IN CONVERSATION WITH MARY BRONSTEIN

Mary Bronstein's second feature film, 'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' messed me up for days after seeing it... I'm sure those who have already seen it can say the same! I had the honor of speaking with Mary about her vintage shopping obsession, her favorite t-shirt, the impact of her feature film Yeast, why contemporary culture just recycles from the past, and so much more. 'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' is now in theatres nationwide, make sure to see this on the big screen in a dark theater filled with other people, it's an experience like no other! 

Hagop Kourounian: I’d love to spend some time talking about your own personal style and your relationship with clothing. How much time do you spend thinking about clothes? How have you developed your personal style?

Mary Bronstein: I have always been somebody that has loved clothes and attracted to style and trying to figure out what my style was. I was a kid of the ‘80s and I was very into this sort of Punky Brewster-Cindy Lauper-Madonna kind of mash up style of color, jewelry, layers. Coco Chanel said to look in the mirror and take one thing off, right? I just look in the mirror and put something else on. I was lucky enough to have a mother who let me experiment with clothes and makeup from an early age. When I was a teenager in the ‘90s my big signature style was that I had gotten a Vietnam army jacket at a vintage store. There used to be a big vintage store in New York City called Cheap Jack’s, by Union Square. That was where I liked to get almost all my clothes and I got this jacket there and I wore it like almost every day. Also at that same time I learned how to sew and got into making my own clothes. I was really into ‘60s style and in the ‘90s you couldn't really buy the kind of clothes that I wanted to wear so what I would do is buy two pairs of cheap jeans and rip the seams off of one of them and then cut triangle panels from the other ones and make giant elephant leg jeans on my little sewing machine. Nobody else was really dressing like that at my school and that was okay because I didn't have friends anyway, so that was fine. By the time I got to college I continued to experiment and now where I am at my age I can afford to buy higher quality clothing, but what I continue to do is go vintage. 

I love vintage so a lot of the stuff that I've worn on this press tour for this movie has been from thrift stores or vintage stores. I wore this amazing ‘80s purple dress to the Melbourne Film Festival premiere. I found it at a thrift store for like 50 bucks and that's kind of the vibe that I've been trying to go for on this press tour  and in my personal life. That's how I would dress if you caught me on a day off. If I'm just walking around doing errands or whatever it's jeans and some kind of band t-shirt or t-shirt with a graphic graphic on it and a cardigan and Doc Martens boots. That's my go-to and what I pretty much wore every day while I was directing this movie.

Hagop Kourounian: I love that you mentioned shopping at thrift stores because I was about to ask about that. I saw on your Instagram that you wore a $40 thrifted dress to some premiere recently.

Mary Bronstein: Yes, I did wear it to the BAFTA screening in London. That dress I found for 40 bucks is from a thrift store that is such a thrift store that it doesn't even have a name. It just is this store on 7th Avenue in Manhattan where I live right around the corner from my apartment which is dangerous because I go in there multiple times a week and it’s one of those stores that is just stuffed. You have to pick through the racks and you can find something like that in there and my rule with vintage is if you like it and then you go in the fitting room and it fits you. You buy it. 

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, you gotta. It's meant to be. The chance that you see something you like and it actually fits and looks good is so rare with vintage. 

Mary Bronstein: Yeah. My favorite vintage store in New York City is this little tiny boutique called Eye Candy on 23rd Street right across from the Chelsea Hotel. The guy that runs it is just a connoisseur. You can have a conversation with him for half an hour about bakelite bracelets and you just learn everything and I get most of my like costume vintage jewelry there. Also every time I go in there whatever selection of clothing he has fits me and I'm like, “why? why are you doing this to me?” And then you got to buy it! I love jumpsuits. I'm wearing one today that's not vintage, but I love vintage jumpsuits, especially in the summer. My favorite one that I own I got from Eye Candy and it's an imitation PUCCI jumpsuit from the late ‘60s. It's imitation and the label is from a department store that I've never heard of. I don't know where it's from. But I love the idea of some woman somewhere being like I can't afford PUCCI, but I'm getting this thing. And now I'm buying it in 2025 and it still is great. That's what I love about vintage too is imagining the person that bought it first. 

Hagop Kourounian: It's amazing. There was a time before where clothes, even if they were imitation, used to be so well made. Now honestly I can say that nothing that I still own from my early teenage years in the 2010s is worth keeping.

Mary Bronstein: I know it's wild. I find these things like the dress that you're referring to that I posted. Just from the style of it and knowing about clothes, it's got to be from the late ‘50s early ‘60s. I got it for 40 bucks and it lasted however many decades for me to wear it the other night. It's wild and like you're saying anything that I buy from fast fashion, it doesn't even last the season. Politically, I know we're all supposed to be against fast fashion, but it happens to us all and sometimes it's there for you when you need it. Certainly there were points in my life where it's all I could afford but I also am a big believer in rewearing stuff. Jeans are the best example of that, right? If you find a great pair of jeans you're gonna wear those till they turn into a thread. T-shirts are like that for me too. My favorite t-shirt I have is from a John Waters movie Female Trouble, it’s purple with a very colorful graphic and if you follow me on Instagram you'll see it show up a lot. If you look at BTS photos from the film of me directing I wore it a lot on set. Right now my favorite t-shirt is this Unsolved Mysteries t-shirt that I wore to the Hampton's Film Festival that my husband gave to me as a gift because it’s one of my favorite shows. But things like that instead of being something like ‘oh no, I'm wearing this t-shirt again’ it becomes a signature look for you. I'm really into that and I'm into people that other people that do that too I think it's cool. 

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, definitely. I remember there was someone I knew who kept wearing this leather jacket all the time and when I saw her not wearing the leather jacket one day I thought it was so weird and it made me think that people used to have signature pieces of clothing. Now everyone kind of dresses a little bit differently every day depending on their mood, etc. 

