Transforming Daniel Craig Into a Very Grimy William Burroughs

The clothes in Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Queer” are almost entirely from the 1950s. So don’t expect them to look spotless.

“Queer” the director Luca Guadagnino’s new film, is a tale of misplaced affection. It is also a movie that will leave neat freaks clutching their Tide pens.

Led by Daniel Craig at his elastic, drunken best, “Queer” follows Lee, a drug-addled older man who falls catastrophically in love with the much younger Allerton (played by Drew Starkey) in the steamy heat of 1950s Mexico. It morphs into a road film as the pair traverse the fecund South American jungle in search of ayahuasca. Along the way, their clothes acquire so many oil stains, sweat marks, muddy prints and smudges of unspecified origin that the audience can practically feel the grime through the screen.

“There’s nothing worse when you watch a film and it looks like it’s just been pressed,” said Jonathan Anderson, the fashion designer who was the film’s costume designer.

“Or they use some little cocoa powder to give a sense of dirtiness instead of making it really dirty,” Mr. Guadagnino added.

The mud-caked costumes are a beacon of the uncompromising authenticity that Mr. Guadagnino and Mr. Anderson strove for in working on “Queer,” which is adapted from William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel of the same name. Mr. Craig’s hard-drinking, lecherous Lee is a thinly veiled version of Mr. Burroughs, such that Mr. Guadagnino referred to the character interchangeably as Lee and Burroughs.

The clothes are almost entirely authentic to the 1950s — save two rakish “Thin White Duke”-style ivory suits that appear in a fantasy sequence toward the film’s conclusion. The eggy yellow shirts, the faded swim trunks, the short-sleeved sweaters, even the crisp underwear were all period, sourced by Mr. Anderson from vintage dealers across North America. If any items had moth holes or distressed hems, that was just part of the appeal.