The costume design was done by Marie-Sylvie Deveau, but the style, Davis explains, is all Sandler. “I think the thing with Adam is he wears what he wears,” she says. “It wasn’t like, oh this is what Billy Madison would wear. I don’t remember anything being different from what Adam Sandler would wear.”
What Davis herself identified, she recalls, is how that could be widely appealing. Davis came onto the production midway through the shoot after Universal was unhappy with what the initial director Stephen Kessler had produced. Initially, Davis thought that Sandler was “kind of dorky,” because she mainly knew him as Opera Man on Saturday Night Live. But she also identified the kind of sex symbol that Sandler could become if you just pushed his natural inclinations a little bit.
©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
At the time, Davis was married to Mike D of the Beastie Boys, so she understood intuitively how cute, nerdy, New York Jewish boys could possess unexpected swag. On set, Davis would offer her own sort of encouragement for Sandler, and some suggestions for minor alterations to the styling, like tying a shirt around the waist. “It wasn’t really like, ‘Oh this looks so fashionable,’” she says. “It was more like, this is something you would wear, and then for me as a girl saying, ‘I think this looks cute on you.’”
Her favorite look? Billy’s blue windbreaker, yellow cap, and Timbs for his first day of scholarly regression. Yes, the one where he sings his rhyming ditty: “Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I’m not a fool.” When he finally gets to class, he doesn’t look all that different from the much younger kids he’s learning alongside. That made the clothing “relatable,” Davis says.
©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection
