TBT: Young Guns & Young Guns II

You’re going to laugh, but I was 14ish and 16ish when Young Guns (1988) and Young Guns II (1990) came out, so a movie with some historic elements chock full of hot male actors was totally up my alley. I recently watched Brats (2024), the Brat Pack documentary, and was filled with nostalgia for all the films referenced … and then Emilio Estevez mentioned Young Guns and the nostalgia really hit! So, it’s summer and that’s when we watch (or rewatch) ridiculous movies, right??

Both movies tell the story of Billy the Kid, the Western outlaw, and are set in the late 1870s. Billy is played by Estevez, with Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Dermot Mulroney, Terence Stamp, and Jack Palance rounding out the cast for the first film; the sequel features Estevez, Sutherland, and Phillips and adds Christian Slater, who was the hottest thing in the entire world for me at the time (please don’t ask me for my teenage thoughts on Pump Up the Volume, because they were EPIC). (Note to self: rewatch Pump Up the Volume).

Okay, so the films themselves are decent if you like a snappy Western, and from a brief perusal of Wikipedia (SUCH MAD RESEARCH SKILLS) at least the first film hews relatively close to the actual historical events. About which I don’t really care, so that’s all you’re getting out of me.

The costumes were designed by Richard Hornung (Barton Fink, Nixon) for the first film and Judy L. Ruskin (Born on the Fourth of July, A Walk in the Clouds) for the second.

According to the Morning Call, Hornung researched the men’s look and meant it to actually reflect what was worn in the late-19th-century west:

“Hornung and ‘Young Guns’ production designer Jane Musky’s bible was a series of handsomely illustrated volumes published by Time- Life. In “The West” they discovered that late 19th century enforcers in and around Lincoln, N.M., leaned to slightly urban getups. ‘A lot of these people looked like misplaced Easterners, misplaced Europeans,’ reasoned Hornung. ‘Unlike the people in the genre westerns, they did not look like cowboys.””

They sourced antique clothing:

“Hornung and crew found the lion’s share of period pieces in New York and Los Angeles, both far cries from Billy the Kid’s tumbleweed haunts. Design team members recreated multiples of many of these outfits: a single frock coat, for example, was the foundation for the outerwear of the six regulators. Copies were then aged and weathered.”

They also used actual period garments for the one main female character, Yen Sun, a Chinese American woman who is Sutherland’s character’s love interest:

“According to Hornung, 1980s women are usually too big-shouldered and/or wide-waisted to wear unaltered antique garments. Alice Carter … was actually too small for the 1880s linen bustle dress he found in Albuquerque. The piece had to be tightened by two or three notches to fit her size-3 figure.”

For the sequel, the Los Angeles Times records, “Ruskin had almost all of the wardrobe for the principals custom made, although some of the accessories were bought off the rack.” And she clearly stuck to the same look:

The one exception is Pat Garrett, the ex-friend and now-sheriff hunting Billy and his gang. According to Ruskin, “In my research, I found Pat Garrett was quite a fashion plate. He was always very well dressed and incredibly vain.”

The one bit of female interest is “Whisky” Jane, the prostitute who is an old friend of Billy and his gang — and was all I wanted to be at this age (a sexy and badass redhead, what’s not to love?):

 

Do you remember Young Guns and Young Guns II? Fondly or not?

 

Find this frock flick at: