After stints in New York, London, and Paris, the third annual edition of Vogue World is taking place this weekend in Hollywood, paying homage to the role of fashion in film (and vice versa). As such, the starring roles this year belong not to actors and models—though, yes, all your favorites will be in attendance—but to costume designers and their work. Joining Nicole Phelps and Virginia Smith, Global Head of Fashion Network, on this week’s edition of “The Run-Through” is Arianne Phillips, a stylist and Academy Award– and BAFTA-nominated costume designer best known for her work with Madonna; Tom Ford’s A Single Man; Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and most recently A Complete Unknown, among many, many others.
In this episode, Phillips details how she began in the industry assisting veteran stylists and fashion editors, graduated to work with pop sensations like Lenny Kravitz and Madonna, and soon found her way to costume design, the only job “in the whole process of filmmaking that is like, ‘nice to meet you, take your clothes off.’”
Hers is the kind of career that would leave most of us starstruck, but Phillips is remarkably down-to-earth. That may be a key to her success. She found the Japanese designer clothes she put on Lenny Kravitz in his then-girlfriend’s closet (yes, that’s Lisa Bonet). With Madonna,“one of the responsibilities from day one of working was honoring her incredible collaboration with fashion designers,” whether that was Fabio Zambernardi, who worked at Prada for 40 years, or Alessandro Michele just six months after his first Gucci show. The other requirement, it seems, was being comfortable with plain old-fashioned hard work: “It’s not just Madonna. It is 20 dancers. I think on one tour”—Phillips styled six of the superstar’s tours—“we counted, like, 700 pairs of shoes because the dancers were changing costumes up to 12 times during the show.” And as for all the clothes? “You get them from the fashion designers,” she explains, “and then you have to kind of pull them apart and rebuild them with what we call ‘skin layers’ to withstand the physicality of dancing and sweating and everything.” For more tricks of the trade and a behind-the-scenes look at Vogue World 2025, listen below.
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