How Layla costume designer used fashion to explore queer identity

In Amrou Al-Kadhi’s feature film directorial debut Layla, the clothes worn by the titular protagonist (played by Bilal Hasna) tell much of the story.

Layla, a British-Palestinian non-binary drag queen surviving in London’s queer underbelly, is making ends meet like all drag divas have to. Yet during one particularly sad corporate gig at a ready meal company (featuring a perfect cameo from Self Esteem’s Rebecca Lucy Taylor), Layla’s life is flipped upside down.

It’s here she meets Max (Louis Greatorex), a straight-laced advertising executive who slowly but surely begins to fall for her. Their relationship blossoms but it soon becomes clear that their worlds are far too separate for it to be plain sailing.

In telling the story, costume designer Cobbie Yates had a pivotal role in reflecting how the different worlds Layla exists in both make her whole, and tear her apart.

The first costume, a Hawaiian print gown worn by Layla at the corporate event, was the “trickiest” to get right – particularly considering Hasna had never really been in drag before. Yet Yates says that for Layla, the costume was about liberation.

“I feel like that girl is so familiar for me in my mind of who Bilal’s character Layla was,” he exclusively tells PinkNews. “They’re incredibly confident when they need to be, incredibly vulnerable when they need to be, but in this costume and in others that were kind of day-to-day outfits, there was a lot of skin involved.”

Yates held conversations with Hasna to ensure he was confident in the looks, explaining that the ultimate purpose of showing skin was to portray how “liberated” Layla feels while in drag.

“I think that that was a really interesting part of the journey for him to unlock the character and for him to come to terms [with] what it would feel like frolicking around the room in a thong and how he would play it to see if it would work.”

The Hawaiian dress was then used to symbolise how, immediately after meeting, the pair begin to warm to each other. “The first time that Layla meets Max, she’s almost like this perfect package with the little bow on her shoulder,” Yates explains.

“When you see them on the bus, the first thing that comes off is the bow. So it’s almost like he’s starting to open the box, he’s starting to dig in and find out who that person is.”

As their relationship progresses, it becomes evident that Max is quietly uncomfortable with Layla’s outlandish looks, and she retires into “drained, sad, cis-presenting outfits” to show her conformity. Then, during a return home to see his family, we see her out of drag, in a traditional religious thawb.

“So who are you then?,” Max questions Layla, as seen in the film’s trailer. The answer? Many different people.

“There’s so many different areas and elements of this person and the discovery. There’s a lot of cloaking and concealing their feelings, and so often they’re in something quite over the top,” Yates explains, adding that in some scenes, plain joggers, jeans and t-shirts were used to symbolise the “stripping away” of identity.

“It’s all of those areas that we wanted to express of young love, and just how you can be battling yourself through so many different feelings and versions of who you want to be and who you think you could be.”

In addition to showing the different sides of Layla’s identity, Yates – who has just been named as one of this year’s BAFTA Breakthrough cohort – used costume to showcase London’s vibrant queer scene.

“I just wanted to dial up and highlight just how creative and what the queer spirit is in the city. People are so expressive,” he says. Placing Layla and her friends in London, during the day, draws a very clear “us and them” picture, where the queer people look like “fish out of water”.

And yet, he hopes the depiction goes some way to showing that the city’s queer culture is everywhere.

“I wanted to create a nod to that spirit in the film when you see them on the bus, when you see them in Canary Wharf, and just celebrate it and normalise it.”

Cobbie Yates is one of 42 creatives receiving industry support through the BAFTA Breakthrough initiative, supported by Netflix. The full list of recipients is available here.

Layla is out in cinemas from Friday, 22 November.

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