From ‘The Crown’ to ‘Black-ish’: Costume Designers Dissect How They Curate the Perfect Looks
Paolo Nieddu
Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) and Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) are always dressed to the nines on Empire. So how does Nieddu — nominated for the fourth time for the Fox drama — continue to put new spins on black tie? By finding pieces in the most unexpected places. “I had been walking through the Garment District in New York and passed by this rather inexpensive prom/evening gown shop and saw this dress in the window,” he says of the dress that would become Cookie’s look for the Captain’s Ball in the episode “Slave to Memory.” “They had racks of them in different colors, and it was this cool, deco crystalled design on the dress.”
Nieddu paired a blue version of the dress with fine jewelry from Jacob & Co., a white fur capelet and a Judith Leiber bag that looked like a wad of $100 bills. With the addition of Lucious’ emerald green suit jacket, the pair shined like jewels. “Cookie and Lucious just kind of come into this room like Fred [Astaire] and Ginger [Rogers] and do this elaborate tango,” he says. “It was a cool old Hollywood homage mixed with their gangsterness.”
The dress, however, barely survived the tango. Nieddu says that between cutting the train to make the dance easier and the snagging of cheap sequins, “by the end, we were on the third dress and it was practically falling apart.”
Jane Petrie
Based on the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), The Crown uses real events and outfits to inspire much of its costume design. However, first-time Emmy nominee Petrie must find a balance between staying true to history and telling a story with the clothes that each character wears, as was the case with the “Dear Mrs. Kennedy” episode.
“The dress the queen wore is accurate, but the dress that Jackie [Kennedy] wore isn’t because I thought I could enhance what we were trying to say by changing it slightly,” she explains. During their visit to Buckingham Palace, the Kennedys are met with fascination from most of the royal partygoers and insecurity from the queen. While Elizabeth wears a typical blue chiffon gown, Jackie Kennedy (Jodi Balfour) opts for a strapless blue silk dress.
“We worked really hard on telling the story of the outside world in forward propulsion, and then the palace being so stuck,” Petrie says of the costume choices in the episode, from Jackie’s lack of sleeves to the style of the background actors.
Kennedy’s dress presented an additional, unexpected challenge when they were filming in central London. “When we got to set with that dress, I suddenly realized I hadn’t given her a cape or a top layer to wear with it for when she arrived at the palace.”
Petrie drove 45 minutes from the set to buy more fabric and sew the cape herself. “You’re not going to stand there and go, ‘Oh, I wish I’d made a cape but there isn’t time. We’ll have to go without.’ You would never do that on The Crown because the material’s too good. It’s far too good.”
Jane Petrie
Based on the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), The Crown uses real events and outfits to inspire much of its costume design. However, first-time Emmy nominee Petrie must find a balance between staying true to history and telling a story with the clothes that each character wears, as was the case with the “Dear Mrs. Kennedy” episode.
“The dress the queen wore is accurate, but the dress that Jackie [Kennedy] wore isn’t because I thought I could enhance what we were trying to say by changing it slightly,” she explains. During their visit to Buckingham Palace, the Kennedys are met with fascination from most of the royal partygoers and insecurity from the queen. While Elizabeth wears a typical blue chiffon gown, Jackie Kennedy (Jodi Balfour) opts for a strapless blue silk dress.
“We worked really hard on telling the story of the outside world in forward propulsion, and then the palace being so stuck,” Petrie says of the costume choices in the episode, from Jackie’s lack of sleeves to the style of the background actors.
Kennedy’s dress presented an additional, unexpected challenge when they were filming in central London. “When we got to set with that dress, I suddenly realized I hadn’t given her a cape or a top layer to wear with it for when she arrived at the palace.”
Petrie drove 45 minutes from the set to buy more fabric and sew the cape herself. “You’re not going to stand there and go, ‘Oh, I wish I’d made a cape but there isn’t time. We’ll have to go without.’ You would never do that on The Crown because the material’s too good. It’s far too good.”
Lou Eyrich
Eyrich has been collaborating with Ryan Murphy for decades, since his early Glee days — from Jane Lynch’s iconic tracksuit look on that show to Lily Rabe’s demonic nun getup on American Horror Story: Asylum. And now, Eyrich has her eighth Emmy nomination (she’s won two twice) for her work re-creating the designs of a fashion empire on The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which chronicles the weeks leading to the 1997 murder of the iconic designer.
“We scoured the internet for weeks and weeks,” Eyrich says of her early research. Despite a tight budget, her crew built the looks using a combination of vintage Versace and custom-made pieces. However, her favorite look from the nominated episode, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” is not based on an outfit that Versace wore or designed at all.
“Ryan Murphy, who is very hands-on with costumes, said that he would love it if we could make some kind of a pink and gold robe,” she says of the wrap that Versace (Edgar Ramirez) dons at the beginning of the episode. “So, a tailor custom made it. When we came to shoot the scene at the casa in Miami, we had him in the black T-shirt and white shorts that he eventually gets [killed] in, and Ryan called me and said, ‘Do you have that pink robe?’ ”
Perhaps the robe was meant to add some color to an otherwise bleak day. Or maybe Murphy just likes pink.
“I do not know why pink,” Eyrich admits. “That’s just something that Ryan came up with, and I always follow his instincts. They’re always spot-on.”
