How <em>Hustlers</em> Captured the Excesses of Prerecession Fashion
The film’s costume designer, Mitchell Travers, talks about fur, glitter, and the characters’ changing relationships with wealth.
Midway through , the new a group of New York City strippers who defraud their lunkhead patrons after the 2008 recession, Destiny (played by Constance Wu) receives a gift that shocks her with its weight. At a gilded holiday celebration, her friend and mentor Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) presents the younger woman with a box containing a formidable fur coat. “What it?” Destiny asks giddily, then squeals upon finding out her new outerwear lived its first life as several chinchillas. The coat is lavish, gaudy, and ethically questionable. But it’s also a sentimental callback to when the two women first met years earlier: Destiny had wandered onto the roof of the club where Ramona held court, and the veteran dancer had ushered the new
