#No Time To Die Costume Designer Shares How You Dress The Most Stylish Spy In Movie History [Interview]

You’re a big fan of vintage clothing, which you and Daniel Craig discussed quite a bit for the film. What are some vintage pieces in “No Time to Die”?

Throughout all of his wardrobe, I would say there’s an element of it. I think the big ticket vintage one is the end, the final costume of his, which is this tactical-looking [costume]. We had discussed wanting to send Daniel’s Bond off into film history with something that we haven’t necessarily seen him in before, something that felt like an iconic silhouette.

Not a silhouette in the way costume and fashion people talk about the silhouette of a suit, but literally like a silhouette, like the shadow of a figure that you see in that famous iconography of Bond coming through the gun barrel, right? We wanted basically something that would tick those boxes. The sweater that he’s wearing at the end, I was hesitating and almost called it a jumper because of course in England, call a sweater the jumper. It’s basically an adapted version of a vintage World War II British commando sweater, which I had found and brought to Daniel.

When we were starting to work on what this final look was going to be, I brought that in to show him and he put it on and he loved it. We decided to use that as our jumping off point. There are things that we changed about it, though. The original one still had very period pattern shapes to it, which aren’t necessarily as modern as what you are looking at in the film.

So we adapted it for Daniel, changed the color, the material, all that stuff, and collaborated with one of those long-standing brand partners of Bond to have them manufacture it, because we knew we needed something like 48 of them, I believe. We needed lots of multiples of a lot of his costumes and all the numbers are varying between 20 and 60. I think 48 was the number of the sweaters. It becomes an important prop in the film, too. We made it a nod to his Naval heritage, his upbringing in the special services.

We wanted something different. But yeah, there’s a drawstring boat neck collar. The original was a very heavy wool, but obviously, for the purposes of our scene and all the action, we are definitely not wanting to have him endure multiple days in the summer shooting this in heavy wool. So, we made it out of a sort of cotton blend.

The trousers were also based on an amalgamation of different vintage combat trousers from Naval origin. The silhouette of a Second World War trouser is not the silhouette that you see on him. They’re much higher-waisted, looser-legged. We wanted obviously to have that silhouette idea of him as just, the perfect human form. He has kind of got an Adonis figure. In developing those trousers, it took quite a while. We made the trousers in-house, had an amazing workshop, two tailors and cutters and a bunch of stitchers and people in the dye workshop.

I mean, just the number of hands within the department that each item of clothing passed through, it’s an extraordinary amount of work that goes into it. We kept developing the prototype and redeveloping the prototype based on the fact that they were working on the final sequence and all the action and the stunts. Every time Daniel would come in for a fitting, we would do more multiple looks at every fitting, but we would be honing and perfecting various pieces of costumes every time.

And the trousers were one that took a long time to develop over the course of several months because the action in the final sequence was evolving, and he’d come fresh from a stunt rehearsal and be like, oh right, I did the rehearsal today and I know I’m going to pick up the weapon from this angle, and so maybe we should move this pocket over here. We wanted them to feel authentic to what he would need in the scene. It’s not just an aesthetic decision or one based on love of vintage clothing, but very much a practical and technical decision.

The franchise usually looks back to the past, but still captures what’s modern and new. What were some of the other more modern touches you used?

I think fashion is in this phase where everything goes at the moment. There’s also a real love at the moment for vintage. It’s a little bit of a catchall. So with each character, I think the approach wasn’t necessarily to think, okay, they have a retro style to them, or they have a more contemporary, modern feel to them. It was more character-based. And so with Bond himself, it meant that we could look back because there is this legacy of 24 films and a real evolution between Bond performers in their chapters, as well as the overall evolution of Bond himself as one character.

The freedom to go that way came with characters that were completely new. I think with the returning characters, there was always an obligation to make sure they fit on their evolutionary scale, like you have a lot of returning characters in MI6 headquarters. The new characters like Paloma or Nomi or Rami Malek’s Safin, we could just start fresh with them.