Down With Love's Most Iconic Costumes Almost Got Cut
At a recent CDG screening and Q&A, designer Daniel Orlandi talked about the beloved 2003 comedy.
Down With Love has finally earned the love and appreciation it always deserved, and if I point out that I saw it twice during its theatrical run in 2003 and bought the soundtrack, well, I’m so rarely on the right side of history that it’s worth pointing out. But a candy-colored homage to Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex comedies starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, fresh off their star turns in Chicago and Moulin Rouge!? Tailor-made for me.
For costume designer Daniel Orlandi, too. As director Peyton Reed told him, “You were put on this earth to do this film.” That was one of the tidbits dispensed during a recent CDG screening and Q&A with Orlandi and CDG President Terry Gordon.
Raised on the movies he was hired to replicate, Orlandi got a sneaky head start on Down With Love: Its line producer handed him a script way in advance, so that when he went in for his interview, he brought with him sketches and designs for the entire film. And most of the designs for the four leads (Zellweger, McGregor, David Hyde Pierce, and Sarah Paulson in her first movie) remained unchanged throughout production.
That includes the GIF-famous black-and-white checked coat that reveals a yellow dress and the yellow coat that reveals a black-and-white checked dress in which Zellweger and Paulson make an unforgettable entrance. Although that almost got cut.
The sketches were approved and the scene filmed, and then the studio looked at the dailies. “One of the execs in charge of the picture, she went wild: She hated yellow on blondes because she was a blonde,” Orlandi said. “And they were like, ‘We are reshooring that.’” Orlandi had to go so far as to redesign the costume before the all-clear came, and they breathed a sigh of relief. But that reprieve brought with it an unexpected casualty, a coat with a Mongolian lamb collar and hat that Paulson’s Vikki wore into the office to get fired. “Our producer said that’s the other costume [the blonde exec’s] not crazy about it, so that had to go,” Orlandi says, mentioning that he’s disappointed every time he sees the scene with Paulson wearing just a dress.
One of the reasons Down With Love plays as well as it does is that, like the films it riffs on, the movie was shot on Hollywood soundstages. In fact, Zellweger had an L.A. shoot stipulated in her contract. (She also went to bat with Reed to cast Paulson when the studio wanted a bigger name, Orlandi shared.)
But a local shoot didn’t minimize how many costumes Orlandi made. Cautioned that the budget wouldn’t sustain too many made-to-orders, he begged, borrowed, and stole to make it work. Along the way, he found a bolt of black-and-white plaid that was tagged “Lucille Ball” at Western Costume (which became a sports coat for McGregor) and a cache of thousands of unsold shoes from the ‘60s. Perhaps most strikingly, that iconic pink plaid suit that Zellweger wears in the film (and in the advertising) wasn’t actually plaid fabric; Orlandi and his team embroidered on the plaid so it matched all the way around.
Among the other anecdotes Orlandi shared is that the film used the same extras in every scene (go back and look, it's a fun game), and his costume inspirations included The Art of Love and Edith Head’s costumes in recent meme fave What a Way to Go, starring Shirley MacLaine. “She had 100 costume changes,” Orlandi said, adding that despite reports to the contrary, Zellweger only had around 38 in Down With Love.
Which is all to say: If you’re looking for some frothy long weekend viewing, treat yourself to renting Down With Love. In the meantime, enjoy this outlandishly extraneous musical number that got tacked onto the end of the film in true ‘60s style. (And the reason I’ve had the lyric, “You make Dean Martin look like a Quaker,” stuck in my head for 22 years.)