Few films have captivated fashion in the same way that Alien has. Ridley Scott’s cult classic burst snarling and blood-drenched into cinemas back in 1979, and has been a source of inspiration for countless designers in the years since.
From Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, who dotted their AW23 menswear collection with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them Xenomorph motifs, and Alexander McQueen, whose 2009 Plato’s Atlantis offering was full of out-of-this-world references, to rising star Standing Ground, whose Fashion East finale saw extraterrestrial spinal cords and tails snake down elegant evening gowns, the industry can’t get enough of HR Giger’s ferocious ‘perfect organism’. In 2017, Craig Green even took it one step further: after costume designer Janty Yates unexpectedly knocked on his studio door. The London designer and self-proclaimed horror fanatic went on to create looks for the cast of Alien: Covenant.
Now comes a new instalment in the franchise in the form of Alien: Romulus, which landed last week to pretty high praise across the board. Directed by Fede Álvarez, Romulus sits between the original Alien movie and its sequel Aliens (1986) and tells the story of a group of teenage stowaways who steal a spaceship to escape the mines and fields they’re forced to work in on their colony’s planet. On their way to a verdant new world where the sun still shines, they stop off at what they believe to be an enormous abandoned vessel, and here, it wouldn’t take a genius to grasp, is where shit hits the fan.
Further cementing the link between fashion and the Alien franchise are this movie’s cast. Miu Miu campaign star Cailee Spaeny takes the lead role of Rain, while Tyler (Archie Renaux) is a former runway model, walking for the likes of Nasir Mazhar. Meanwhile, synthetic Andy, played by Industry’s David Jonsson, today announced an upcoming project which will explore four friends entering the world of fashion retail. But while Mazhar’s tracksuits and trainers might not look out of place within the Alien universe, there’s not a hint of Miu Miu throughout Romulus, with Speany and her co-stars fighting off facehuggers, chestbursters, and full-grown adult Xenomorphs in ravaged costumes by Fede Álvarez’ frequent collaborator, Carlos Rosario.
Rosario, who was finishing up a trip to an Ayurvedic retreat and “feeling very zen” when he got the call about the job, could not say no to working on a new Alien movie, and signed on the dotted line before he had even read the script. “I was just like ‘Yes, yes!’ Alien and all those films are so iconic, and I have been a fan for so long. I was never going to turn it down.” What followed was one of the biggest challenges of his career, as he set about creating endless blood, gut, and mud-splattered exact multiples of each look for continuity purposes, and figured out ways of making each character’s clothes dynamic enough to tear in half or even quarters as prosthetic extraterrestrials ripped through their bodies. Perhaps most fun of all, though, is just how many subtle easter eggs, designed to delight die-hard fans, the movie crams in – and the costumes are no exception.
Here, as the movie continues to blow competition out of the box office, Rosario discusses working very specifically with Reebok, the process behind giving clothes “a past and a future”, and coming face to face with those formidable Xenomorphs for the first time.
“[Seeing the aliens for the first time] was amazing! They were actually in the office next to ours, and it was actually one of my favourite moments from my whole career to go into that warehouse with all those facehuggers and chestbursters – there must have been about 70 of them lined up. And then the Xenomorphs were huge. I was like a little kid in a candy store” – Carlos Rosario
Hi Carlos! So to start with, I’d love to know when you first saw the original Alien movie and what you made of it.
Carlos Rosario: Well, like most people, I saw it when I was really young, actually – probably a few years after it came out, because I was too young to see it in the cinema. So I was about 13 or 14, and somebody gave me the video tape. I remember I would watch ten minutes at a time, in the middle of the day during my lunch break when I would come home from school, because I was so petrified I had to keep switching it off – everything is way more amplified when you’re a kid, right? So I was terrified, but my curiosity would get the better of me and I had to know what happened next. Movies like that, they really get printed onto your being, in a much more powerful way than they would if you saw them as an adult.
Going back to the start. How did you get into costume design?
