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"  Danny Glicker, up for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, has admired legendary gay-rights activist Harvey Milk ever since happening upon the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk on cable. &amp;quot;I always thought Milk would be the ultimate dream project, the project that I would absolutely most want to be associated with,&amp;quot; says Glicker, who talked with us about his costumes for Gus Van Sant&amp;#039;s acclaimed biopic.  What interested you about designing for San Francisco&amp;#039;s Castro District in the &amp;#039;70s?   The clothes really reflect the tone of the gay movement when everyone was beginning to understand the diversity of personalities and roles they were able to pursue. It wasn&amp;#039;t just that if you&amp;#039;re gay you have to be the Nelly florist or the screaming drag queen\u2014you can also be really butch. You can be a construction worker or more practically, you can be a schoolteacher or a politician. I think that people were beginning to get into identity politics at that time, and it was reflected in their clothes. They were beginning to understand that being gay wasn&amp;#039;t this secret thing that was only to reveal itself in the shadows of a bar at night, but was actually something that was part of who you were. Also, everyone in the Castro was very poor in the movie, and that was really important in reflecting that Harvey was fighting for a grassroots civil-rights movement. This was not a bunch of well-dressed disco queens who wanted nicer cars. They were all dressed from Goodwill\u2014they were really just pulling it together.  What kind of research did you do to evoke that era?  Because of Harvey&amp;#039;s camera shop, there was a ton of really fantastic archival material that documented Harvey and all his friends and compatriots through that entire period. There are a lot of incidents in the movie that are pretty much exact re-creations of what happened in real life, and whatever the characters were wearing in the movie is exactly what they were wearing in real life. This was the closest way to tap into the truth of the characters. That said, we had an enormous amount in the movie that&amp;#039;s not documented in the research. We reassembled timelines for each character in these incredibly beautiful photo archives. And I worked closely with the real Danny Nicoletta and the real Cleve Jones, who&amp;#039;s played by Emile Hirsch in the movie. The thing I wanted to avoid was falling into a shorthand of `70s or gay life in the Castro, because it felt like it had to be seen through fresh eyes in order to be accurate. What were your biggest challenges in outfitting the cast?  In the beginning, there was the challenge of meeting everyone&amp;#039;s expectations, because I think that time in the Castro was an incredibly special time and in retrospect is completely untarnished by any of the heartbreak associated with AIDS, which did not appear in the timeframe of our movie. The Castro was a really exciting place to be and was ground zero for the gay sexual-liberation movement. There was so much nostalgia for that time, and whenever I would speak to people who had lived through it, I felt this enormous pressure to give them what they remember. But as I interviewed people, I began to understand that their memories are so attached to their emotions from these times; I often had to step back and take an almost journalistic view and discern what the reality was from the gloss of memory, because the movie is not a nostalgic look back. It really is a meticulous re-creation of the time. What&amp;#039;s your favorite image from the film?  In the case of Sean Penn, it&amp;#039;s hard for me to pinpoint just one look. The thing that I really came away with was the uncanny spirit of Sean every time he would come out of his trailer in hair and makeup. It was just this complete transformation. But it&amp;#039;s hard not to get choked up when I think of Sean in the Gay Freedom Day outfit\u2014to see Harvey Milk in the white T-shirt with the &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll Never Go Back&amp;quot; logo and the armband is so iconic. The day I saw Sean in that outfit was such an emotional time because it wasn&amp;#039;t just about the clothes, it was about the man inside the clothes and the spirit that he brought to them.  Read more on Oscar screen style:  Revolutionary Road  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button  The Duchess  Australia "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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