Like production designer Dennis Gassner, Renée April also needed a visual cue about the direction of her costume design from Denis Villeneuve. And he gave her the same description about the dystopian world of “Blade Runner 2049”: “Brutal.”
“He said it was worse than the dark and rainy mood of ‘Blade Runner,’ said April, the go-to costume designer for Villeneuve. “They’re in bad shape 30 years later and the earth is not the place to be. It’s more polluted, it’s colder, it’s really kind of dreadful.”
“So I took it from there and made it tougher,” she added. “Also, we didn’t want to do something science-fiction. We wanted to do it realistic. I didn’t want costumes with [lots of] zippers and plastic. So my job was to make the characters believable.” In other words, it was more about survival than fashion.
Starting with K’s Coat
April began, appropriately enough, with the black coat worn by Ryan Gosling’s K, the new replicant blade runner. Instead of the noirish trench coat worn by Harrison Ford’s Deckard, she chose a simple, inexpensive coat made of laminated cotton with a fake fur high collar to shield him from the pollution. It’s all he needs to protect him from the brutal climate.
“It’s pretty ugly on purpose,” April said. “As you can see, he’s not making a ton of money, and what he makes, he puts into Joi [his holographic companion played by Ana de Armas]. “I wanted a very clean cut look, almost military. And we could destroy it all along the movie.”
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