by Before Kim and Kanye, Posh and Becks or Britney and Justin, there was Elvis and Priscilla.
Sofia Coppola’s Hollywood biopic Priscilla – an official selection at the Venice film festival and soon to be released in the UK – tells the story of America’s first couple in the 1960s from the perspective of a young Mrs Presley. Priscilla Beaulieu, a 14-year-old schoolgirl when she met Elvis, spent the early years of her relationship partying with the most famous man in the US at night before donning her uniform to attend a Catholic school during the day.
A stark cinematic portrait of an unequal marriage reveals how Elvis used fashion as a tool to control Priscilla, molding his wife into a feminine image of himself to frame their public image as the perfect couple. Priscilla’s light brown hair, first seen in a ponytail, is dyed black at Elvis’ direction to match his own hair. Then, it is placed into a beehive that reflects the height of his signature quiff.
“That dress doesn’t suit you,” Elvis coldly tells Priscilla when she picks out an earth-toned outfit in a store. “You are a little girl. You have to keep away from the prints, baby.” He buys her a blue dress with wasps, telling her she can’t wear brown because it reminds him of the army.
As the world’s heartbroken wife, Priscilla was the envy of millions, but the film portrays her as a woman struggling to assert her identity. Coppola has described her screenplay, based on Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, as a love story. Priscilla praised the film, describing it as “straight forward” in terms of accuracy. But Elvis’ estate, Elvis Presley Enterprises, rejected Coppola’s request for music rights, and as a result no Elvis songs appear on the soundtrack.
“The Priscilla you see on screen is Elvis’ fantasy of who she is,” says Stacey Battat, the film’s costume designer. “He had a very clear image of his ideal woman, and he projected that onto Priscilla. She lives like a queen, but he has all the power.”
In one stunning scene, Priscilla lays out dresses on her bed in an array of feminine sugary colors. Each dress is accessorized with its own jewel-encrusted pistol in a matching shade. It’s a neat visual metaphor for how clothes became a battlefield in Presley’s marriage. It is predicted, on screen, that Priscilla will eventually leave the marriage, when we see her begin to push back against Elvis’ tastes, wearing blouses and trousers instead of his preferred dresses, and exchanging her beehive signed for hair worn flat and loose in Gloria. Steinem-esque middle parting.
Tamara Deverell, the film’s production designer, called Priscilla “the story of women in North America told through hair and makeup”.
“Clothes are such an important part of storytelling,” says Battat. “Costume design has historically been under-appreciated in Hollywood, which has to do with the fact that it has traditionally been a woman’s job in a man’s industry. But Sofia appreciates what costumes can bring to character development.”
“You know that saying – you want a whore in the bedroom, a woman in the living room? That was Elvis. Priscilla was his ideal wife, and he wanted to keep her pristine. “Sexually, he went out with all kinds of women,” says Battat. One of the ways Elvis exerts control over Priscilla is by stifling her emerging sexuality, insisting his wife keep her virginal, doll-like appearance and refusing to have sex with her after her daughter to conceive a daughter.
But Coppola and Battat also wanted to show the romance and affection that accompanied control and gas lighting in the suffocating atmosphere of Gracelands, the Presley mansion. “We know Elvis wore reading glasses, but he never wore them in public,” says Battat. “So we showed him how Priscilla only saw him, the handsome Southern boy she fell in love with, reading next to her in bed wearing a sweater and glasses.”
Battat created 120 looks worn by Priscilla, played by Cailee Spaeny. The film was shot in just 30 days, but the story spans 13 years and “the silhouette is really important to understand that timeline,” says Battat. “For the first part of the film, she is wearing a crinoline under her pleated skirts. Women still wear pleated skirts now – what makes a pleated skirt look 1950s is the fullness of wearing a crinoline underneath.”
Historical accuracy was balanced with “pieces that fit now, so it’s not too sharp for the modern eye”, she says. “So the heart necklace that Priscilla wears on screen is a piece she’s worn now too, so we made it more prominent, because it’s so interchangeable, and that works.”
Coppola’s film is a fashion moment as well as a cinematic one. She first created in 1999, The Virgin Suicides, a noble, girlish dreamscape that has since disappeared from popular culture. Coppola said she wanted Graceland’s interior to feel “like a wedding cake” on screen, and cited William Eggleston’s 1984 photographs of Graceland – with close-ups of swagged and saccharine velvet drapes and soft, flowery furnishings – as visual reference.
Most of the costumes were made in-house, but Chanel, for whom Coppola is a long-term ambassador, created a custom white lace wedding dress for Spaeny, based on photographs of the Presleys’ 1967 wedding.
Battat says the process of making the film – which ends with 28-year-old Priscilla settling for a divorce from Elvis – left her “comforted with Priscilla’s strength”.
“I can’t imagine how brave she was, to find it in herself to walk away from all that.”
Priscilla opens in the UK on January 1 and in Australia on January 18.
