The Important Role of Fashion in ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’
An interview with the writer of the hit Netflix film, and best-selling book of the same name, on her eye for style: ‘It was almost obsessive.’
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Have you seen Luckiest Girl Alive? The movie, which grew out of the 2015 novel of the same name by Jessica Knoll, has been at the top of the global Netflix watch list since it premiered earlier this month. Luckiest Girl Alive stars Mila Kunis as Ani FaNelli, a hard-edged, sharp-tongued writer whose carefully choreographed life unravels with a documentary about a pair of traumatic events from her prestigious private high school.
(*Important trigger/content warning before you watch: The story involves graphic depictions of both sexual assault and a school shooting.)
After the book was a runaway hit, Jessica revealed in a 2016 essay — which the New York Times called “raw and chilling” — that she based Luckiest Girl Alive on her own experience being raped by three of her classmates.
“The only way I felt comfortable speaking up was under the cover of fiction, and I poured my self-loathing and agony into the invented character of Ani,” Jessica wrote recently in Vogue. Rage emanates off the screen as the story weaves between Ani’s quest for revenge as an adult and flashbacks to the horrific traumas she endured as a teen.
Luckiest Girl Alive is a powerful, disturbing movie — and it’s a fashion film, according to Jessica, who wrote the screenplay, and costume designer Alix Friedberg. Jessica worked at Cosmopolitan before becoming a New York Times bestselling author. Clothing is front and center in her descriptions, about both Ani’s experience and her own. In the Vogue essay, Jessica describes how she “wore Victoria’s Secret tank tops with the built-in bras when I should have worn J.Crew cable knits.” And check out the thought Jessica put into what she wore for her cameo in the film, which she summed up in this Insta post, below.
I recently Zoomed with Jessica and Alix to learn more about the role fashion played in Luckiest Girl Alive, why the accessories helped place the film in 2015, and how Ani’s look evolved from sharp to something softer. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed. (Note: The last question contains spoilers.)
The Important Role of Fashion in ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’
Mila Kunis as Ani and Finn Wittrock as Luke in Luckiest Girl Alive. Note the Goyard tote. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
What was the mood board like for Luckiest Girl Alive?
Jessica Knoll, writer: First of all, it was set in 2015. And so there was a nuance to the clothes. We didn’t want it to be costume-y seven years ago. But Alix, how many conversations did we have about New York in those mid 2010s? What were the bags everyone was carrying?
Alix Friedberg, costume designer: The accessories were what was most indicative of 2015. The Celine bag and the YSL tribute sandal are all the things that Jess had very much written. If you read the book, with every single character, Jessica first describes what they’re wearing. And that is what I was so excited about, she was so in tune with what each of these characters were wearing and it was so important to her.
Jessica, as a writer, why did you want to describe the clothes in such detail for the book?
Jessica: For so long, I felt like I needed to be a chameleon. I never felt like I fit in, I always felt like I was trying to assimilate. So my eye was super keen: This person is wearing that, that's how they're doing it. Okay. Okay, taking notes, and now I'm going to try and emulate this. A lot of that attention to detail was born of my own active work. How can I infiltrate these worlds that I don’t feel naturally like I’m cut from the same cloth? Whether that’s the Nantucket world or the New York media world, it was almost obsessive. And Ani is obsessive about it in the book, too.
And why was it important that the movie was set in 2015, the year Luckiest Girl Alive was published as a book?
Jessica: When I conceived this character, when I wrote my essay, it was pre-#MeToo. It’s a different conversation post-#MeToo. There weren’t enough examples in the culture of women coming forward many years after the fact. And that’s an important part of it. Not to say that it’s a cake walk now, but I do think that we just have more examples. Society’s tolerance for believing women is at a way higher threshold than it was pre-2017.
So the fashion helps place the film in 2015?
Alix: I really deferred to Jess on every character, because this is something obviously from her personal experience. She lived in that magazine editor world in that time period. And she was that girl, she was going to Nantucket on the weekends.
Working with Mila, she’s so stunning, so striking and her emotion comes so much from her eyes and her face that I think we decided to keep her simple and chic and let those little accessory details speak to the 2015 of it all. If we started to get too mired in making sure everything was period correct, it would start looking not like a fashion movie — which it is.
I noticed some amazing booties.
Jessica: Yeah. Ani is wearing those kick ass Gucci studded booties when she confronts Dean. We really wanted her to look like she would kick him in the balls.
The wardrobe for Connie Britton, who plays Ani’s mother, is meant to be the opposite of her daughter’s. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
How did you think about the color palette for Ani? I noticed a lot of black and white with a sprinkle of light blue.
Alix: When you look at where Ani was running from, the visual indication of that is Connie Britton’s character [who plays her mother] and all of her cheap stretch, print, bright, in-your-face clothing. Ani wanted to do exactly the opposite and run as far away from that visual manifestation of where she came from.
And I think the New York of it all lends itself to black. Black doesn’t always work on camera, but I think black really worked for this film just to keep her very clean and simple in New York.
But if Ani is on Nantucket, there’s a lot more of that Americana nautical thing happening. It was impossible to sell that Nantucket-y world without using blue. It’s just iconic.
Jessica: Blue was also the color palette of the flashbacks, the visual cue we are moving into her past. The [school] uniforms have that kind of powdery pastel blue. Finn Wittrock, who plays Ani’s fiancé, is wearing that blue shirt the first time we see him.
