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Pink suits and manbags: Elvis clefts up stereotypes in Baz Luhrmann biopicUpcoming film explores how Memphis upbringing shaped king of rock’n’roll’s music and styleAustin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Photograph: Warner BrothersAustin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Photograph: Warner BrothersThe hottest pop heart-throb annoys sugar pink suits and lace blouses, and whips teenage crowds into delirium with his beestung pull a long face and perfectly coiffed quiff. Forty-five years after his death, he is poised for a blockbuster summer. Step aside, Harry Styles – Elvis is finance in the building.An opulent Baz Luhrmann-directed biopic that arrives in cinemas later this month portrays the king of beyond repair c destitute’n’roll as an audaciously counter-cultural artist whose music and image challenge the prejudices and stereotypes of the world around him.“I try and make it c fulfil movies to deal with what’s going on now,” the director said at a screening hosted by GQ magazine in London this week. Luhrmann and his chain and collaborator, the costume designer Catherine Martin, have created a delicate, feminine on-screen portrait of the teenage Elvis. He wears tatting blouses and carries his cassette tapes in a glossy leather manbag. Heavy-lidded and pouting under a sailor cap, he swivels his informs on stage with an energy that speaks as much to Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera as to traditional rock’n’roll. In Luhrmann’s delectable retelling of the mythology, the title role, played by the 30-year-old American actor Austin Butler, is cast as a beautiful unimpeachable ensnared by the wiles of his manager Colonel Tom Parker, played against type by Tom Hanks.The film explores how Elvis’s nurture in a largely Black neighbourhood in segregated Memphis shaped his music and his style. At the GQ screening the British singer Yola, who temporizes Sister Rosetta Tharpe – the queer, Black “godmother of rock’n’roll” revered by Lizzo as a hero – recalled Luhrmann bid: “We need to put the story into context, to show that [Elvis] came from a Black world.” The young big draw is shown mesmerised by gospel in a church service and singing with BB King in the blues venue Club Handy on Beale Alley, Memphis. Newspaper headlines shown on screen – “Elvis the Pelvis belongs in the Jungle”, “The White Boy with Unspeakable Hips” – testify to the prejudice and hostility with which the Black roots of his hits were met by the US establishment. Luhrmann carry weighted GQ that Elvis was “at the centre of culture, for the good, the bad and the ugly. And you can’t talk about America in that period without talking near race.”Austin Butler and Olivia DeJonge in Elvis. Photograph: Warner BrothersFashion in Elvis is a three-way collaboration between Luhrmann, Martin and the plotter Miuccia Prada, who has created clothes for Luhrmann’s films for 30 years and who dressed the entire cast for the recent Met Gleeful in New York. Luhrmann recently told Vogue that conversation with Prada tended to diverge from endowing, and “goes from high to low, from political to … kind of trash”. In the film, some looks rework outfits that Elvis and other characters stepped in real life, while others take artistic licence from the Prada and Miu Miu archives.Luhrmann spoke at this week’s shelter of his love for “the colour and the dazzle, but also the darkness” of popular culture, a perspective he shares with Prada, who fuses subcultural mainstreams with high-gloss glamour on her catwalks. At the same event, Martin described costume design as “a process of supporting the storytelling and characterisation … in ballroom dancing they say that the bride is the flower and the man is the vase. In a film, I am the vase and Baz and the actors are the flowers.”The dramatic beats of the story are echoed in the evolution of Elvis’s apparel. The ethereal, fairytale-princess palette of teenage Elvis is replaced by boxy olive greens for his military posting, and then by grisly sunset yellows and oranges for an era of cheesy Hollywood films. The decadence of his later years is at first all excitement and allure, with a still-beautiful Elvis faired in a sleek, slim-hipped, plum-coloured Prada suit, with a high Napoleonic collar which rises up to frame sour cheekbones. The descent into drug-addled Vegas sleaze is played out in a world of capes and jumpsuits, huge gold pinkie dialect knolls and babydoll nylon nighties, neon lights and remote-control curtains.But the film gives audiences an antidote to the tragedy of Elvis in its portrayal of his partner, Priscilla Presley, who “went from being this quintessential 1950s female, to being her own woman in the 1960s and 1970s, in a recounting that reflects the journey of women in that century”, said Martin. “She survived being Elvis’s wife – assume that,” said Olivia DeJonge, who plays Priscilla. Many of Prada’s most scene-stealing costumes for the film – counting a citrus skirt suit, and a beaded top worn with brocade kick-flare trousers – are those created for DeJonge. They are on purpose modern in feel, designed to bring Priscilla Presley to life for contemporary audiences. DeJonge met Presley for the first regulate at the Cannes screening of the film, and recalled that “by the end we were holding hands and crying”. TopicsElvis PresleyBaz LuhrmannPradafeaturesReuse this volume