Bruce Springsteen has worn a lifetime’s worth of great jackets. Leather with mileage. Denim with stories. All killer, no filler. In Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone had to figure out what makes those pieces feel alive. Not “rockstar cosplay” alive, but “just walked out of a gig in ’81” alive.
“It’s a process of finding the vocabulary,” she tells me over Zoom. She’s wearing merch from Zero Day, a political thriller starring Robert De Niro that she also worked on. “The way the clothes fit on his body. The way he wore them. The combinations he made.” Her goal wasn’t to build exact replicas. It was to build Springsteen’s aura.
To do that, she went deep into his visual history: books, biographies, thousands and thousands of photographs. The Springsteen that showed up for a magazine shoot didn’t always match the Springsteen who rolled out of bed and into a diner booth. “This film is searching for the intimate Bruce,” she says. “The one behind closed doors. Not the album cover version.”
Then, of course, the Boss himself arrived on set.
Bobby Bank
“We had this amazing moment when he responded to specific pieces,” she says. “There was a red T-shirt we planned to use. You see it everywhere in photos. But Bruce said, ‘I never loved that shirt. That was for a photo shoot.’” The shirt was thrown out immediately. “Respecting his memory of those clothes was essential. He knows exactly what felt like him.”
Meanwhile, Jeremy Allen White was stepping into those clothes with his own instincts. The Bear star is already a massive vintage guy off-screen (he’s got a collection of Levi’s jeans from the early ’70s), and the moment a specific piece felt right, his whole vibe shifted. “We didn’t really talk much,” Walicka-Maimone says. “We listened to music and tried things on. He started emerging as Bruce in front of us.” The conversation wasn’t verbal. The jacket did all the talking.
And getting those jackets wasn’t easy. They didn’t just materialise from some storage unit in the middle of Hollywood. “We hunted,” she says. “Vintage suppliers, collectors, markets. Some jackets were altered. One was rebuilt completely. But the real vintage… those are diamonds. They’ve already lived a life before the camera ever rolls.”
20th Century Studios