Ani wears two noticeable pieces by Cartier throughout the film: A watch and the LOVE bracelet. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
A few brands jumped out, too. I got a press release from Cartier about its pieces in the film.
Jessica: That Cartier LOVE bracelet is so of that time. In the book, she doesn’t yet own a Cartier LOVE bracelet, but it's the thing that haunts her around the city. Anytime she goes somewhere and she’s feeling like she’s not passing as one of these tartan blue blood types, she looks and there’s a Cartier LOVE bracelet sliding out of a woman’s sleeve. And it really is this thing that her eye snags on. We knew we needed to get that into the movie somehow, which we did with Ani’s mom having an eye to her Cartier watch.
Alix: Sometimes we can get brands to send us stuff on films, especially if they’re getting a shout-out. But nobody really wants their stuff that’s six or seven years old. We couldn’t use any brand new merch on our show because it would’ve been a dead giveaway. The classic pieces we were able to get our hands on, but a lot of the bags we had to find on RealReal or 1stDibs.
What is the line between true to the 2015 time period and what looks good on screen?
Jessica: We really fought for the vest on Finn (who plays Ani’s fiancé). There’s a scene when he comes in wearing that gray fleece Patagonia vest that all the bankers wear, the Midtown uniform. Our director is British and he was like: It’s the ugliest thing I've ever seen. He would only agree to let him wear it if he was taking it off as he came into the room. And I was like: He has to wear this, even if it's for a minute. When I showed my husband, who is in that world, and his friends, they died. They were like: Oh my God, it's the Midtown uniform!
How about the flashbacks? Tell me about working with those private school uniforms.
Alix: Initially the director and I thought that it should be a private school uniform. We felt like to drop you into that world visually, it would really be beneficial to us to have just a standard uniform. But Jess’s experience, and even in our research, a lot of people didn’t wear uniforms in a private high school. It was more of a Catholic school thing.
Jessica: I was so against it when you first said it. I wanted to get the world so right. At non-denominational, private East Coast schools, they don’t wear uniforms unless it’s religious. Now it’s one of those things I can't believe I ever worried that it would be an issue. Also, Alix did such a great job. Everyone had, within their uniform, their own distinct look.
Chiara Aurelia as Young Ani, second from right, with her high school classmates. The burgundy vest helps her stand out in the pack. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
Alix: Ani’s skirt was a little tighter, a little shorter. She was definitely spilling out of it, certainly in the beginning and less so at the end as she felt a little more self-conscious of her body. But it also, just from a production standpoint, allows you to shoot in and out of those scenes, not worry about continuity as much. Not worry like this day this happened, this day this happened, there’s more of a passage of time. We were shooting in Toronto in the height of the pandemic, so there were a lot of little shortcuts that we needed to make.
Jessica: Remember you took that picture of Carson and he said he felt more in character with the “asshole sunglasses” on his head?
Alix: It was a really happy accident or it was a really good decision in the end. I think you do see their personalities.
Jessica: It was a budget thing, too. It’s a lot easier and then we could use more of our budget to devote to the high fashion moment.
Ani wears a lot of black and white with sharp, defined lines, clothing that matches her intensity. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
My favorite look of the movie was the black sleeveless turtleneck Ani wore for the second part of the documentary interview.
Jessica: It’s every woman's favorite outfit from the film. And every man who worked on the production was like: We hate this. We hate it. But we were like: This outfit is so fierce. It's the perfect outfit for when she delivers that line: All the women will be fine. And then she turns and she stalks out and her hair whips over her shoulder. To me, I think that's my favorite outfit from the whole film. It’s to die for.
By the end of the movie, Ani’s look gets a bit less severe, is that right? The white dress for the rehearsal dinner was so beautiful.
Alix: It’s such a heartbreaking scene and I love how you see her openness for the first time. You see her chest and it’s very vulnerable that whole scene and the lace and all of the things about that was just beautiful.
Jessica: We talked about softening her up a little at the end, when she walks into the New York Times. It’s still black and white, but it’s that flowy white skirt. We wanted something that would just be really beautiful as she's walking.
By the end of the film, Ani wears the same shapes rendered slightly softer. (Photo via Sabrina Lantos/Netflix)
I have to say how moved I was by your movie. I found it to be incredibly powerful, a depiction of female anger that we don’t see often on the screen.
Jessica: I saw someone online describe it a feel-good rape movie, a rape movie with a happy ending. I really love that. Because it’s that fantasy, you get everything. He cops to it. She gets him to say it. She gets that vindication, all of that. It’s the happy ending that no one ever gets.
My thanks to Jessica and Alix. You can find Luckiest Girl Alive on Netflix (and in a bookstore near you). Once you have a chance to watch, hit “Join the discussion” at the bottom of this email and share your thoughts on the film — and the fashion — in the comments of this newsletter.
The So Many Thoughts Newsletter comes out twice a week. You can subscribe and catch up on the archives here, including:
➡️ What Makes Anna Wintour So Powerful?
➡️ An Interview with Downton Abbey Costume Designer Anna Robbins
➡️ A Masterclass on Sartorial Diplomacy from the Ukrainian First Lady
💭 Have Thoughts to share? I’d love to hear them! Hit “Join the Discussion” and leave a comment on my Bulletin page. You can also send me an email at Hello@SoManyThoughts.com. And you can find me on Instagram at @EHolmes.