Ms. Marvel is a story about Kamala Khan, a Muslim American teenager growing up in Jersey City. Despite having a brilliant imagination and a love for the Avengers, Kamala finds it difficult to fit in —that is, until she gets superpowers! Ms. Marvel costume designer Arjun Bhasin talked with The Art of Costume about representation and authenticity within the Ms. Marvel costumes, collaborating with Iman Vellani who plays Kamala, AvengerCon, comic book references, and the Ms. Marvel supersuit!
Spencer Williams: What I love about Ms.Marvel is the beautiful representation, a faithful look into a culture that hasn’t really been seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What was your philosophy behind the design of these costumes, and what sort of research and inspiration were a part of your process?
Arjun Bhasin: Thanks for asking that. I feel like so much about Ms.Marvel is about representation, and it was really important for me that we represented Kamala not just as a South Asian person but also as a young person growing up in America. She is a young artist, a young woman, and also someone who was creative, living in a diaspora – being from the east coast and being Islamic. There was so much about her, and we didn’t want it to feel like she was just one type of person.
Often we’ve seen young students, and it feels like they’re very one-dimensional, and I wanted this show to be very much about culture, family, and history. So much of the show is about her understanding herself as a human being and becoming the person that she is with all the influences that she has in the world. We very much looked at all of those influences simultaneously.
Spencer Williams: It was interesting because, at the same time, Kamala is still a young girl going through high school. So you have two worlds colliding at once in this project.
Arjun Bhasin: Exactly! I didn’t want it to feel like she was from a totally different world than the other people in the high school. She’s very much a part of the high school and American culture. But then she has a family who is traditional Indian-Pakistani living in New Jersey, and they have the influences of all those things as well.
Spencer Williams: Ms. Marvel is a story about Kamala Khan, a superhero fan with a big imagination who feels like she doesn’t fit in at school and sometimes even at home, that is until she gets superpowers and becomes this incredible, strong female role model in the community. Was there a collaboration between Iman Vellani, who plays Kamala, and yourself?
Arjun Bhasin: Oh, a hundred percent! Iman is Kamala. She’s a super fan herself. Iman grew up with the comics. She wanted to be a superhero herself, and there she was, being thrust into this world. It was very much about being honest with her. It was so exciting for me to watch her being so excited about filling those shoes. Ms.Marvel was really the story of her life. It’s very special. Iman was just the ideal person to dress.
Spencer Williams: That’s so exciting, and so much about what you do as a costume designer is helping these actors find the character in the costume. AvengerCon looks like the coolest event ever, and I need this to translate onto my real-life calendar at some point. I thought this scene was so fun, especially seeing all of the costumes go by. How did this scene come to be?
Arjun Bhasin: It was so exciting and so chaotic, yet so much homage. For me, AvengerCon was really about the fans. In my very first meeting with the showrunners, we talked about AvengerCon and didn’t want it to feel very polished. Everyone’s showing up in these homemade costumes to this incredible event full of Marvel costumes. I wanted it to be homemade and a little awkward feeling. I wanted people who just painted themselves green and showed up as the Hulk! Or perhaps there were people who made their costumes out of toilet paper, and people just had a lot of fun. There was a fine balance in showing the pains that fans go through to actually make these costumes beautiful.
We had a lot of fun and a lot of laughs with it. Something that we have to remember about our show is that it was made during the pandemic. There was nothing available anywhere. There was no way to go anywhere or do anything. We practically manufactured every costume ourselves in our little offices in Atlanta while we were all masked up. We were in our own little Marvel universe making these things. It really was like a family of people, a family of super fans.
Spencer Williams: I love this because when you think of Comic-Con, everyone’s costumes are so top-notch, top-tier. This, to me, felt more authentic and kind of aspirational. This, to me, felt like a love letter to the fans who are just doing what they can just to be a part of the world. Maybe you’re not spending lots of money on big costumes. It just felt very homemade and fan made in the most beautiful way.
