Spoilers below.
When it comes to the fashion of The Drama, it’s Zendaya’s eye-catching press tour outfits that have earned the lion’s share of recent headlines. But for those of us still chewing on the polarising A24 romantic comedy’s so-called ‘twist,’ it’s the actress’s costumes themselves that deserve our closer scrutinisation.
In The Drama, Zendaya plays Emma, a Bostonian literary editor engaged to museum curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson), whom she plans to marry in mere days. It’s only when Charlie learns a startling detail about Emma’s past that their prenuptial bliss begins to unravel, and the titular drama unfolds.
As costume designer Katina Danabassis—known for her work on numerous A24 projects, including Past Lives and Materialists—suggests, Emma’s fashion is ‘completely grounded in reality,’ intended to signal that Emma herself is grounded. (Or, anyway, grounded enough.) As Emma, Zendaya’s outfits are academic but accessible, fashionable though never flashy. She wears crewneck sweaters and dark-wash denim from Agolde, her sweatshirts and striped tops from 6397. During an early dance-rehearsal scene between her and Charlie, Emma sports a ribbed cropped tank top and a full-length nylon skirt, a play on what Danabassis calls ‘modern gorpcore.’ At home and in bed, she pairs silky Eres lingerie with her loose-fitting Harper’s Magazine T-shirt.
‘Nothing’s too perfect,’ Danabassis says of Emma’s style. ‘I don’t want to say “lazy,” but [it’s] normal—elevated just enough to make us stay in a “movie” sort of world.’
In one of the film’s earliest scenes, depicting Charlie and Emma’s coffee-shop meet-cute, Zendaya wears a chartreuse top that Danabassis selected precisely for its idiosyncrasies. She wanted it to subtly foreshadow some of the confusing emotions the characters would experience later in the film, while nevertheless highlighting Emma herself amidst the coffee shop’s otherwise muted backdrop. The shirt is absolutely something you could see a ‘regular human being’ wearing ‘in an East Coast city in the fall,’ Danabassis says, and yet ‘it’s kind of an offbeat colour…it’s not a colour where you’re like, “Oh yeah, that girl in that beautiful pea green.” So, right there, you have a visual cue of some offbeatness.’
This slight offbeatness recurs quietly throughout the film, Danabassis says, though not always in a way audiences will immediately pick up on. For instance, in one quick scene in which Emma throws her coffee at a car edging too close to a crosswalk, Danabassis chose to put Zendaya in a classic, neat trench coat and stylish turtleneck. But she paired the look with a hiking shoe in order to create ‘tension and friction’ for a character who’s otherwise ‘supposed to be quite normal and grounded.’
Emma’s seemingly girl-next-door normalcy is upended less than a half-hour into The Drama’s runtime, when the engaged couple sit down for a pre-wedding tasting menu with their maid of honour and best man, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie). During this prolonged dinner, the friends decide to play a game in which they share the ‘worst thing [they’ve] ever done.’ Each character relays their shameful anecdotes, some of which are genuinely shocking, and proceeds to laugh off the discomfort, at least until the conversational roulette lands on Emma. Several glasses of wine deep, she reluctantly reveals that she planned a school shooting as a teenager. She never followed through on the violence…but she came close.
This revelation threatens to upend everything Charlie thinks he knows about his fiancée. Once his disbelief settles into desperation, reality as he knows it seems suspect. Suddenly, he’s no longer certain if he can even refer to Emma as ‘compassionate’ in his wedding vows. Could a ‘compassionate’ person even think of doing what Emma considered doing? Does it matter that she was a child? Does it matter if she had mental health issues? Did she have mental health issues? Was she dangerous? Is she still?
Flashbacks in The Drama soon give us a peek at the younger version of Emma (Jordyn Curet), the one who nearly orchestrated the school shooting. For this character’s style, Danabassis pulled from late-aughts high school yearbooks. In one particular book, she found ‘one really great photo of this girl’ wearing an oversized hoodie, baggy jeans, and glasses, with a ‘dark, mall-punk, emo-y vibe.’ She decided to model Young Emma’s look after this aesthetic, and similarly dressed Curet in clothes that might have belonged to Young Emma’s father, a military veteran. ‘An important part of the thing for me was trying to express a slight dissociation from who she actually, normally was,’ Danabassis says. ‘So the clothes reflect that a little bit. She’s slowly kind of descending [into disassociation].’
Years later, at least in The Drama’s timeline, that aesthetic is nowhere to be seen in Adult Emma’s wardrobe. Her clothes seem to argue she is not who she once was. But Danabassis throws in enough of that aforementioned ‘tension and friction’ to keep Charlie—and, perhaps, the audience—wondering.
Danabassis’s subtle symbolism is equally applied to Emma’s wedding dress, a classic square-neck gown with a full ballroom skirt. When debating options for what Zendaya would wear in the wedding scenes, the designer considered gowns that were ‘almost avant-garde,’ but she ultimately landed on the ‘more austere, cliché wedding-topper vibe.’ The silhouette, Danabassis acknowledges, is not necessarily the obvious choice for a character like Emma. ‘Probably that person would wear a more restrained, simple, elegant, straight-down sort of dress,’ she says, but the impact of the full skirt being ‘dragged through the rounds’ and getting ‘as dirty as possible’ was impossible to resist. And it also spoke to the tensions at play in The Drama: who is Emma, and who is she trying to be? What happens when the other characters around her project their own feelings and doubts onto her? That tension is only elevated when Zendaya slips an electric-orange puffer jacket over the wedding dress and trudges out into the rainy streets of Boston.
‘She ends up throwing on this jacket because she has to storm out,’ Danabassis says. ‘Part of the colour choice is that we wanted to be able to see her when it’s dark out, [but also]…we’re finding her in something that feels a little offbeat again. You’re always kind of like, “What’s unexpected? What is memorable? What’s going to be visually striking?” And so then you end up going for something that’s not always a happy accident, but sometimes it’s a happy accident.’
Watch closely, and you’ll notice that—apart from the significant style switch from Young Emma to Adult Emma—Emma’s fashion changes little throughout the film, Danabassis argues. Charlie’s style, however, starts to grow slightly more haphazard as The Drama progresses. ‘[Emma’s] trying to maintain this composure of “everything is fine, and I’m not that person anymore,”‘ the designer says. ‘”I no longer want to be associated with that worst thing I’ve ever thought of doing.” She kind of stays the same, but he falls more apart.’
She continues, ‘At the end of the day, Charlie is the one who’s actually quite terrible. He’s lying constantly, and he has a lack of empathy, whereas she is actually trying to be a better person, and an honest person at that. Is she the anti-hero? Is he the anti-hero? Can people change? Do we hold them accountable to actions that [they didn’t follow through on]? There’s a lot to be discussed.’
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Lauren Puckett-Pope is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE, where she oversees coverage of film, television, books, music, and art. She was previously a culture writer and an associate editor at ELLE. Based in New York City, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Critics Choice Association, and the Television Critics Association.