It ends with us was a difficult story to bring to life on screen from the start. The film, which is closely based on the hugely popular novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, is essentially a drama about an abusive relationship. Hoover has been open about the dark themes of her book, revealing that the inspiration for the story was her own mother, who left her abusive father. And in the years since the novel was published in 2016, there have been endless discussions about how it portrays and deals with trauma. What I am saying is that It ends with us is not a whimsical love story – it is a pretty dark film about an undeniably dark subject.
That’s why the film’s costumes, an incongruous fever dream of workwear, glitter and bohemian fantasy, not only don’t fit the story — they’re an irritating distraction. In the film, protagonist Lily Bloom (played by Blake Lively), a Boston florist, wears outfits as frivolous as her name — sequined evening gowns with oversized Carhartt work jackets, low-slung quilted patchwork pants that reveal high-waisted plaid boxer shorts, a vest-and-shirt combo and a leather blazer reminiscent of a restaurant waiter’s uniform that she dons at her father’s funeral. The intention, it seems, is to show that Lily is a quirky but likable bohemian free spirit. But the result is a character whose clothes, despite Lively’s earnest efforts as an actress, mean she’s tonally out of step with the film she’s in.
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When the first photos of the production surfaced last year, fans on social media criticized Lively’s character’s chaotic costumes. “What are these outfits, oh my god,” wrote a user named Holden Smith on TikTok, expressing his derision with a sound on the app. Eric Daman, the film’s costume designer, has taken the critics in stride.
“It’s exciting that there is so much excitement about the looks themselves, whether it’s positive or there are haters,” Daman said in an interview with Hollywood reporterwhere he also said he worked closely with Lively to develop the looks, calling her “an incredible creative force” with “an incredible eye and incredible taste.” (Lively, for her part, has said she used pieces from her own wardrobe, as well as those of her husband Ryan Reynolds and her supermodel friend Gigi Hadid, to create the film’s looks.)
It is worth noting that Daman, an Emmy-winning costume designer for Sex and the City, Lively was also a colleague at gossip Girlwhere his fantastical style was more than apt for the drama and debauchery of the spoiled teenagers of the Upper East Side. They may not have been entirely believable, but the youth and money of the characters made it easier to suspend disbelief and go along with the excesses. But the same whimsy misses the mark in It ends with us.
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You don’t have to be a film buff to know how important clothing, and especially costumes, are to storytelling. They can help build a world or break the fourth wall. They can draw the audience into a fantasy world or anchor them in a time period, provide much-needed context or add levity or seriousness to a scene. And they can make a character feel intimate, glamorous and ambitious, or laughably out of touch with reality. As TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek aptly noted during this year’s awards season, “costumes, whether spectacular or not, are an essential part of the power of movies,” arguing that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dark costume in Christopher Nolan’s eponymous film starring Cillian Murphy made the character “a man of his time, but also constantly outside of it,” and that The poor Bella Baxter’s “garments, both extraterrestrially strange and poetically familiar, could have sprung from the fish-eye corners of our wildest dreams.”
Lily is a character whose experience with domestic violence reflects a dark reality that many women can identify with. What a woman wears, of course, has no bearing on whether she is, was, or could be a victim of such violence. But here, Lily’s story is in constant competition with her clothes. There is a time and a place for reality-defying outfits, and perhaps even a world where there is an argument to be made for the eclectic combination of freakin’ dress and Carhartt that Lively wears in a pivotal scene in the film. But in It ends with usit just feels like an excuse to dress up at the expense of the character.