Carlos Rosario: So I really wanted to get into fashion first – growing up in France, sometimes on the news they’d show a short clip of the Haute Couture shows in Paris, and I remember specifically seeing some of Gianni Versace’s Couture shows when he was at the height of his fame. I remember thinking that I’d never seen anything as beautiful as some of his clothes – they were so colourful against the sleek black glass of the runway, and they were worn by all the top supermodels at the time. I was just overwhelmed by the beauty, and wanted to understand it – it felt very mysterious to me, and I wanted, somehow, the grab it and be a part of it.
Closer to home, I was obsessed with the clothes my mother and grandmother wore. My grandmother was a patternmaker, so I’d watch her putting the fabric on the table and cutting out pieces without a pattern, making us little aprons when we were kids. And my mom… I always called her my Sophia Loren, because she dressed beautifully when I was little. She would be dressed up even at 8AM just to go to the market, high heels on. She had this beautiful blue polka dot dress by Thierry Mugler that I loved. So off I went to fashion school in Paris, and did internships with Vivienne Westwood and Dior.
Costumes, however, really chose me, it feels like pure destiny. I decided to go to Los Angeles when I was about 21, just on a holiday, but someone said to me ‘Since you’re going to Hollywood, there are many studios making movies over there, so why don’t you take your drawings with you?’ So I was like sure, and made this little package of all my drawings I did for Dior and Westwood, and at school, and went off to Hollywood. I didn’t really have a plan, but someone encouraged me to take my package and show it to the Costume Designers Guild. I got really lucky, because the director of the jury really liked my drawings and became one of the costume designers on Batman & Robin (1997), and a few weeks later he called me and asked if I wanted to do the illustrations for the movie for him, and of course I said yes. So there I am – 21 years old in Hollywood, barely speaking English, no money, just my little portfolio. And that’s how my career started.
You’ve worked with Fede a bunch of times. Why do you enjoy working together, and why do you feel you work so well together?
Carlos Rosario: Yeah, I’ve worked with him four times, and we do work really well. First of all, I think it’s because we’re both Latin – although I’m French, my parents are from Spain and I speak Spanish fluently, and he’s from Uruguay, so we really bonded quickly the first time we met – being able to connect in our maternal language maybe allowed us to connect more deeply than if I was working with a director with whom I had to speak English every day. The more we worked together, the more I understood his taste, what he liked and didn’t like, and he kept trusting me, so my confidence grew about the ideas I would give him. It’s a great relationship, in which we’re still constantly learning about each other.
What was your reaction when you got the call asking you to do Alien?
Carlos Rosario: I was actually in India, on an Ayurvedic retreat, and I was about to leave. I was feeling totally zen, super enlightened, incredibly well and positive. I was packing up my bags to go to the airport and Fede video-called me. He said ‘Listen, I’m gonna do the new Alien film, and I would like you to be part of it’. Of course, I didn’t even have to read the script, I was just like ‘Yes!’ Alien and all those films are so iconic, and I have been a fan of the franchise for so long. I was never going to say no, obviously! (laughs)
What was it like coming face to face with that famous Xenomorph for the first time?
Carlos Rosario: It was amazing! They were actually in the office next to ours, and it was actually one of my favourite moments from my whole career to go into that warehouse with all those facehuggers and chestbursters – there must have been about 70 of them lined up. And then the Xenomorphs were huge. I was like a little kid in a candy store. I think everyone, including Fede, was really blown away by how realistic they felt and how lucky we were to work with such iconic people that worked on creating the first Xenomorphs for the first movie. It was one of those moments where you’re like ‘Okay wow, this is as surreal as my life is gonna get’.
“It’s actually really beautiful [to work with such a limited palette], because we created all these muddy textures on the clothes for the colony and on our lead characters’ costumes. They were pieces of art, in the end, you know? And there’s an art to making each piece look interesting on screen, and making sure the dirt is in the right place for continuity reasons – it’s not like you can just smear it anywhere” – Carlos Rosario
What was your first meeting like? What did you talk about, and what was the brief from Fede like, and what did you both want to achieve?
Carlos Rosario: Our first meeting was really mostly about understanding what the colony was about, because in order to design our characters, our main characters, we needed to understand where they were living, where they were coming from – that was really the most important thing. So we started talking about all those different groups of people that were living in the colony, from the farmers, to the miners, and then the different kinds of elements we would have to create in order to define those groups, and then subsequently define our lead actors.
