Click to see more costume designs from Django Unchained.

*In a recurring series,*Vanity Fair pulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, two-time Oscar nominee and costume designer Sharen Davis discusses her designs for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

The Academy Awards nominees won’t be announced for another week, but according to an accidentally published test page on Oscars.org, Django Unchainedcostume designer Sharen Davis has already clinched a slot. “This is the third Academy Award nomination for Sharen Davis. She was previously nominated for Dreamgirls(2006) and Ray(2004)” the site said. While we feel sorry for the poor sap responsible for her inclusion—and while we won’t know whether she’s really nominated until next week—we had to tell Davis.

“Oh my gosh! I haven’t even lost weight!” Davis replied. “I never thought about an Oscar in my life. When they called me for Ray, I thought it was a prank call. I said, ‘Am I going to open the door and see one of those fake, standing Oscars?’”

Davis was similarly incredulous when the Tarantino camp approached her for Django Unchained.“Are you sure you want the girl from The Helpand Dreamgirls?” she asked. Although the bold, bloody Western is a departure for Davis—“I don’t even like violent movies,” she admits—her admiration for Quentin Tarantino trumped her sensitivity.

Early in the process, Davis says she realized two things—first, “it’s a period movie within a period movie. It’s set before the Civil War, but it’s really a spaghetti Western, which is a late-60s, early-70s movie.” (In other words, any discussion of whether or not a period detail rings of pre–Civil War authenticity is kind of irrelevant.)

Second, Tarantino had a very specific vision. “It’s all in the script. Quentin writes everything down. Everything. ‘Django wears a green jacket.’ I illustrated it as it was written,” she says.

When, early in the process, the director invited Davis to his house to watch Bonanza, she says she came away thinking, “I want to make it a rock ’n’ roll, spaghetti Western.” That meant visiting the hat-makers who made Michael Langdon’s Bonanzatopper and finding a variation for Jamie Foxx. “Django’s hat is Little Joe’s,” Davis says. “I just put a little more swerve in it.”

It also meant digging up spaghetti-Western eyewear. “Sunglasses are usually considered props, but I was asked to find them. I started searching through films that I thought Quentin would like, because that’s what he relates to,” Davis says. “You can show him the actual history, but that won’t do it. They were Charles Bronson’s from The White Buffalo. They’re hammered metal from 1830. They’re hard to put on. They just splay! I only had one pair.”

While Foxx pulls off the sunglasses so effortlessly that we might even see copycat lenses on the street, there’s one costume in the film no one could carry. When Dr. King Schultz, a bounty hunter, takes the freed slave Django, to choose a costume for the pair’s next con, Django selects a ruffled, ridiculous Little Lord Fauntleroy suit.

“Quentin had it in the script as powder blue. And I said, ‘I just can’t do that. It is very 70s, but that’s going to look like polyester no matter what I make it out of.’ I slipped a copy of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy in the back of the research book. He didn’t say anything, but he saw it. He sort of said later, ‘Oh! Make him look like Blue Boy.’”

Even with the director’s go ahead, Davis held her breath for Foxx’s approval. “I thought, ‘He’s never going to wear this.’ But he loved it. It was the hardest one to put on, because of the lace-up arms. It took forever. Then I had to build in comfort. I had a different pair of pants for every action. When he was running, I’d drop down the crotch a bit and give him a little more in the waist. When he was riding, we didn’t want the pants to ride high.”

Tarantino’s gory action sequences presented another challenge. “There was so much blood! The squibs kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, to the point where if they had been still, you’d have thought they all had goiters,” she says. “I would take the clothes off the backs of the actors when they got shot, literally hand wash it, blow dry it, put some kind of paneling in, and they would re-squib it. It was old school.”

At times, color serves to pace the plot. It doesn’t take the viewer long to realize that the whiter a surface, the more likely it is to be splattered: when plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at dinner with a white carnation in his buttonhole, he may as well have a bulls-eye on his chest.

“Quentin said, ‘I’d like Calvin to wear a white carnation.’ And I said, “I’m just going to ask you now. Is that where he’s going to get shot? Because, if it is, I’ll get special effects. Quentin won’t tell you much in advance, so you’re excited to see what happens.”

To dress Django’s love interest Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Davis referenced the spaghetti-Western tradition of super-saturated flashbacks and visions. Broomhilda often appears in deep purple, bright yellow, and eye-catching blue. For Broomhilda’s final, ride-off-into-the-moonlight look, Davis chose a belted full skirt and a button-down shirt. “That was her segue into becoming a Western woman. She’s saying, ‘I’m as strong as you, honey. Let’s go!’ I illustrated her whole arc. She started in a dark purple and ended in a light purple. Now she’s totally free.”

Clothes emphasize Foxx’s arc, too. In his final action sequence, Django stages a surprise attack while wearing Candie’s suit. “That’s what made it the spaghetti Western it should be. Those two could never wear the same clothes! I remember Quentin called me three days before the shoot. He said, ‘I have a great idea. Jamie should wear Leonardo’s red suit.’ And I thought, Do I even have enough fabric?”

The costume designer’s only disappointment, she says, is that so many costumes never made it to the screen. That leaves some unexplained characters, like that of the beautiful lady outlaw whose face is half-covered throughout the film. (The idea there, says Davis, is that the character would drop the bandana to reveal an absent jaw.) It also leaves the possibility of a sequel.

“I think Django 2 is on the cutting-room floor!” says the costume designer, lamenting the intricately dressed gangs, comfort slaves, and miscreants who will never be seen. “There are barely any clothes in the movie. It breaks my heart!”

Although, judging by the early response to Davis’s work, it seems there are just enough.