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"I’m wearing a complete mismatch of all of my friends," said Tilda Swinton last night at the Pomellato-hosted New York City premiere of "We Need To Talk About Kevin," a film that follows a family dealing with the aftermath of a Columbine-like tragedy. Easily done when you can count designers such as Jil Sander designer Raf Simons and Haider Ackermann amongst your inner circle. Swinton, who has been the face of Pringle of Scotland, dressed herself for the event, claiming to have never heard of a stylist. "You mean there’s somebody in your hotel room who actually takes your clothes out of a suitcase and lays them out for you," she asks, "Really? Or is that just a fantasy. There is nobody in my suitcase, but myself, I can tell you that."
On set, however, it is a different story. "Costuming is a huge part of getting into character," she explains, "The costuming is like the look of the person and you have to get the information across really fast about who this person is." "Katherine George [the costume designer] had a very tough job with my character because my character ages over 15 years and so she like had to nail the development of this woman for over 15 years and we had a blast doing it."
Swinton's co-star, Ezra Miller, a relative newcomer to the acting scene, who plays her son Kevin in the film also has his own sartorial preferences: "I only wear thrift store stuff and hand me downs." While the young star looked dapper in a vintage velvet jacket ("This one came from a New York vintage store called Star Struck.") and a flannel button down ("that was my friend's grandfather's"), he isn't just being trendy with his clothing choices. Miller is making an ideological point: "See the textiles industry, designed and branded as it is, glorious and glamorous, it is actually a very bloody industry, every time I do consumer research into a given line of clothing you eventually get to something in the manufacturing of the clothes themselves, that happened in a far off place lacking human rights and environmental protection parameters." "It’s essentially that I don’t want to spend my money," Miller declared, "I don’t want to put it into an industry that is essentially doing wrong. It’s painful to me that we go through our interactions with the world as consumers blindly getting blood on our hands in a way we never actually have to confront." Miller's concern for the message his wardrobe sends to the world translates to the way he personified his character: "There’s something about the way Kevin fetishizes and pursues a state of physical discomfort and also in his refusal to allow his mother to buy him new clothes."
Although Swinton is a bonafide fashion-plate, and Miller finds the industry despicable - the two clearly were close working on the film. Mid interview, Swinton and Miller embraced and the two even posed with their co-stars in a huddle.