‘Priscilla’ Costume Designer Stacey Battat On Capturing Reality Through The Style Of Two Cultural Icons
With her recognizable beehive hair and dark eye makeup, the early photos of Priscilla Presley are inescapable when it comes to American history. Over the past few years, the Presley inspiration has seen a resurgence in pop culture, whether it’s Lana Del Rey emulating some of Pris’ well-known looks, Riley Keough honoring her grandfather in Daisy Jones & The Six, or a chaotic biopic about The King himself.
So, when Sofia Coppola received Priscilla’s approval to adapt her memoir, Elvis And Me, she wanted to take a gentle but real approach to her life story, as it painted a darker portrait of their time together — beyond the picture-perfect one that the general public has seen. This started by assembling an impeccable cast and crew that allowed actors Cailee Spaeny (The Craft: Legacy) and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria) to transform into Priscilla and Elvis completely.
“I thought Priscilla’s story encapsulated something we all go through, but in such a heightened, glamorous way,” Coppola previously told Vogue. “I really wanted to capture how overwhelming that first brush with love is and how confusing it can be trying to understand a man who’s so hot and cold.”
Coppola also enlisted the help of her longtime collaborator, costume designer Stacey Battat, to craft the style as a symbol of Priscilla’s changes — from adolescence and beyond. According to W Mag, Battat, who had previously become friends with the director while working at Marc Jacobs, first started working with her on the costuming for 2010’s Somewhere. Since then, the two have collaborated on Coppola’s films, including The Bling Ring and The Beguiled, which was Battat’s first period-era work.
In total, Priscilla marks their sixth project together. A challenging one, to be sure. After all, transforming two historical icons on the screen is no small feat. According our conversation with Battat, there were six weeks of prep time ahead of the six-week shoot with Coppola providing a mood board for the entire film and the script.
As the film recently released in theaters, we sat down with Battat to speak to some of the key looks — and how they add to the grander portrayal of Priscilla and Elvis.
Priscilla’s First Encounters With Elvis
During Priscilla’s first encounter at Graceland, she witnesses the stripped-down version of Elvis. Instead of portraying him at first as the on-stage icon, he is just a man, softened by the option to put him in knitwear. “I really wanted to make sure that he felt regular, like an intimate, not in lace shirts,” she says of the choice. “And he wasn’t performing that, that he looked non-performative. He looked vulnerable.”
However, this created a challenge for Battat during the prep time. Valentino made many of Elvis’ sweaters for the film, which took about a month through hand-knitting — as “there’s not companies that just manufacture one sweater.” Despite the time crunch, she feels it elevates Jacob Elordi’s take as Elvis the most.
Priscilla Was Stylized To Stand Out From The Party
As for Priscilla, who was still a teenager at the time, the fashion also makes note of just how out of place she is to those surrounding her.
At Elvis’ party, the other attendees are all older. The women sit around, gossiping, as they wear watches and high-quality jewelry. Priscilla is, as they put it in the film, looking like a child. And this was exactly what Battat was aiming to achieve.
“The thing is, 1959, we’re actually closer to the ’60s, so we’re getting into a slimmer silhouette,” Battat shares. “We’re getting away from that kind of puffy petty coat that you see in the ’50s… I wanted to make sure that in the late ’50s when we first meet Priscilla and we first meet Elvis, that she does have a silhouette that reads as younger, younger than the other girls, also younger than she reads later on in the film.”
Elvis’ Controlling Influence On Priscilla’s Style
Throughout the film, fashion continues to serve as a throughline — whether it’s explicitly stated or implicitly delivered in subtle moments, both of which add up to the clothes being a means of control. During one moment, Elvis asks Priscilla if she’d like to go shopping, which she gleefully accepts.
The scene then shifts to Priscilla parading various dresses in a room filled with Elvis and his older male friends. She expresses her discomfort with one feeling too low-cut and grown-up. “I think these clothes are too sophisticated for me,” Spaeny-as-Priscilla says, as the guys encourage her to buy them. “Now, what is that dress?” Elvis asks in another part, when he wakes up to Priscilla wearing a printed dress she picked that he feels is distracting.
In turn, Priscilla becomes a doll of Elvis’ design — being stripped of her identity in the process. She is modeled after the beauty ideals he holds for himself rather than, it seems, what he actually is attracted to in women. Their relationship is dotted with accusations of infidelity: with his co-stars (Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret), with a flirty new woman in California, and more. The ones we do see Elvis’ attraction to are all blonde, while he wanted Priscilla’s hair to be jet black.
