The Costume Designers of Hollywood on the Evolution of Glamour and Taking Style Notes From Holland Taylor’s Mom
How does one define glamour, or even begin to contemplate it, at a time when everything around us seems so bleak? It’s difficult to conjure visions of over-the-top excess or ultrabeautiful clothes, but it’s also not impossible. Social distancing during this pandemic, we’ve turned to movies and TV shows for small injections of escapism, often involving some form of glamour, and it can help add a little bit of glitter into our lives, even if only for an hour or two.
Beginning Friday, we’ll have another source of transportive entertainment, another way to internalize a little glamour. Ryan Murphy’s anticipated new series Hollywood premieres on Netflix, starring Patti LuPone, Holland Taylor, David Corenswet, Darren Criss, and Laura Harrier. Other cast members include Jeremy Pope, Mira Sorvino, and Samara Weaving. The story takes place in the 1940s, the golden age of Tinseltown, where dreamers once came to try and make it big in the movies. It was the era of Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh and a young Judy Garland. It was also the era that a Hollywood-branded version of glamour was born.
The plot revolves around a hopeful young war veteran who moves to L.A. with his pregnant wife and aspirations to become a movie star. Murphy sets you up to believe that this is another vintage Hollywood fairy tale but very early on you realize this story is a different one. Without giving too much away, Murphy, whose coproducer and director on the project is Janet Mock, introduces very contemporary story lines into the squeaky-clean exterior of the golden age of Hollywood: sex for hire, orgies, racism, and sexism. More than anything, Hollywood is an allegory for a town that, no matter the era, has swept people in and dumped them out, over and over again in a vicious cycle. That said, it is a hopeful show, one that shows the power and necessity of, say, putting a woman in charge or putting men and women of color at the forefront of a creative project. It is also a beautiful show to watch, full of bright colors and brimming with spectacular costumes.
There are bold women wearing bold suits; young starlets cinched into embroidered pencil skirts topped off with tiny cardigans; men with giant lapels and high-waist trousers; and plenty of old-school Oscar gowns too. Many of the ensembles recall trends that are relevant today, like the loose suiting for women or the cardi-and-skirt sets. Glamour has evolved, but one fact remains true eight decades later: Wherever there is glamour, there is a way to be carried off somewhere else, to a different time, a different place, and the clothes in this show are what help to get us there.
Here, Hollywood costume designers Sarah Evelyn and Lou Eyrich discuss how they created a dreamscape onscreen with a wardrobe from a bygone era in Hollywood.
The show sort of mashes up historical narratives with fictional ones. Did this affect the way that you approached the costumes?
Sarah Evelyn: The initial aesthetic vision—golden sheen, Old Hollywood vibe, and period—came from Ryan and then some other specifics per character. We took his vision, and we researched a ton, pouring through resource materials such as books and magazines, and we watched hundreds of movies from the period. Lou had just come off Ratched (an upcoming Netflix series based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), so she was up to speed on 1940s-era fashion. But I had to catch up pretty quickly. We also hired a terrific researcher named Raissa Bretaña. She’s based in New York and is a fashion historian. She had access to some really fantastic photographic and written source materials. We love researching and found it really inspiring.
Regarding the fictional narratives, I think the idealistic and hopefully dreamlike quality that the fictional narratives infused into the story allowed us to create some dreaminess in colors of the costumes. The color palette came from Ryan Murphy as harvest tones, golden hues with a bit of Technicolor. He wanted Archie [Pope] and Raymond [Criss] in some pinks and purples, and while that might not have been period correct, it worked within the context of the aspirational, could-have-done-it-better vibe of this story.
If we re-created any historical events in the show, it was Hattie McDaniel at the 1940 Oscars. Ryan wanted us to re-create the costumes as close to the real thing as possible. We deeply researched that dress and put a premium on re-creating it.
Did you all take any inspiration for the costumes from the runways of today? Some of the looks, specifically those on Camille and Claire were similar to past collections from Prada, Marc Jacobs, and Louis Vuitton, for example.
S.E.: Living and breathing and loving fashion in the contemporary world, I’m sure some costumes were influenced by recent collections, even if subconsciously. But we were really focused on being period correct, particularly in the silhouettes. What’s so cool, to turn the question on its head, is how the 1940s fashions consistently inspire contemporary designers. We’ve seen trends that were born in the ’40s—like the long collar, menswear for women, big shoulders, and more—inspiring contemporary designers again and again. Women in menswear, like Katharine Hepburn, for example, never goes out of style.
Was everything custom-made, or did you have to source a lot of vintage?
S.E.: A lot was custom-made—there just aren’t that many clothes from the ’40s in good shape. There were four or five other period shows in production at the same time, so it was really tough to find quality stock. We dug and dug and dug and worked with some really fantastic vintage vendors across the globe. Our cutter and fitter, Joanne Mills, is quite the magician, so we knew we could lean on her to produce some really special pieces. There weren’t any contemporary-designer pieces used, but we found some really amazing early Lilli Ann suits that we used on Avis [LuPone], and we also found some Fred Block suits, like Avis’s mint-green-and-black studded suit. Knitwear was particularly hard to find in usable shape, so we had several pieces custom knit. It’s difficult when designing episodic, as time is quite condensed!