Stretching imagination

Designing The Fantastic Four: First Steps

- ROBERT ITO

What if the dreams and design features of Disney’s Tomorrowland were realised in 1960s New York City?

One gets a sense of the possibilities in Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which begins on Earth-828, a doppelgänger for our own planet and the home base of the film's titular superheroes, before spilling out into space. This alternative universe includes mod fashions and flying cars, Flash Gordon-inspired rocket ships and robot butlers, midcentury modern chairs and space-age architecture.

In this iteration of the franchise, directed by Matt Shakman, the superhero team inhabits a planet devoid of other Marvel superheroes — no X-Men or Spideys here — and a vastly transformed Manhattan simultaneously familiar yet alien.

For the film’s fashions, Oscar-winning costume designer Alexandra Byrne (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) looked at everything from Ernst Haas photos and 60s ski wear to fashion designers such as Rudi Gernreich and Bonnie Cashin. Little was overlooked. Byrne even wrestled with the challenges of how the massive Thing might dress himself.

“He's got rock hands,” she said. “He would never be able to do buttons up.”

Other artists and designers drew from concept cars, modernist architects, period newspaper comic strips and archival Nasa footage to create the film's retro-futurist world, said production designer Kasra Farahani.

“So much of retro-futurism is kind of jokey and naive,” he said. “We were looking to move past that, to take the important archetypical bits, the tail fins, the turbines, the visual icons of that era, but then shed some of the silliness and move to a more sophisticated version of midcentury futurism.”

Below is a closer look at how three specific design aspects were achieved.

The Baxter Building Living Room