How Should A Cannibal Dress?

“If a cannibal, why hot?” This is not an original thought of mine but the fifth most-liked comment on Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram from November 25. The actor posted a grainy film still of his character, Lee, from the new movie Bones and All, shirtless and slathered in blood, with a (formerly) white shell necklace wrapped around his neck and a lit Marlboro dangling from his lips.

The comment made me laugh, because it reminded me of my own twisted thoughts while watching the movie. Lee and Maren (Taylor Russell) are teenage cannibals on a road trip. They’re definitely murdering people, but you sympathize with them anyway. I think a lot of that has to do with the costume design. The hot cannibal wardrobe is, to my eye, really appealing—and it gives them both an unmistakable vulnerability.

I’ll be honest. I wanted to see Bones and All because of the fashion—not what the characters wear in the teaser photos, but what Taylor Russell wore on the press tour: vintage Vivienne Westwood, archival Ralph Lauren, and haute couture Schiaparelli. Her film festival looks captivated me to the point where I watched the trailer on a loop—and it wasn’t until my fourth rewatch that I even realized the protagonists of the film ate human flesh.

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I went into the theater with almost no information about the story. All I knew for certain was that people kept using the following words to describe it: Tender. Beautiful. Heart-wrenching. Romantic. No one really mentioned all the gore. But 10 minutes into the film, I started to understand when Maren bit off her friend’s ring finger at a sleepover, then broke down into remorseful tears. These aren’t cannibals in the way Hannibal Lecter is; they don’t want to have this urge. And apparently, cannibals who don’t really want to be cannibals wear soft grunge.

The wardrobe of loose floral dresses, slouchy T-shirts, and shredded denim feels slightly out of place for the 1980s, which is when the film is set. But costume designer Giulia Piersanti is sending a message by not dressing Lee and Marin in the bold colors, parachute pants, or puffed shoulders that were mainstream at the time. It’s clear they’re the kind of misfits who were the originators of the grunge aesthetic, before it became commodified by people who could afford non-ripped denim, but wanted to dress like they couldn’t. It all feels authentic on Maren and Lee, a chosen family of two, rejected by everyone close to them, with barely any money to their name. If the film wanted to set us up to hate them, it wouldn’t have put them in such pretty clothing.

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Piersanti has made pretty costumes for Bones and All’s director, Luca Guadagnino, before, notably in Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria. For the latter, Piersanti designed a custom print for a dress inspired by a Louise Bourgeois drawing of scattered women’s hip bones. From afar, it looked like simple gold embroidery of cherry-tree branches.

That quiet creepiness is evident in Bones and All’s costumes, too: The raw edges and pastel florals of Lee’s button-downs suggest maybe they used to be a meal’s old dress he reworked into a top. But he isn’t wearing them like trophies. Instead, there’s a softness and ease to his looks and Maren’s, reminiscent of those worn by the characters in Call Me by Your Name. Everything Elio and Oliver and Maren and Lee wear feels tender in a way that feels a little sad, like they each picked out these little denim shorts and chunky patterned sweaters to dress up for someone else when they can’t even look at themselves.

At a diner shortly after meeting (where, thankfully, they opt for pancakes and cereal), Lee tells Maren he doesn’t mind her hanging around him because she “seems nice,” to which she replies, “I am nice.” Lee “eats,” as he calls it, only when he feels like his meal had it coming. Maren, by contrast, acts impulsively, actively avoiding situations that will make her want to eat. At one point, she even puts the burden of finding a meal entirely on Lee so she can remove herself from the guilt she feels after.

Maren and Lee don’t identify with their cursed compulsion. They don’t see themselves as pretty young monsters like the audience does. And instead of someone like Portia on The White Lotus, who dresses like she doesn’t know who she is or who she wants to be, Maren and Lee dress like two people with an acute, aching sense of self. They know who they are. But that doesn’t stop them from trying to look like somebody else.

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The wardrobe makes it clear they’re searching for a sense of normalcy, but it also feels strange to say they don’t dress like cannibals, because what should a cannibal dress like? Other monsters portrayed in cinema have a fixed aesthetic, like eternally young vampires dressed in sexy black lace dresses and sleek leather jackets. Cannibals don’t, because they’re not entirely mythical. The most chilling thing about this kind of behavior is that it has actually existed, and like all the evil humans are capable of, it doesn’t come with a set costume.

But Bones and All isn’t necessarily making a point about cannibalism so much as crafting an allegory. By dressing Maren and Lee in the kind of grunge uniform that has become the universal wardrobe of the romantically depressed and sensitive, Piersanti sets us up to view them as people first. Their struggles with self-acceptance make it clear that all the agony over flesh-eating is really just a metaphor for being an outsider, with outsider desires. Some have suggested it’s specifically about queerness; others have said Lee’s aesthetic feels so analogous to Kurt Cobain’s that it must be about addiction. But it could just as easily be viewed through the lens of anything deemed unacceptable by society (which, in the conformist ’80s, was a long, long list).

The grunge look has been romanticized for years, and it’s often thrown on characters to make them look edgy. But in Bones and All, it feels genuine, because it’s worn by tormented people who are filled with self-loathing but still yearn for self-knowledge. In the final 10 minutes of the film, Lee asks Maren, “Do you think I’m a bad person?” It’s clear they see themselves in each other, and so she can’t give him the answer he wants. But seeing him in his pink patterned top, with his blank, teary eyes, it doesn’t feel out of the realm of possibility to think maybe, somehow, he isn’t all bad either.

This article originally appeared in Harper's BAZAAR US.