Sofia Coppola and Stacey Battat have been friends for two decades. They met when Battat, now Coppola’s go-to costume designer, was working at the Marc Jacobs store in New York City. ‘My neighbour at the Mercer Hotel was Sofia,’ she recalls over Zoom. ‘We would smoke cigarettes outside of our respective places of employment and talk to each other. She said to me, “When I make my next movie, I want you to do the costumes.”’ Three years later, Battat was working as a stylist with no experience in film, but true to her word, Coppola rang her up and asked her to do the wardrobe for Somewhere. ‘I just liked it so much,’ she says of the deep-end plunge in costume design. ‘I love fashion shoots too, but there’s this subtlety to developing a character.’
In the years since, Battat has been the skilful hand behind the costumes of five of the cult director’s movies – from the corseted frills of period psychosexual drama The Beguiled to the tacky noughties excess of The Bling Ring. She is also the creator of the plush, pastel-shaded sartorial universe of Coppola’s latest feature: Priscilla. Adapted from the memoir Elvis and Me, the film paints a sensitive portrait of Elvis and Priscilla’s complicated marriage, starring a shrewdly cast Jacob Elordi as The King, who at 6'5 towers over his petite, baby-faced co-star, Cailee Spaeny.