The second thing that came up in the first meeting was the Reebok sneakers Rain (Cailee) wore. That was one of the very first things Fede said to me – Ripley had worn Reeboks in the original movies, and he wanted Rain to wear them, too. So one of the first things I did was reach out to Reebok to discuss a collaboration.
The third thing I asked him about was the general feel of this movie – I always need to understand what the vision for the director is so I can keep everything aligned with that. His answer was very interesting. He explained that, since this movie sits between Alien and Aliens, the first two movies, it needs to feel very 80s, but he didn’t want me to design as if I was trying to design something that looked like it was for the 80s – instead, he asked me think as if I was making this movie and designing the costumes in the 80s. Our concept of the future and the concept they had of the future in the 80s were so different, right? He wanted me to tap into that. I loved it, and I think it really comes across well in the film, actually.
It really did! And so the lead characters. What was it like working with them – was it a collaborative process?
Carlos Rosario: The cast really came in at the last minute, so it was a little tricky since for every costume we needed many, many multiples. I knew that when the actors came in, we’d start the project in a few weeks, so I had ten multiples of each look ready, but in the end we needed about 25 to 30 multiples. When the cast finally came in, thankfully it worked out pretty well – we were finally able to feel the personalities of each character in a new way, and that’s when we started figuring out how to shift things about, how to elevate their identity through little details.
Fede is really meticulous about stuff like that, and really wants to make sure, in a simple way – maybe through a tiny accessory here or there – that we tell the audience who the character is. So Rain has the shoulder pad, and Andy has his little fanny-pack. And it’s those details that to me are some of the most exciting elements.
I love how you talked about falling in love with fashion through beautiful collections by Mugler and Versace, but those clothes are so different to what you create now. Did it ever feel limiting to work in such dark colour palettes, with clothes that you know are going to be trashed and destroyed through filming? And how do you play with texture and tone?
Carlos Rosario: No, actually, because I find that there is so much beauty in dirt – you just had to make it look good on camera. It’s actually really beautiful, because we created all these muddy textures on the clothes for the colony and on our lead characters’ costumes. They were pieces of art, in the end, you know? And there’s an art to making each piece look interesting on screen, and making sure the dirt is in the right place for continuity reasons – it’s not like you can just smear it anywhere.
I wanted to make sure that all the clothes would be overdyed, would be broken down, would have those amazing muddy textures layered on top of them. Tto me there is a great beauty in the darkness of the clothes, the depth of their colour – you give them a past and a future at the same time, you know? You give them life. You try to imprint on these clothes some kind of adventure that they are going through, and I find the process really one of the most fascinating things about working in costume.
“For Navarro we made a Hawaiian shirt, which was inspired by the one worn by Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) in Alien. I didn’t want to lean too much into the old movies, and really wanted to align with the vision of the director, but it was good to have a bit of fun with it and incorporate things that would make the fans happy” – Carlos Rosario
Were there any specific designers on the moodboard when you began thinking about the costumes?
Carlos Rosario: Not really. When I first went into it, I was mostly thinking about the colony, because I knew it was going to be a multicultural setting – Fede was very good at selecting people from a lot of different backgrounds and of all different races. Since we had all these different groups, like the farmers and the miners, I did a lot of research into American workwear, pieces from the 40s, 50s, and 60s – these very industrial garments made from hardy canvas and materials like that.
Then I looked further afield, and dipped into different uniforms from across the world, from Eastern Europe to Russia and beyond, so I could really give layers to the looks and help bring to life this post-apocalyptic feeling through a mish-mash of different elements. We also made a lot of raincoats, because I wanted to convey the colony’s reality of facing very harsh living conditions – we deconstructed them and made them really dirty, these ponchos and overcoats, and layered them over beaten-up hoodies and coveralls.
In terms of my lead characters, I developed those looks to become a little more distinctive. So Bjorn (Spike Fearn) is a miner, and he has the overalls with a lot of industrial zippers incorporated, while Kay (Isabela Merced) was in something a little more farmer-like in a pair of dungarees – they felt a little like gardening overalls.
