“I learned a lot from nature. I couldn’t imagine what was happening with the cold. I only imagined that the boys’ bodies didn’t get naked anymore, that they were adding layers and more layers. That the dirt came from inside, that the smell came from from within. I imagined the smell to achieve the color, and new ways of producing these surviving bodies. I was interested in telling that degradation from the inside out,” he reflects. Julio SuarezArgentine costume designer who has just won the Goya Award for Best Costume Design for his work in the film The Snow Societythe mega production of Netflix about the survivors of the Andes tragedy. Apprentice of the old theater artists, craftsman of clothes and faithful to noble materials, he was the costume designer for most of the films of Lucrecia Martel and turned Natalia Oreiro into Gilda. He went from observing the passengers getting off the train at the station in the small town of Valdés, district of Twenty five of May, to be the first Argentine to win the statuette in that category. With more than 30 years of experience, he affirms that he does not want to lose his amateur side. From studying him in Constitución, he revisits his story and reflects on the craft of dressing others on the big screen to Buenos Aires/12.
Someone has to do it
Around the train there were all the possible spectacles of Valdés, the small agricultural town that in the 2022 census declared 1,000 inhabitants, and in the 2001 census, 519. In the sixties, when Julio grew up, the train not only brought the bombast of the circus closer. , but also a more modest way of looking: outsiders. Raised in the town hotel, he had access to that traffic of travelers who provided the only difference to the small country world. Like many others like him, in the mid-seventies he went to study in Buenos Aires “with the theater in my head”, without fully understanding the call of the vocation. But she found that the National Conservatory had been intervened.
“There was no other option than work. In cinema there were the last props, people who were remembered and famous for how they worked. I learned from them, researching on my own, looking, seeing the history of the costume, going back. I caught the last blows from trade school,” he says.
At first he was an actor. Within the independent theater company that the playwright directed Maximum Rooms, began making her first costumes out of necessity, “because someone had to do it.” His first significant costume was an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding at the Teatro Margarita Xirgu, which crossed a traditional style with Picasso. The result was a colorful gypsy world that made him start to think twice about that profession. It was after that job that he began to get backstage.
“I think theater taught me to put my body into it. Not to go through everything through the mind, intelligence or intellectuality, which of course shapes you. But to really know what it is about, I think you have to do as a tasting of the character, passing it through the body. Making it more credible. I never liked to start with the aesthetics, with the visual. For me it is a universe to reach each character, I do the opposite way. I think it is the other way around, starting with the character and tell the universe that each work you do presents to you,” he says.
Since it started, it hasn’t stopped. It has been more than 30 years working in film, theater, television. She did series abroad, small theater, big theater, operas. She made the costumes The Clan (2015)by Pablo Trapero, gave color to Luis Ortega’s Robledo Puch in The Angel (2017)recreated heroes in Belgrano (2010) and in Revolución: the crossing of the Andes (2010)and turned Natalia Oreiro into Gilda (2016)among others.
How to paint a picture
The work that earned him the status of being the first Argentine to obtain the Goya for Costume Design brought with it the flavor of a challenge. In addition to carrying and bringing a filming of three hundred people, The Snow Society (2023) It was filmed in the hostility of the mountains, with the classic urgency of a mega production. But Julio worked as always.
“Even in the cinema, I reach out and change things around the place. I like the set for that reason, I was always attentive to what I put on. I know that there are other people who design costumes but they delegate. I like to carry the bags, I learned like that. I like to go to Eleven, to the dressmaker, check it between takes. I continue working the way I worked when I was young, as always. And it is still something that I defend,” he says.
The director’s obsession JA Bayona representing the story faithfully may or may not represent a challenge for the costume designer, who took advantage of the strict instructions to develop his creativity. The director had spent more than ten years researching these characters and their ways of being for their representation, and although he had “iconic pieces” of each one that could not be missing, not everything was said. He had to go from back to front.
