Much of Beth Harmon’s arc happens internally: her struggles after being orphaned, her plight as a female chess prodigy, her battle with addiction. Designer Gabriele Binder used color strategically to telegraph those struggles—green, for instance, to mark when Anya Taylor-Joy’s character lost her mother, then again when she seemed to heal. “When she gets to Moscow and the final game, we came back to this green color to show that she is reconnected again,” she says.
Binder modeled other looks after different 1950s and ‘60s icons. “Her early idols are Audrey Hepburn and Jean Seberg,” says the designer. “After [Beth’s] mother dies, she finds more youth culture and goes to New York to connect more with Andy Warhol’s Factory style.”
For the show’s final scenes, Binder wanted to signify Beth finally finding peace. The last costume seen is an ivory coat and sculptured hat made from alpaca wool, which when worn together softly emulate the silhouette of a chess queen. Says Binder, “We wanted to make a point, but without losing the costume language of the whole series.”
Leesa Evans didn’t have to look far when searching for inspiration for Young Rock, NBC’s biographical sitcom about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “I started creating this database of thousands of images I found of him and quickly realized I would never be able to style this show any better,” she says.
The series bounces between the early 1980s, when the wrestler turned movie star was a child in Hawaii; the late 1980s, when Johnson was a high school student in Pennsylvania; the 1990s, when he played football at the University of Miami; and the not-so-distant future, when the fictional Johnson is running for president. (He has not actually confirmed that he plans to run for office…yet.)
Evans accommodated each story line, whether the wardrobe called for retro wrestling gear, ’80s sweaters, or a Woody Woodpecker starter jacket. She estimates that she relied on vintage clothing for about 60 percent of the wardrobe while custom-building the rest. “I felt like we were re-creating this moment that had this grounded-authenticity feel to it,” she says.
The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, depicts the antebellum-era path to freedom as a literal railway. Costumer Caroline Eselin naturally looked to history to inform her designs: “I think we found every published daguerreotype, painting, drawing, etching of the enslaved that we could.”
The show’s characters travel to several different states as their quest unfolds, all requiring a slightly different sartorial approach. “Each state in the story is its own world,” Eselin says. “I am proud of the realism we achieved in Georgia. I am proud of the uniformity of South Carolina and the hybrid 1850s-1880s world we built there. I’m proud of the wicked, dark, terrible world with a huge and almost grotesque 1830s sleeve that we built in North Carolina; the rugged burned world of 1850s Tennessee; and the beauty and ease, if you will, of our progressive Indiana farm.”
Cora and Caesar, the story’s central characters, “do not have many personal choices,” says Eselin. That explains their minimalist costumes, which cloak the characters through nightmarish journeys. “Cora goes through the worst hell in this story—from cotton fields to swamps to wilderness and burned-out territory to underground train tunnels.” She telegraphed Cora’s journey by the wear in her wardrobe. “We made many multiples of her pieces and aged them in the stages of her journey. We had dirt samples from all of our locations and used those dirt colors on the costumes.”
Ewan McGregor channels the designer in a sumptuous new series charting Halston’s rise as a modernist and his fall, precipitated by impulsive business decisions, before he died at age 57. Costume designer Jeriana San Juan had the daunting task of re-creating Halston’s personal closet, as well as his most iconic designs. “I wanted to highlight how evolved his aesthetic was,” she says, “and to show his collective tribe of collaborators as these bon vivants that were in juxtaposition to the rest of the world.”
San Juan was able to pick the brain of Halston’s own head tailor, Gino Balsamo. “It was pretty much the finding-the-needle-in-the-haystack moment,” she says. “He came to my workroom and helped me literally develop the patterns to the jackets exactly as he had for Halston himself.” One favorite re-creation was a long jacket with a sheen that the real-life Halston wore to an art opening. San Juan had the jacket made in patent leather: “It did feel so futuristic, slick, and modern, and it expressed his creative, forward-thinking driving force in fashion.”
She also spoke to Chris Royer, a model for and good friend of Halston’s, about “the textures and fabrics he wore, how he occupied the space in a room, and the very unique way that Halston wore menswear.” Says San Juan, “He had such a sensitivity to fabric and to drape. Even his sports coats were often made out of a crepe wool, which is more traditionally used in womens wear to soften the shoulders of his designs. He created a unique pattern for his pants that was almost like 1940s sailor pants, which allows the fabric to drape more elegantly along the leg. Those little details helped clue me in on and develop a silhouette for him that captures that ease and elegance.”
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