It Ends With Us was always going to be a difficult story to bring to life onscreen. The movie, which is closely based on the wildly popular Colleen Hoover novel of the same name, is essentially a drama about an abusive relationship. Hoover has been frank about the dark themes of her book, revealing that the inspiration for the story was her own mother leaving her abusive father. And in the years since the novel was published in 2016, there’s been endless discourse about how it depicts and addresses trauma. All of which is to say that It Ends With Us is no whimsical romance—it’s a pretty dark movie about an undeniably grim topic.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Which is why the costuming for the film, a mismatched fever dream of workwear, sparkles, and bohemian fantasy, isn’t just a bad fit for the story—it’s a jarring distraction. In the film, protagonist Lily Bloom (played by Blake Lively), a Boston-based florist, dons outfits that are as deeply unserious as her name—sequined evening gowns topped with oversized Carhartt chore jackets, low-slung quilted patchwork pants that expose high-waisted plaid boxer shorts, a vest and shirt combo and leather blazer, reminiscent of a restaurant server’s uniform, that she dons for her father’s funeral. The intention is seemingly to show that Lily is a quirky yet relatable bohemian free spirit. But the effect is a character whose clothing, despite Lively’s earnest efforts as an actor, makes her feel tonally mismatched with the movie she’s in.
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When photos first appeared of the production last year, fans took to social media to critique Lively’s character’s chaotic costuming. “What are these outfits omg,” wrote a user named Holden Smith on TikTok, using a sound on the app to show his derision. Eric Daman, the movie’s costume designer, has taken the naysayers in stride.
“It’s exciting that there’s just so much buzz around the looks themselves, whether it’s positive, and haters are gonna hate,” Daman said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, where he also shared that he worked closely with Lively to develop the looks, calling her “an amazing creative force” with “an incredible eye and amazing taste.” (Lively, for her part, has shared that she used items from her own wardrobe, as well as that of her husband Ryan Reynolds and supermodel friend Gigi Hadid, for the film’s looks.)
It’s worth noting that Daman, an Emmy-winning costume designer for Sex and the City, was also Lively’s collaborator on Gossip Girl, where his fantastical stylings were more than fitting for the pampered Upper East Side teenagers’ drama and debauchery. They may not have been entirely believable, but the characters’ youth and money made it easier to suspend disbelief and go along with the excess. But that same capriciousness misses the mark big time in It Ends With Us.
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You don’t need to be a movie buff to know how crucial clothing, and especially costuming, is to storytelling. It can help to build a world or break the fourth wall. It can draw an audience into a fantasy or ground them in a time period, provide much-needed context or imbue a scene with levity or gravitas. And it can make a character feel intimately relatable, glamorously aspirational, or laughably out-of-touch. As TIME movie critic Stephanie Zacharek aptly noted during this year’s awards season, “costumes, showstoppers or not, are integral to the power of movies,” making the case that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dark suited looks in Christopher Nolan’s eponymous film starring Cillian Murphy made the character “a man of his time, but also perpetually outside it,” and that Poor Things’ Bella Baxter’s “both out-of-this-world weird and poetically familiar garments could have sprung from the fisheye corners of our wildest dreams.”
Lily is a character whose experience of domestic violence mirrors a dark reality that many women may 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 storyline is in constant competition with her clothes. There’s a time and a place for outfits that defy reality, and maybe even a world in which there’s a case to be made for the eclectic freakum dress and Carhartt combo that Lively sports in a pivotal scene in the film. But in It Ends With Us, it just feels like an excuse to play dress-up, at the character’s expense.
