Odysseus is a particularly tricky character to costume. “Odysseus, in our story, deteriorates, he reconstructs, disguises, adapts, survives. He’s evolutionary,” Mirojnick says. “The design challenge was always to allow the audience to feel his erosion without losing the core that really did define him.” Simplicity proved the best route to convey our hero’s shifting identity in the various worlds he inhabits. In the end, she says, “the armor becomes a memory rather than power.”
Ithica, however, was a different story. As Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and her son Telemachus (Tom Holland) await Odysseus’s return, a crowd of impatient suitors urges her to choose a new husband. In fact, the only gleaming bronze viewers will see in the film is on Penelope’s suitors, like Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, whose garments are festooned with intricate brass embellishments. “All of these men are sitting there for years on end waiting to be the king, hoping to be the king, so they are exhibiting their best,” she says.
Robert Pattinson as Antinous.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Even the deities’ wardrobes, which could have easily fallen into the fantasy trap, are defined by their utility. Zendaya’s Athena is expressed through, as Mirojnick puts it, “her simplicity and restraint,” and is fittingly cloaked in off-white linen. As a counsellor to Odysseus, “her presence needed to just glide through that kind of composed authority,” she adds. The same could be said for Calypso (Charlize Theron), who detains Odysseus on her island for seven years. “Her costumes are grounded in the reality of the environment she’s connected to, which is nature, eternity, and isolation,” Mirojnick says. “Everything that she covers her body with is of a practical nature.” Calypso wears a dress topped with a layer of netting, which Mirojnick imagines the nymph would use to fish.
It was a world exhausted and haunted and salt-stained and fractured. Every costume had to carry the feeling
Ellen Mirojnick
Circe is another case of practicality. Rather than having a costume that aids her in some way, though, Mirojnick created a piece that reflected Circe’s beguiling nature and all those who crossed her path. “She has accumulated the artifacts from every single traveler that has passed her door, and she wears them with great pride,” she says. “That makes up who she presents herself as when the men arrive.”
Mia Goth as Melantho and Anne Hathaway as Penelope.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