Mary Bronstein: Yeah, that was like when I was a teenager, the army jacket I was talking about earlier, I wore it every single day so that if I didn't wear it it would be like me being naked. Also what's weird about this time in history with fashion is if you're into vintage stuff you can tell if something is from a certain decade all the way up until like the mid-2000s. That’s when everything starts to look the same. I can tell when something's even from the early 2000s, but then once you hit 2010 everything kind of starts to look the same and I start to wonder sometimes for the future if someone was like well, ‘what did people dress like in 2025?’ I'd be like I don't know. I feel like the trends go faster and there isn’t sort of like ‘this is how people look.’ I don't know if that's good or bad. Maybe it's because we have more choices, but maybe it's also because we have fewer choices. I can't decide. What do you think? I don't know. 

Hagop Kourounian: Not to get like existential or anything, but..

Mary Bronstein: No, let's get existential.

Hagop Kourounian: You know how people always say the current times we're living in is a nostalgic era where there's nothing new and even in film we're referencing things from the past and remaking things and rebooting things., I think it's the same with clothes and it's kind of the reason it's hard to tell what the style of 2025 is because everything that was niche before is now mainstream. 

Mary Bronstein: Like grunge! I know because I have a teenage daughter, Urban Outfitters is all ‘90s except that it's not ‘90s if you actually lived through the ‘90s. It's through nostalgia eyes ‘90s. So she dresses like that and calls it grunge. But I think you're right that it's all sort of nostalgic but then that means you can't pinpoint what it is. Whereas if I see a dress I'll know oh, that's definitely from the ‘70s. I try to find vintage stores wherever I go. I was just at the Hampton’s Film festival and I found this vintage store and I bought so many pants there. They had these ‘70s velvet bell bottom purple pants and I was like ‘well, if these fit me that's done.’ I bought like five pairs of pants there because they had all these fabulous ‘70s pants. I feel like there's less places that are selling things like that. A vintage store will sell stuff from the ‘90s and Y2K stuff, but to me as a person in their 40s. That's not vintage. I want ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. Even the other day on this tour in London for a press day I wore a suit that I found on Etsy that was from the ‘40s and I just find that stuff so fun. And to think of clothing as something to not be so serious, something to have fun to have with. But one thing I'll say is I always like to be comfortable. Some people say pain is beauty, beauty is pain or whatever.

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, but long term that doesn't last…

Mary Bronstein: Long term that doesn't last. I got my Docs on right now and for me I have a very low tolerance for being uncomfortable.

Hagop Kourounian: Speaking of secondhand vintage clothes… There’s a moment of comic relief in this film that felt very much needed… So, without spoiling anything from the movie I wanted to ask you if you've ever been banned from TheRealReal? 

Mary Bronstein: No!!! I have never been banned from The Real Real. So Ella Beatty who's a terrific actor who I wish had a bigger part in the film because she's so fabulous. When I auditioned people for that part I had them do a self tape where the direction was you're coming into a therapist's office and you just are so self centered and you're immediately coming in just talking about yourself. That was something that she said in her  self tape and I was like can I add that to the script? She said sure and I was like, is that a thing? Can you get banned from The Real Real? And she was like, Oh, yeah! She explained it all to me, I was fascinated by it and so we put that in there. But how horrifying that would be? 

Hagop Kourounian: As a teenager. I got banned from eBay…

Mary Bronstein: From eBay!? 

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, I had to make a whole new email, PayPal, new everything to get back on.

Mary Bronstein: Are you an unreliable seller? Is that what happens? 

Hagop Kourounian: I would sell basketball cards in my early high school days and whenever it would sell for a price I didn't want I would just like cancel it and make every excuse up in the book. 

Mary Bronstein: You were an unreliable seller. Oh my goodness!

Hagop Kourounian: Unfortunately, yes, not anymore though. Not anymore!

Mary Bronstein: I get a lot of clothes from Etsy and if I was ever to be banned from Etsy I would just die. I don't know what I would do.

Hagop Kourounian: I’d love to talk about Yeast for a second, it's an incredible film. It's had a great resurgence over the last few years. I got lucky enough to see it in theaters in LA in 2023. The crew that helped you make Yeast have gone on to make significant impacts in both independent cinema and studio filmmaking. You have Greta Gerwig acting alongside you, as well as Josh and Benny Safdie, Sean Price Williams behind the camera, and of course your husband Ronald Bronstein editing among other roles. I'm curious what you think was incubating with your friend group on that set and how we've kind of gotten to this place where you guys are dominating the film world. 

Mary Bronstein: Oh my god Well, thank you. It took me a little longer to get out there, but I'm here now. I don't know where there must have been something in the water. I'll tell you that we all met… and also Lena Dunham was part of that group. She's not in that film, but we all met at SXSW in 2007. All of us were there with our first films, I hadn't even made Yeast yet but it came out the next year. I was there as an actress with Frownland and we were all there with our first projects and Greta was there as an actor as well and there must have been something in the zeitgeist there. We met and we were all attracted to each other like magnets. I think it's a testament to the person who programmed the festival back then, his name was Matt Dentler and he programmed all of our work and then the next year program Yeast. It is pretty wild isn't it?

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, I mean the list of names on the credits and thinking about what  everyone has gone on to do next is crazy. I even forgot to mention Sean Price Williams 

Mary Bronstein: Sean shot and acted in my film. How good is he in that film also by the way? 

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah, he's such an asshole! But yeah, you guys are all killing it and I'm excited to see the reception for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I loved it so much. Thank you so much for the time and congratulations on the film.

Mary Bronstein: Thank you! This was so much fun. Thanks for having me.