Arjun Bhasin: Exactly. Just do it and have fun. That’s all anyone really cares about. It’s the thought that counts.
Spencer Williams: We get to meet another hero character in Karachi, Kareem, who is a part of the Red Daggers. This is another character that has a comic book past; what does that process look like in translating a character to live action?
Arjun Bhasin: It’s a very tricky thing to do, actually, because you want to be honest to the comic as much as you can. You want to be true to the fans and honest to the comic. Yet, comic books are one-dimensional. They’re just drawings that are flat. When you start making clothes, they have to move a certain way, and they have to follow rules of gravity and motion that comic books don’t have to do. They can just have swirls of fabric drawn in any way. It was really fun in that way for me to work on a bunch of characters actually who had never been on screen before. There was a lot of work that we did to try to maintain the gist of what the character was, yet bring a spin to it that felt realistic while being honest to the character and exciting to the fans who are seeing it for the first time.
With Red Dagger, for instance, we kept his color scheme the way it was because he was always in greens and reds. But then I made the costume feel a little bit more practical. We made it something that someone would actually wear and give it dimensionality, texture, and feel. There’s a lot of stuff that we did with the embroideries using traditional methods, showing the same costume in a more interesting way.
Spencer Williams: I loved his fabrics and textiles. There is an emotional, powerful episode toward the end of the series where we see flashbacks to 1942 during the Partition of India. What sort of challenges did you face in creating the costumes for these scenes?
Arjun Bhasin: The idea of Partition… it’s such a strong visual for all of us who grew up in India and Pakistan. Every family has a partition story. It plays a part in every family’s history, and it’s always spoken about. To be able to tell this story in a Marvel show for so many people to see and understand the pain of the separation of families, basically, a whole culture of people was torn apart. We wanted it to feel very realistic, so there was a lot of research involved.
The Partition of India is also very much a part of Kamala’s history, and we wanted to be faithful to it. There was a lot of heartbreak in those scenes, and we all went through it quite emotionally. I wanted that emotionality to be in the show and not just feel like it was just a fun little excerpt from the past. I wanted people actually to feel that they were there.
Spencer Williams: The emotion really conveyed onto the screen, and when you’re watching it as an audience member, you don’t even remember that this is a flashback. None of that really matters at that moment. You’re just there, and you’re really experiencing a moment. For a lot of people who don’t know the history of the Partition of India, this was a great entryway for people to learn more.
Arjun Bhasin: Especially for young people, it’s kind of a historical fact that is glossed over that no one really talks about. I think it’s important to know.
Spencer Williams: We have to talk about Kamala Khan’s Ms. Marvel super suit. It’s fantastic. It shows familiarity with the suit that we have seen in the comics, but you added such great detail, thought, and fabrics. What did your process look like in creating this costume?
Arjun Bhasin: It was a dream come true for me to make a Marvel super suit. We also made this suit in the office in Atlanta ourselves, with our tailors and our graphic designers. It feels kind of like a miracle that it got done. The idea was very much that we wanted it to represent her. There are details in the super suit that is Islamic calligraphy that we took off walls that spoke to her culture.
We also wanted the suit to feel like a family heirloom, the way the bangle was a family heirloom that had been passed down. I wanted that same idea to go into the costume that her mother made for her. It came from the family, and it’s really a representative of this confluence of traditional values of her home and her family with the Marvel Universe and how the two meet in this place, which is the costume. We put in all of these little details that speak to her heritage and her family.
Spencer Williams: Wow, it came out beautifully. Just today, I noticed details I never saw on the screen before, so I feel like I need to go back and give it another rewatch because it is that good. I hope I can see this in person someday. What did this project mean to you?
Arjun Bhasin: This idea of representation has been so important to me. I’ve followed it through in all my work. I grew up in India, and then I moved to the US when I was a young person. I feel like this idea of people being an amalgam of different things and different cultures and different philosophies is so interesting. To be able to make a visual of that and show what that could look like to young people in the US is very important to me!
