With a leather jacket on top and Levi’s jeans on the bottom, the biker look is arguably one of the most classic Americana fashions of all time. It’s an ensemble on full display in Jeff Nichols’ new historical drama The Bikeriders, which follows the fictional Vandals MC motorcycle gang outside of Chicago in the early ‘60s.
Adapted from journalist Danny Lyons’ 1968 photobook of the same name—which documented his travels with Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the midwest from 1963 to 1967— the film’s costume designer Erin Benach had her work cut out for her. Benach, whose credits include A Star Is Born, Birds of Prey, Drive, and Neon Demon, says that she first saw this project as being about the individual characters at the story’s helm—Tom Hardy’s club ringleader Johnny, Austin Butler’s young, freewheeling Benny, and his wife Kathy, played by Jodie Comer. “Secondly, it was about a subculture,” she tells Marie Claire. “Everything you could think of was this anti-norm, counterculture, liberating insanity.”
