How ’Emilia Pérez’s Costumes Pay Homage to Saint Laurent’s History in Netflix’s Musical Thriller

“Emilia Pérez” is one of the year’s most ambitious films, springing to the center of conversation from the moment it premiered at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize and the cast won the Best Actress award, to its release this month on Netflix. The film, directed by Jacques Audiard, stars Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez and Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro and Selena Gomez as Jessi Del Monte, and is a Spanish-language musical based on Audiard’s opera libretto. The story follows Manitas, a cartel leader in Mexico who contacts a lawyer to help him transition in secret and start a new life.  For the project, Audiard tapped Virginie Montel as both artistic director and costume designer. Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent Productions is a coproducer on the film, and many of the costumes came from Vaccarello’s archives. Montel had been involved in this story for so long that the first pages she recalls reading had Saldana’s character as a man. “But then it became a woman’s movie,” she says. The opportunity to work on a musical with big dance numbers appeared to her from the beginning. “It was the singing and dancing. It opens a lot of possibilities that we

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