“I want to write something new, something extraordinary and ...

Fitzgerald’s prose in The Great Gatsby is rich and full of description, and
Martin mined it extensively for information on everything from what each character’s
upbringing would have been like, to where they lived and the clothes they wore.
“It always starts with the script, the ideas, the images and the story that Baz
brings to the table. He will always have a kind of visual philosophy that he wants to
follow in order to help tell the story,” Martin explains. “So, certainly we did an
enormous amount of literary study about F. Scott Fitzgerald, about his world, his
context, his life, but we also did an enormous amount of historical study on the visual
context of the world. That ranged from everything from accessing the large library at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a huge costume library and costume
archive, to accessing all kinds of things on New York and the surrounding boroughs.”
Some flexibility was allowed for the timeframe, ensuring they had some of the
best fashion moments of the era to work with. “The book was set in the summer of
1922, published in 1925, and it foreshadowed the Crash, so we made a rule that we
could use that decade,” Martin establishes. “In the costumes, for the men, we erred
closer to the beginning of the decade—because we went for a much slimmer
silhouette. For the women it was later in the decade, when there was much more of
a body-conscious silhouette.”
When he sees Gatsby’s choice of attire, Tom may be in disbelief at such a
preposterous choice, but it would be hard to find a more defining look for Gatsby’s
character—the pink suit, so incredibly stylish but decidedly out of place in the world
in which he so desperately wishes to belong.
For a lot of the male costumes, Martin worked closely with Brooks Brothers, the
American heritage brand, who provided more than 2000 garments for the film,
including both formalwear—200 tuxedos—and daywear, helping to comprise the
approximately 1200 costumes in total.
“One of the reasons we felt this association was so important is that Brooks
Brothers have been the purveyor of preppy clothes, and in fact they sold to
Fitzgerald,” she says. “They had a huge archive of Fitzgerald’s letters where he was
ordering clothes by mail.”
Martin researched the rationale behind every minute detail in the book—from
the robin’s egg blue of Gatsby’s chauffeur’s uniform to Daisy’s tricorn hat—and she
also added extra details to the costumes to help the actors get into character.
“This is an example of the genius of CM,” says Edgerton. “Tom Buchanan is
described as being Yale educated and part of the upper echelons of Yale society,
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