“You had to find the steps to get them to be dressed that way. Based on the time, and what this group of people was, they could already choose certain clothes and certain colors. Catholic boys, from the upper class of Montevideo, in the seventies, but with sober cuts and styles. The psychedelic and pop thing, that had nothing to do with this world. For example, the collars of shirts were very long at that time, up to twelve centimeters. But with these kids it seemed, even if it was real, it always seemed a little too much. Because of the characteristics of each character, because they had an outfit that was very similar to a school report too, of a group of athletes who were going to play a friendly against another. place,” he says.
Coats were marked: montgomerys, gamulans. Each character had a limited amount of clothing: a weekend suitcase for each. Each costume had seven or eight copies, which also wore out as time went by, since the film was filmed chronologically, except for the accident and the rescue, which were filmed at the end. “It was like painting a picture, something that was transforming,” he says.
“The clothes were divided by state: first ten days, before the avalanche, after the avalanche, already with a worked base of color, tears, washing. But also after the same action they were modified, they came soaked by the snow, so we had drying rooms, so they could go back to filming,” he says.
Precisely, one of the important points of Julio’s work with materials is “the human bond of the actor with the clothes.” “When I design something I look for how it moves, what it is used for, when it is put on, if it transforms it. I always imagine a wardrobe that has movement,” he says. In this case, the hostile conditions at the Sierra Nevada ski resort in Spain, which the actors had to endure for four months, challenged that bond. But Julio let “the kids” (some whose first experience in a mega-production was this) do it.
“There were many who had bandaged feet and bandaged hands. In that repetition of the way the body was formed every day, of how everything was going through, it was also useful for them to see how it was done. Some even made the bindings themselves, with my supervision, of course. But what they touch and move always ends up being rich. The one who modifies is because it works and because he understands it, because he adapts,” he says.
On the fourth day of filming, Bayona began asking him for more. “That the broken was more, that the dirty was more, and I told him but they have been in the mountain for two days. And he was right. Because the camera takes a while to see that, on a white background it bounces off you. It was a scene to fight “, it states.
Noble materials to camouflage
A key phrase from Julio resonates in other dialogues he had with experts in the area: “The light of the cinema has to fall in love with the colors of the clothes”. “I say that because I like to work with noble materials. It is not the same to illuminate real skin as synthetic skin. I was interested in making the era feel, their youth. One of my thoughts was that they should be noticed. the mothers in them. That’s why I looked for hand-knitted fabrics, ways to keep warm. Let something be seen in them that wasn’t there,” she says.
According to Julio, light falls in love with fabrics, prints, and textures. If not, the camera does not penetrate. “And I knew that he (the director) was going to get closer with the camera. There is a feeling that you are very close to each one,” he says about the closeness that the film builds with the survivors.
Suárez has experience with intimacy, perhaps a legacy from all of his films. Lucrecia Martel in which he worked: The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008), Zama (2017). Through those performances, he learned that the true value of his work, contrary to what a director of his own film would think, is that it is not remembered.
“I like what you can’t see. I like feeling more, that there are possibilities of things happening to you with what you don’t see or with what you think you’ve seen. It’s as important to put on an earring as it is to put on an entire wardrobe. That don’t hesitate, don’t jump, don’t draw attention, be credible,” he says.
In his desire to camouflage himself within the shot, he rejects what is “authentic” just because, in a fetishistic way. Instead, he embraces the possibility that historical reconstruction gives him of rebuilding “something impossible.” “There are things that you have to do and you start thinking, but how do I do them? With what fabric can I achieve the same thing? Because maybe you don’t have that same fabric, that same thing. And when you see it, sometimes you don’t It works. With Gilda it happened to me that I saw the dress they had saved, her classic violet dress. And when you see it, it doesn’t work for you. Because something has already happened that is not the moment that you have to tell. Time has passed, It was saved, it lost its color. Like there is something that will never be credible. The real thing is sometimes not credible. Because many events happened in the middle, and at the time of telling it they no longer correspond,” he says.
The Goya statuette rests in his studio in Constitución along with pieces of fabric, portraits and souvenirs from other filmings. “Did you see how heavy it is?” He observes with amusement, perhaps with the same curiosity with which he must have looked at those passengers getting off the train at Valdés station.
