By When the costume designer Katina Danabassis was developing a wardrobe for Nora Moon, the playwright at the center of the 2023 film Past Lives, she received a somewhat contradictory request from writer-director Celine Song. “She doesn’t care about clothes,” Danabassis recalls Song telling her. “But she has to look iconic.”
Nora’s outfits don’t sound like much. For a day out in New York, she wears a pair of gray trousers, a cream-colored button-down, and white sneakers. But the trousers, from the Seoul-based brand Arch The, are long and baggy, like luxurious pajamas. The delicate blouse, which Danabassis found in the ’80s and ’90s section of Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing, has “the softest stripe” to it. With only three buttons fastened, the cuffs loose, and the collar tugged to one side by the strap of a tote bag, it looks careless and elegant on actor Greta Lee.
A former anthropology and communications student, Danabassis, 39, is a master of the signifiers and nuances of our fashion moment. She has an uncommon talent for translating everyday clothing to the big screen, a specialty that requires an eye for character. Nora looks like a genuine New York creative, for instance, but her button-down and trousers also express the competing interests of trying to play it cool and wanting to look good in front of the boy she used to have a crush on. It’s the kind of outfit that sticks in your mind—that could, one day, reach icon status—not just because it’s quietly chic, but because of the cinematic stakes that it represents.
In the decade since Danabassis moved to Los Angeles, she has become a mainstay of A24’s influential indie ecosystem, crafting wardrobes for rumpled radio journalists (C’mon C’mon), debauched rich kids (Bodies Bodies Bodies), 1990s teenagers (the upcoming Y2K), and toxic hipster do-gooders (The Curse). Whether the result is tender or biting, Danabassis always aims to be of service to the character and story. “I trust her completely, because the question will never be: What’s the nicest thing, or what’s going to be the biggest-looking thing, or what’s going to be the most show-off thing? It’s always going to be: What’s the right thing?” says Song, who recently reunited with Danabassis for her upcoming film Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans.
Danabassis’s work may often be subtle, but it’s not simple. “Everyday clothing, to me, is much harder sometimes than crazy fashion looks,” she says. (Costume designer April Napier, whom Danabassis assisted on Lady Bird and Booksmart and now considers a close friend, explains that characters should never look like they’re wearing “quote-unquote costumes.”) Although the class-conscious Materialists allowed Danabassis to borrow from brands like Hermès and Zegna for Pedro Pascal’s luxury-clad character—fashion is an explicit part of the storytelling in the film, notes Song—she spends a lot of time scouring costume houses, thrift shops, eBay, and high street stores to locate pieces that feel true to a character’s reality. “Sometimes the perfect slip dress in Past Lives is from Zara,” Danabassis says, referring to the black dress that Lee wears in the film’s final act.
Never have Danabassis’s powers of observation felt more agonizingly precise than in The Curse, the 2023 series starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder. Stone’s Whitney is a millennial nightmare: an affluent white woman determined to be seen as a force of good in the world, even as she makes the lives of those around her more difficult. “I related to the character, which is embarrassing as hell,” Danabassis says. “I was like, well, that person is making choices that bolster her beliefs, right?” In the real world, Whitney would shop at small brands, eco-conscious labels, and secondhand retailers, so that’s what Danabassis bought for her. On set, the team referred to a pair of star-printed Collina Strada trousers as Whitney’s “artist pants,” or what she wears when she wants to feel like a real creative. Their stars and doodles look playful and hand-drawn, but rather than giving her a whimsical air, they only emphasize her try-hard nature.
Although Danabassis would like to costume a sci-fi movie or period piece, her dedication to authenticity doesn’t seem likely to waver. When she’s out and about in the world, she’s looking at the people around her, snapping photos when it doesn’t seem invasive, and making notes on intriguing styling decisions. As she puts it, “I love some down and dirty realism.”
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of ELLE.
