HUSTLERS

Jennifer Lopez’s Hustlers G-String: An Origin Story

Hustlers costume designer Mitchell Travers opens up about creating Lopez’s show-stopping costume.
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Photo courtesy of STXfilms; Illustration by Mitchell Travers.

About 10 minutes into Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez makes one of the most audacious entrances in recent movie history. Until that point in Lorene Scafaria’s film, Constance Wu’s stripper character, Destiny, has struggled to make money at the club where she is working. But as the opening chords to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” crash onscreen, Lopez’s character, Ramona, appears onstage for the first time. Wearing approximately nine-inch heels (more on those later), she drops her jacket and shows Destiny how it’s done.

“I knew that this was always going to be the sequence that needed to leave the audience with their jaws on the floor,” Hustlers costume designer Mitchell Travers told Vanity Fair this month. “I knew it [had] to absolutely floor the audience, and let them know that this is not going to be like any movie that they’ve seen before.” Given how sexy the scene was going to be, Travers wanted to spark questions with J.Lo’s barely-there outfit: “Is that going to stay on? How is that connected? How is she doing this?”

It wasn’t just an issue of designing for maximum sex appeal. Travers wanted the costume to showcase the strength and muscle tone Lopez amassed during her pre-Hustlers training. “She was incredibly dedicated to her pole training, and had a pole installed in her house,” explained the designer. “When I went to do her fitting, the pole was right there with us, so it was easy to see what was going to work.”

To showcase as much of Lopez’s body as possible—without running afoul of the film’s planned R rating—Travers dreamed up a diamond bodysuit that was essentially connected by three straps. “I had this fabulous tailor who hand-sewed these little rhinestone chains on to this tiny little white bodysuit,” he said, explaining that the costume was so small that he was able to ball it up in his hand while walking past paparazzi to set. “We did a lot of research and development to find something that could [stretch in every direction during Lopez’s dance]. It’s performance wear, and really had to work for that sequence. We did a number of fittings on it. It is tailored within an inch of its life, completely custom for her.”

Travers was nervous about presenting Lopez with the minuscule costume: “You have to understand this thing had absolutely no hanger appeal,” he said. “I was bringing in this ball of string with some chains on it. So I held it up, and I said, ‘I know that this is crazy, but I really believe in this.’ And she said, ‘Let’s go. I think I do too.’ She put it on, and she turned to me...I got to know her well, and there’s a look in her eyes when I know we found it.... And she gave me the look.”

When it came time to film the scene, “We had to hand-sew [the costume] on her onstage, so that she could make sure that nothing was going to come off.” Explained Travers, “She was doing [this dance] for this whole crowded room of background actors. It takes a lot for someone to be that vulnerable in a space where everyone is watching, and the cameras are rolling, and she’s got a few takes to nail it. I mean, you see what she created with that moment. It was an incredibly proud [day] for a lot of us.”

Despite her superstar status, Lopez was down to try anything—giving Travers the freedom to take risks himself. When the costume designer presented Lopez with eight- and nine-inch heels—mostly from a company called Pleaser, and engineered for pole dancing and work in strip clubs—“she did not blink.... She’d be like, ‘Baby, put them on. I’ve got it.’ I watched her walk down the metal-grate stairs of a trailer, and she was walking like she was in flip-flops.”

Hustlers is set about a decade ago, and Travers researched the time period as though he was working on a true period film. “I pored over old-school Perez Hilton and Just Jared pages,” said Travers, explaining how he paid special attention to celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Snooki, and Lil’ Kim: “They really helped inform the language that I wanted to create for this film.... I wanted to see what girls were wearing when they came into money and all of a sudden could buy [whatever they wanted]”—like full-length chinchilla fur coats, status handbags, and Hervé Léger dresses. “You can’t ignore the impact of the bandage dress. Beyoncé, Rihanna, and even Jen were wearing the tightest dress they could find [at the time].” (Late-aughts Lopez herself was a reference for Ramona too: “Jen and I did actually joke about that during one of our fittings. We were thinking, Who is Ramona looking at [for style inspiration]? Jen and I started laughing, and we were like, Well...who else?”)

Photo courtesy of STXfilms; Illustration by Mitchell Travers.

For Wu’s character, Destiny, Travers looked to a different celebrity’s style of the era: Nicole Richie. Her Simple Life–era dynamic with Paris Hilton had a feel similar to Destiny and Ramona’s relationship, he said. “You look at Paris, who was sort of effortless and the queen.... And then there was Nicole, who was [still working to] perfect and polish that image.... She was a huge source of inspiration for us on the film.... Constance and I were really interested in finding someone who didn't really have it figured out, and the visual relationship between those two characters is so important. So you get the sense that this is a person who was struggling with how they put themselves together.... And then they come into the company of someone who has perfected this, and has been able to use their image as a professional tool for their job.”

Whereas “Ramona has an editing eye, Destiny has an additive eye,” Travers explained. “She hasn’t quite mastered that less is more. So she might mix prints. She might wear a belt that’s too wide for her proportions. She might put on earrings that really don’t make sense with her jawline. She is somebody who is learning. We wanted to achieve that through proportion and color and silhouettes.”

In the scene in which Destiny works alongside Ramona for the first time, her style evolves slightly. “There’s a line where Ramona tells Destiny, ‘You’re Asian.’ And she uses that in a way where she almost tells her that’s a strength in this club; don’t shy away from that.... So we just really leaned into that fact. [She has] a mandarin collar, which is bright red and plays into the fantasy of what men [want], to understand that she’s playing a character, and she’s playing the room.... And then, of course, [she has] the ‘sexy’ choker...it’s all gold. You get the feeling that she is projecting an image, that she’s getting comfortable with how to use her tool kit.”