Some people will walk away from their viewing of Emilia Perez with one of its many musical numbers stuck in their heads. Standing in the snow in Switzerland in a huge Saint Laurent fur coat, the image with a character like Jesse Selena Gomez: I leave another fixation playing with a loop permanently

Jesse is not the hero of this story. That honorific goes to the titular Emilia Perez, who secretly transitions to become a woman after leading a notorious Mexican drug cartel with the former identity of Juan "Manitas" Del Monte. But Jesse, who married Manitas, is a central player in the opera saga. Without going deep into spoilers about how their relationship is unraveled, her coat in that Swiss mountainside scene strikes an important tone. With all its strong shoulders, extra textured glory, it is a symbol of her character's own transformation in the favorite feature of the Cannes Film Festival. It's also an unusual cinematic universe garment that I wanted to shop for, based solely on the look-at-me silhouette.

Virginie Montel, the costume designer for the film, has established early on that the best faux-fur coats embody something ambitious for Jessi when living in an encampment in Manitas, Mexico. In these early scenes, she "wears a fake fur jacket that must be her idea of a country like Switzerland," Montel says.

Fast forward when she actually lives there. The power of clothing changes. "A few years later, when she left [Switzerland] to return to Mexico, we liked the idea that she still had fake fur and made a connection, but Jesse wears it differently. Her references have changed, her code is different," Montel explains. Her blonde hair and her new silhouette make her character a different person. She is more independent, she is in charge, in a certain way she is stronger.

Many of the pieces worn by Emilia Pérez's main trio, Gomez, Carla Sofia Gascon and Zoe Saldana, come from the Montel wardrobe department and Saint Laurent's partnership. "The Ysl house has opened its doors to us, including collections and archives since Anthony Vaccarello," she explains.

Defining Gascon's transformation into Emilia, from the fiery red suit Saldana wears for a gala number that expresses the wrath of her characters to dresses inspired by Catherine Deneuve and Monica Bellucci, all works are eye-opening for stylization and storytelling. It was chosen in. Colors and silhouettes symbolize the arc of the character, but there is also a practical aspect. "A lot of the movies take place at night, so we were looking for shiny elements," explains Montel. "In other sequences, we needed colors."In some cases, even YSL's vast archives didn't have exactly what the team needed, so they became custom. Montel, for example, said: "The blouse jessi was wearing had to shine and open easily.(To say exactly why she's opening her shirt, it's going to be too much spoilers for this post.

Jesse's over-the-top Saint Laurent outerwear, especially her faux fur, enters the revered canons of fictional women who treat coats like armor. As Anora's titular character, Mikey Madison wears (and eventually discards) a mink coat that represents the wealth and status she believes she envisions through her marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch. The penguin comes with a vintage fur coat that "looks wild" for Sofia Falcone's ascension to the full-fledged mafia. These are just a few examples of costume design and an age-old tradition in cinema in 2024.When a woman wants to take up space and convey her power without saying a word — realistically or imaginatively — she pulls a fur coat.

Most of Selena Gomez's press tour to promote Emilia Perez left the YSL fake mink on screen. But for one of her last Los Angeles events, she arrived in a leather coat lined with faux fur by French designer Nour Hammour. The cut and color were not like her character, but the energy was exactly the same: it is an independent women's outerwear. In terms of style, it deserves all the awards.