AT THE START OF Priscilla, the audience is introduced to a 14-year-old whose pastel pink sweaters, heart-shaped pendant necklace and schoolgirl fringe belie the fact that this is the future Mrs Elvis Presley. But as you might expect from a film that is written and directed by Sofia Coppola – who based the biopic on Elvis And Me, Priscilla Presley’s best-selling autobiography about that period of her life – this isn’t a stor y about the so-called King.
In fact, Stacey Battat, Priscilla’s costume designer, who has worked on multiple films with Coppola, purposely avoided using scene-stealing colours on Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla is the one the audience is drawn to. ‘It was important that he was always relegated to background prior to that because it’s her story. She was the thing that popped,’ explains Battat, who was tasked with visually charting her evolution from 14 to 27 years of age, high school student to pregnant wife to mother.
The couple’s love stor y (and eventual undoing ) is told through their clothes, which start off as complementar y before gradually becoming more dissonant. ‘At the beginning , they’re very in tune with each other,’ says Battat. ‘Later, he’s not her sweet boyfriend who wears reading glasses in bed. All of a sudden, he’s also Elvis Presley, the rock star.’
In Germany, where the couple met in 1959, Priscilla’s costumes are childish and made of slightly ‘dusty’ colours as she engages in petulant battles with her parents over Elvis. She was 14 – still at high school and living abroad because of her father’s career in the US Air Force – when she was invited to a party hosted by Elvis, 10 years her senior and serving in the army.
After three years of wistful phone calls, occasional visits and long-distance longing , Priscilla finally gets permission from her reluctant parents to move to Graceland, Elvis’s estate in Tennessee, on the condition she would finish high school and graduate.
Coppola, who gave each department head a mood board at the start of the creative process, explained to Battat, ‘Germany is kind of sad and the sun comes out in Memphis.’ Initially giddy with delight and wearing brighter colours, Priscilla is gradually moulded into his vision. Her mousy brown ponytail is teased into a towering beehive, although it had to be made shorter to suit Spaeny. (For the wedding scene in ’67, Battat also had to modify the dress, made in collaboration with Chanel. ‘We took some vol
