Arianne Phillips is working the racks at Decades, the famed vintage emporium on Melrose, flipping through a wild mix of clothes from the 1920s to the 1980s, deciding in seconds if a piece is a yay or a nay.
"We're going for a combination of Chelsea girl Marianne Faithfull-Nico and California girl Michelle Phillips-Rickie Lee Jones," says Phillips, which might sound a little crazy, except that she is the wardrobe stylist and visual auteur for some of today's greatest rock 'n' roll icons.
Madonna's geisha guise? Phillips was behind it. Courtney Love's cleaned-up moment in snow white Versace? Her again. Lenny Kravitz's flared pants and shrunken T-shirts? All Phillips.
Fashion designer -- An article in Saturday's Calendar section about fashion designer Arianne Phillips stated that she dressed Bruce Lee for the 1994 film "The Crow." It was actually his son, Brandon Lee, who starred in that film.
Besides being the fashion visionary behind hundreds of music videos and album covers, Phillips is also a distinctive film costumer. She dressed Bruce Lee as a black leather goth in "The Crow" and Lori Petty as a neo-feminist heroine in military fatigues and corsets in "Tank Girl." Most recently, she outfitted Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash for "Walk the Line."
But right now she's shopping for a new client: the Dixie Chicks.
Leaning over plastic storage containers at Resurrection, another vintage boutique on Melrose Avenue, she paws through slouchy boots, looking for sizes 10, 8 1/2 and 5 1/2 .
"I first agreed to meet them because they made that comment about George Bush," she says of the Dixie Chicks. "The way they are in person, they dress well themselves. But in their visuals, it's big hair. They have come to me to up the ante and try a new approach."
Phillips is the rare talent able to thrive both as a costume designer and celebrity stylist, working in two worlds that have traditionally been at odds -- the artists who build costumes from the ground up versus the glorified personal shoppers. She sits at the intersection of fashion, rock 'n' roll and Hollywood at a time when celluloid costume dramas are increasingly being eclipsed by personal costume dramas, played out in paparazzo photographs.
Phillips' approach is a blend of the two disciplines: She understands how to dress celebrity clients as characters in a real-life narrative, and film characters such as Cash as real-life stars.
For "Walk the Line," she had a tiny budget and just eight weeks to research, gather and in some cases create the 1,000 or so costumes. And if it looks authentic, it should. To save money, she borrowed costumes from vintage clothing vendors all over the country. But for the Cash character, she spared no expense, having his black suits and tux shirts made from scratch.
