How 'Avatar's Costume Designer Did The Dressing for 'Jojo Rabbit'

Shifting gears from working on the biggest fantasy saga of all time to a satirical comedy about Adolf Hitler, rarely anything else can be poles apart. That is also the case here with Mayes C. Rubeo, who worked on Avatar previously and is also the costume designer of Taika Waititi led film, Jojo Rabbit.

We all know how there have been numerous versions of Adolf Hitler over the years and while some have been satirical, others have been one-sided to say the least. That was taken into consideration amongst other things for Jojo Rabbit. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Rubeo said, "Waititi was the driving force on the costumes. He was very specific in what he wanted the costumes to be, and we had long intensive conversations about the looks. We wanted it to look like wartime through the eyes of a child and do something unexpected." Referencing the wartime aesthetics of Italian Neorealist '40s films, her goal was that "the movie should be World War II in the summertime with brightness as seen through JoJo’s eyes. We did not want this to be a [black and white] documentary, we wanted to do something different in a respectful way."

As for the clothes worn by Waititi's scatterbrained clownish Hitler, Rubeo says, "while this Hitler was just a suggestion only, we had to get his suits right because it’s historical." This translated into his brown paper bag-colored uniform made up of a khaki shirt, safari-style belted jacket and "a voluminous pair of riding pants" with a swastika patch.

Sam Rockwell’s Captain Klenzendorf portrays the Jungvolk’s flamboyant leader, who first approached Rubeo with a simple request, as the designer reflects, "He came into my wardrobe trailer with a picture of Bill Murray from Saturday Night Live and said, 'This is who I want to look like.'" The look for the character, who goes for a more unorthodox and heroic departure from the regimented military uniforms (think “colorful and homemade”) as the end of the Third Reich is on the horizon, was conceived by the designer as “a uniform made by someone who knows almost nothing about the rules of design." 

In designing the wardrobe for JoJo’s mom Rosie Betzler (Scarlett Johannsson), Rubeo's assistant costume suggested a chic look. Historically women of the period wanted to be fashionable and more formally dressed amidst all the pending gloom and doom. Researching the looks of the era, the designer first created mood boards with everything from smart, architecturally inspired hats and tweed, plaid and zigzag Missoni-style patterns to high-waisted baggy pants and colorful short-sleeve sweaters.

The majority of the clothes were custom made, along with a few vintage pieces from Italian costume houses. "Rosie had class and taste, and I wanted to portray her in a way that she might have been a friend of Elsa Schiaparelli who would have had the designer do something for her in better times," says Rubeo. "I flew to New York to meet with Scarlett, and she is such an artist and knew exactly who her character was. We decided she should wear pants as this was an era when pants came into fashion but not accessible to many people."

Since Johansson’s character had an artistic background and hides a young German girl in her house, the designer dressed her in lots of color, detailing, "Color was important in the movie and I wanted to show that part of the ‘heart’ there was during wartime and the sacrifice for a good cause."