The Richard Mille isn’t the only fake luxury object Hill wears, either. “At one point, [Hill] really wanted to have an Hermès [Birkin] purse,” Matheson says. “That was also a problem
in terms of insurance. So I found this purse and the purse that he wears in the movie is $38 from Amazon. And so I have his fitting and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, I have to break it to Jonah that it's not going to be a real Hermès purse,’ so I hand him the purse. He looks at it and goes, ‘This is great,’ and I say, ‘Well, you know it's not Hermès, it's $38 from Amazon,’ and he goes, ‘It's better.’”
Lawrence’s character goes through a transformation similar to DiCaprio’s. “When she is playing Kate Dibiasky, she starts off as a real student—she's wearing a Schott olive drab parka and a lot of vintage sweaters,” Matheson says. “She's wearing these amazing combat boots that were made for her by this company in Italy, in a small village, called Moma, like the Museum of Modern Art.”
“And [Lawrence] also has this arc of having a makeover where she starts to dress so that she can impress the public.” Matheson explains. ”But as she gets booted out of that world and then has to go back home, she starts dressing more and more punk. And so she's wearing this amazing leopard print fake fur jacket. She really starts to wear things that look like they’re from a thrift store that take her completely away from the world of the White House.”
Kid Cudi, who tries to encourage the world to look up through a performance with Ariana Grande, was a natural, according to Matheson. He wears a piece from Giorgio Armani’s ski line that came directly from a photoshoot in the mountains. “Because I was desperate to get it right away, it arrived with alpine dirt still on the boots [from the photoshoot],” Matheson says. “If I took a sample to a lab, I would have been able to tell which mountain range they'd been shooting in.”
Unsurprisingly, Cudi nailed his fitting. “I make everyone in my fittings get into character, so I say to Scott, ‘Scott, could you do me a favor? Could you just perform in this outfit to see if it's going to work for you?’” Matheson says. “So these fitting photos he is getting down and he's performing and they are the most amazing pictures. And he is walking like he's on a runway, so finally I say to Scott, ‘Did you used to model?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, a little —teenage years, Barbizon models, Cleveland.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘I knew it.’ Because he was like the best person I ever took a photo of. I was thinking, ‘Yeah, Scott, you could be in GQ Magazine." He's probably been in GQ already, right? [He definitely has.] But I was thinking, ‘You could just be a model.’”