.
“We were making it all over the world—in New Zealand, Budapest, England—and a lot of it was just arriving the day before we shot. I don’t think I’ve had any other job where I’ve had so many people on planes with 10 to 12 suitcases.” Crossman also oversaw the battle gear for both Lucius and Pedro Pascal’s General Acacius, which proved more complicated than expected.
After saying early on that he wasn’t interested in transforming his body for the film, Mescal later changed course, bulking up ahead of the shoot. This meant that Crossman and his team had to adapt certain costumes already in the works—including a pale, handwoven leather cuirass molded to Mescal’s torso—to fit his evolving physique. “Normally, you don’t see anybody until a few days before you shoot or their availability is always limited,” Crossman says.
“The lucky thing was Paul was on stage in the West End while we were starting on Gladiator at this base in West London, so he was able to come and see us a few times. We just kept going as his body changed shape, so we were able to keep up. And I think he toned to a nice level.
It wasn’t too much, and it was enough, wasn’t it?” Indeed, Mescal’s legs, an ongoing internet obsession , are on particular display in the film. “There’s always the conversation in gladiator films of, ‘How long are we going to make the skirts? How much knee are we going to see?’” says Crossman, who used leg wraps to prevent the thigh-length leather skirts from being overly revealing in an action context. “We are always in the camp that likes a bit of leg.
” That said, Crossman notes, “If you did real Roman to the book, you wouldn’t have anything on the legs and arms. They’d be completely bare.” While Crossman was busy outfitting armies of Roman soldiers and gladiators—in the end, supervising the production of 2,000 artisan-made costumes—Yates spent countless hours sourcing silks and trims from markets in France’s Paris and Lyon and Italy’s Rome and Prato, as well as finding specialists in rare techniques like gold bullion embroidery.
But perhaps her biggest challenge, besides working under Scott’s famously tight shooting schedule, was accommodating the director’s very specific vision for characters like Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Lucius’s estranged mother who, now married to Acacius, is living under house arrest. “With Lucilla, because she’s considerably older—even though you wouldn’t think it to look at her, my God—we did start out sort of haute couture-ing her because we figured she would get more sculptural and more simple,” Yates says. Yet that idea was soon “pooh-poohed by Ridley and—in not so many words, because she’s so dear—Connie,” both of whom had a more extravagant look in mind.
So Yates turned instead to draped silk gowns and bunched, Middle European–style cloaks for the aging princess, largely inspired by garments in 19th-century artworks by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a Dutch painter of classical subjects. “We draped until we were draped out, really, and trimmed till we were trimmed out.” She and Scott were better aligned when outfitting the young emperors Geta and Caracalla, played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger.
“Ridley’s brief was he wanted them to look like Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols,” Yates says. “He wanted their hair red. He wanted them to have either gold teeth or no teeth or one tooth missing.
He wanted their skin to be white.” A more-is-more approach suited both the fame-drunk pair’s unstable personalities and their turbulent style of rule. For their wardrobes, “I basically put gold on gold on gold or silver on silver on silver,” she says.
“All my best pieces from the Marché aux Puces in Paris, all the best embroidery, all the best went on them—just piling it all on.” In the film’s first part, she dressed the emperors in matching breastplates and embroidered white gowns for official ceremonies and Lucius’s early fights in the arena. But as time passed, saturated colors and a smattering of accessories crept into Caracalla’s looks, echoing the more diminutive emperor’s ever-more erratic behavior and fraying relationship with his brother.
“We just went very, very exaggerated as his arc got lower, or higher, whichever you want to call it,” Yates says. “It was more on more on more—the brights of the colors, the golds, the laurels just slightly drunk on his head, and more bangles and fibulae.” Yates also used color and accessories to call attention to Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a power-hungry arms merchant.
From his early scenes picking over potential gladiators and then riding into Rome with Lucius and the rest of his haul, Macrinus is swathed in layers of jewel-toned fabrics set off by gold bullion embroidery and leopard fur. “His look had a very similar attitude to the emperors’, but much more tasteful, of course,” Yates says. Macrinus’s wardrobe was inspired by the work of French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who often depicted male figures in turbans and layers of colorful dress.
She adds that while Washington “wouldn’t wear a turban, sadly,” she did eventually persuade the actor to sport stacks of rings and bangles, oversized belts, and a pair of small gold hoops that quickly went viral after first-look images from the film were released online. “The jewelry is always a last-minute thing,” says Yates, who was surprised to hear the earrings had caused such a stir. “You are always putting it on, hoping, keeping your fingers crossed.
I was just so happy that he agreed to wear earrings, that he wore two of them, and that he wore them pretty well throughout. They gave him a little bit more power, I think.”.