For the last movie in the franchise, Alien: Covenant, costume designer Janty Yates collaborated with Craig Green on costumes. Did you work with any specific designers on this film?
Carlos Rosario: The Reebok sneakers Rain wears of course, Kay wore a pair of Converse, Andy’s were from Crafted Society, and Tyler’s were from Y-3. There were some leather jackets from Alpha Industries, some Dickies shirts, but we made everything else pretty much.
I loved that the film was full of little easter eggs that linked back to the original movies and Prometheus. Were there any hidden within the costumes?
Carlos Rosario: So for Navarro we made a Hawaiian shirt, which was inspired by the one worn by Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) in Alien. I didn’t want to lean too much into the old movies, and really wanted to align with the vision of the director, but it was good to have a bit of fun with it and incorporate things that would make the fans happy. We designed the print, had 50 yards printed, and made all those multiples of it. For Kay, my inspiration was Newt from Aliens – the little girl. I think the characters felt very similar. So the overalls are a little nod to hers.
“There’s padding around the ankle, which imitates the padding on the walls of the ship. We changed the white laces to red ones to give them a bit more of a pop in the dark. And I added a red sole to the shoe, because I knew there would be a lot of scenes without gravity, so I wanted to make sure the underside of the shoe was interesting in that respect” – Carlos Rosario on the custom Reebok sneakers worn by Rain
Can you tell me a bit more about working on the Reeboks? Was it a collaboration or did they just give you an existing shoe?
Carlos Rosario: We wanted them to be an homage to the original Alien, but we wanted to put our own spin on them, so I went to Reebok and worked on the custom style you see in the movie – Cailee’s character is very different to Ripley, in the way that she is built and the fact that she’s a teenager and everything, so we knew we needed something new. Fede is a big fan of Back to the Future, so he loved the idea of a hi-top sneaker. On my first call with Reebok, I asked them to send me anything they had in the archive that looked like the ones Michael J Fox wore so that would form the basis.
Then we started building on that mould, adding things that we thought would be appropriate for Rain. So there’s padding around the ankle, which imitates the padding on the walls of the ship. We changed the white laces to red ones to give them a bit more of a pop in the dark. And I added a red sole to the shoe, because I knew there would be a lot of scenes without gravity, so I wanted to make sure the underside of the shoe was interesting in that respect.
Lastly, I wanted to keep the palette really minimal and the sneaker white. Usually everything is really dark in a horror movie or a thriller like this. If you want your character to feel grounded in the dark, having white sneakers roots the actor’s legs on the floor. And then with the flashes of red, it was a bit about giving her this kind of warrior energy.
It must be mega challenging to work on a movie in which so much action takes place and there’s so much gore throughout. What kind of challenges did you face?
Carlos Rosario: The most challenging part of creating the costumes wasn’t the artistic part of it, like creating the characters and the colony though – it was the technical part of it, in that a lot of the clothes had to form a specific function or action. You have to make different versions of the same look that will fit into a harness, for example, and different iterations for stunt doubles. But hardest of all was to figure out how I needed to transform the costume so the characters could perform their death. Sometimes they needed to be divided into two or three different parts in order to allow different prosthetics to come out of them.
For example, Navarro (Aileen Wu, SPOILERS) who is the first to die after a chestburster explodes from her chest. So basically, she had a fake body from the head down, and her real body is under the floor, and a prosthetic is attached to her fake chest to become the creature that is bursting out. The costume needed to be divided into two, so one part would go under the floor, and the other would go through the action of the chestburster. And it was a similar process with Kay, when she gives birth. Her body was under the surface and there’s a prosthetic on top. It was super complicated to figure out, but so satisfying when we did.
Tough question, and maybe you’re biased, but what is your favourite Alien movie?
Carlos Rosario: I mean I’m very attached to Romulus (laughs) but I would say there is nothing like that original one. It was art. It was so minimalist, yet so powerful, and it’s one of those movies in which you’re faced with your fears. It fucks with your mind.
Click through the gallery above and check out the one below to revisit the time Craig Green created costumes for Alien: Covenant.
Craig Green Alien: Covenant5 Images
