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.