Some people will walk away from their viewing of Emilia Pérez with one of its many musical numbers stuck in their heads. I left with a different fixation permanently playing on a loop: the image Selena Gomez in character as Jessi, standing in the Swiss snow in a gigantic Saint Laurent fur coat.
Jessi is not quite the main character of this story. That honorific goes to the titular Emilia Pérez, who secretly transitions to become a woman after leading a notorious Mexican drug cartel in the former identity of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte. But Jessi, who was married to Manitas, is a pivotal player in the operatic saga. Without getting too deep into spoilers of how their relationship unravels, her coat in that Swiss mountainside scene strikes an important tone. In all its strong-shouldered, extra-textured glory, it's a symbol of her character's own transformation in the Cannes Film Festival-favorite feature. It's also the rare cinematic universe garment that made me want to shop, just based on the look-at-me silhouette alone.
Virginie Montel, the film's costume designer, establishes early on that the best faux fur coats embody something aspirational for Jessi, when she is living in Manitas's encampment in Mexico. In those early scenes, she's "wearing a fake fur jacket that must be her idea of a country like Switzerland," Montel says.
Fast forward to when she actually lives there. The power of the garment changes. "When years later she leaves [Switzerland] to return to Mexico, we liked the idea that she still had the fake fur, to make a connection, but Jessi wears it differently. Her references have changed, her codes are different," Montel explains. "Her blonde hair and her new silhouette make her character into another person. She's more independent, she's in charge, in a certain way she's stronger."
Many of the pieces worn by Emilia Pérez's leading trio—Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Zoe Saldana—came from a partnership between Montel's wardrobe department and Saint Laurent. "The house of YSL opened its doors to us, including the collection and the archives since Anthony Vacarello," she explains.
From a fiery red suit Saldana wears for a gala number that expresses her character's rage, to the Catherine Deneuve- and Monica Belluci-inspired dresses defining Gascón's transformation into Emilia, every piece was chosen with an eye for stylization and storytelling. Colors and silhouettes are symbolic of their characters' arcs, but they also have a practical side. "Since much of the film takes place at night, we were looking for shiny elements," Montel explains. "For other sequences, we wanted color."
In some cases, even YSL's vast archives didn't have exactly what the team needed—so they went custom. For example, Montel notes, "the blouse worn by Jessi, which needed to sparkle and open easily." (To say exactly why she's opening her shirt would be too much of a spoiler for this post.)
Jessi's over-the-top Saint Laurent outerwear, and especially her faux fur, enters an esteemed canon of fictional women who treat their coats like armor. As the titular character in Anora, Mikey Madison wears (and eventually discards) a mink coat representative of the wealth and status her character believes she'll assume through her marriage to a Russian oligarch's son. On The Penguin, Sofia Falcone's ascension to full-blown mafiosa comes with a "wild-looking" vintage fur coat. These are just a few 2024 examples of a time-honored tradition in costume design and film: When a woman wants to take up space and convey her power—real or imagined—without saying a word, she pulls on a fur coat.
Most of Selena Gomez's press tour to promote Emilia Pérez has left the YSL faux mink on the screen. But for one of her final Los Angeles events, she arrived in a leather coat lined with faux fur by the French designer Nour Hammour. The cut and color weren't anything like her character's, but the energy was the exact same: It's the outerwear of an independent woman. Style-wise, it deserves all the awards.