By the time the film depicts Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding, the two are nearly identical. Valentino once again played an “immeasurable” role in the costumes, using an “elegant black fabric” to model the rock star’s tuxedo, rather than his paisley original. For Priscilla’s dress, Battat looked at laces with Chanel’s creative director, Virginie Viard, from an earlier collection, using it for a recreation “within the same vibe,” with the silhouette modeled for Spaeny specifically.
How The Real Life Priscilla Informed The Costume Design
With how spot-on the costume design is in the film, it left questions on whether the real Priscilla had any input on the fashion. After divorcing Elvis, she owned a Los Angeles boutique called Bis & Beau, stemming from her love of style. She also serves as an executive producer on Coppola’s film. Although Battat didn’t have direct conversations with her, she was able to pass on questions through Coppola and Spaeny — whether it was about her fashion evolution or how to style Elordi’s Elvis.
“She helped us kind of to understand when she stopped wearing stockings, and what Elvis would wear between shows when he went to his dressing room,” Battat recalls. “So, all of that kind of came from her. And also, just that Elvis never left his bedroom without being fully dressed. And obviously, the stuff that’s in the script comes from her, that he didn’t like her in prints.”
Priscilla Finds Her Own Sense Of Style And Self
Upon watching Priscilla, viewers are struck by the final transformation that Spaeny goes through. Gone are the eyelashes and eyeliner, and her hair noticeably shifts into a ’70s-inspired straightened look. She washes out the black dye for a gentler, natural-looking honey color, seemingly mirroring the inspiration that Los Angeles had on her. And, she starts incorporating prints and jeans into her wardrobe. In real life, Priscilla divorced Elvis around the age of 27, six years after he married her at 21 and met her at 14. We’re then left with the same question she likely would’ve had at the time: Who are you when you’re alone?
It’s around this period, too, when the film starts to depict pieces of the staged Elvis as he tries on various jumpsuits in the living room of the Graceland house or is seen performing on stage in the well-known white ensemble. These were made between the film’s in-house tailor, and a company called B&K Enterprises Costume Company, which is known for making “a lot of that iconic Elvis stuff.”
“They work with the original patterns, and they were able to make the jumpsuit for us and the blue suit that he wears in the photo shoot,” she adds about B&K, revealing that these were some of the first items she tried on Elordi. “It’s a small company. It takes about six months to make one of those jumpsuits.”
By using these extravagant jumpsuits to contrast Priscilla’s new laidback style, it becomes visually clear just how disconnected the two have become. During the first half of Priscilla, Spaeny and Elordi feel coordinated in their style, typically through similar color palettes, like Priscilla’s polka-dot two-piece matching Elvis’ B&W suit when leaving their Las Vegas bender. Priscilla’s adolescence is also marked by bows being present on most of her outfits, being “indicative of the time” and Battat tied it to the Southern phrase, “The bigger the bow, the closer to God.”
However, much like Priscilla’s beehive look, the bows also “tapered out as she got older,” much like her willingness to remain in the marriage.
Battat reflects on an image from a photoshoot she encountered of Elvis and Priscilla, taken shortly before they got divorced — which is recreated in the film. “I think that photo really informed how far they’d come apart, in a visual way,” she points out. In one still from it, Elvis takes a power stance of sorts, as he wears an all-blue suit, and is the one sitting in the chair with a cigar and a staff. Priscilla is in a lavender outfit, posing beside him from the carpet.
“I remember looking at that photo early on with Sofia and us noticing that she was really uncomfortable,” she says. “There’s one photo where he’s kind of gripping her arm, and the real Priscilla looks very uncomfortable.”
“I think there was also more to that photo that felt disconnected, which is, he’s so embellished,” Battat adds. “He’s got a staff and a giant collar and jewelry and eye makeup, and she is pared down, she’s lost the eye makeup, she’s wearing a simple outfit.”
Battat’s costume design work captures not only this disconnect, but also the way that fashion is used as a form of control on Priscilla. Early on in the film, Priscilla wants to work part-time at a clothing store while Elvis is away — a notion he swiftly shuts down. She is meant to be there for him.
In turn, we see her rewarded with extravagance, whether it’s the dresses, a watch, a ring, or any other gift Elvis provides to keep her complacent. Reflecting back to Coppola’s earlier quote, Priscilla does a tremendous job of capturing the relatability, before driving home the eventual message through a collaboration of Battat’s costuming, Coppola’s directorial vision, and the acting work of Spaeny and Elordi: it’s okay to leave Graceland when you find yourself.