Working with someone for such a long time creates trust, she says, which is crucial for a relationship like theirs. “You have to be able to know, without a doubt, that you are in safe hands. You’re trusting someone to make you look a certain way. It’s a big responsibility.”
It’s a responsibility also keenly felt by Debra McGuire, who in season two worked alongside De Rakoff as Jennifer Aniston’s costume designer for the show.
“Debra has the same relationship with Jen as I have with Reese,” says De Rakoff of the unusual arrangement. ”This is a really, really big show and to take some of that workload off, when you are creatively in sync with the other person, is so helpful. Deb and I talk about the scripts, we share photos. We know what the other person is doing, always. And the characters are so incredibly different that it’s not a problem to differentiate them. That distinction was established in season one and was very easy by season two.“
McGuire is a seasoned designer, having worked with Aniston since 1994, when they both began on a TV series called Friends. You may have heard of it.
Debra McGuire, who is Jennifer Aniston’s personal costume designer for Morning Wars and other projects.
But although she has worked with Aniston for almost 30 years, the pace and size of Morning Wars – not to mention the added pressure of lockdown – was daunting, says McGuire.
“I really wasn’t sure how we would pull this off,” she says. “The crew is huge. I’ve worked on $200 million movies that didn’t have this many people on it. It’s a very big production, and COVID made it all the more complicated.”
McGuire and her small team of assistants were kept in a bubble to ensure Aniston did not get sick, and underwent rapid daily testing. “It just became a way of life,” she says now.
Greta Lee and Billy Crudup in Morning Wars.
Part of the challenge of the show was its relatively large ensemble cast, expanded in season two to include the likes of Julianna Margulies, Billy Crudup, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mark Duplass.
“Sophie has so many people in her department,” says McGuire. “Her task was overwhelming. I had one person. I used to feel guilty when I opened the schedule and saw all the fittings she had.”
But De Rakoff was unperturbed. “By the time I meet the actors I’ve gotten to a place emotionally and visually where I am comfortable conversing with them about who their character is and how they dress,” she says. “It’s that fine balance of listening to the actor but also understanding your own role.”
Adding to the difficulty is the medium of television itself, which is not always scripted to the end of the season when shooting begins. “It’s physically demanding in that way,” says De Rakoff. “You’re shooting all the time but also constantly thinking of new characters and even new plot lines. You don’t know what’s happening at the end of the season at the beginning. So you need to be flexible. With movies, you have the script and you know what’s going to happen. With TV, anything can happen.”
I’m not at all influenced by brands. I cut up their clothes if I need to. I’m certainly not in bed with them.
— Debra McGuire, costume designer
COVID-19 lockdowns, too, affected production. “All the stores were closed and it became very hard to source clothes,” says De Rakoff. “I think there is this idea that we are sent floods of clothes for Reese and Jen, but that is not the case. It’s us, finding the costumes, making them in some instances.
“The best you’re getting is a discount, and even then I don’t love to take it because you don’t want to be indebted to designers. I want to show the character, not a particular brand.”
McGuire agrees. “I’m not at all influenced by brands,” she says. “I cut up their clothes if I need to. I’m certainly not in bed with them. We buy everything so we can adjust it and make it what we need it to be.”
If she had the time, she says, she would simply make everything from scratch. “That’s what we did for the first few years on Friends,” she says. “We would get the script on Monday and have the wardrobes together by Wednesday to do dress rehearsal Thursday. For six characters! I look back and I don’t know how I did it.”
For Morning Wars, inspiration has come from documentary footage of newsrooms, and female anchors of the ’70s and ’80s such as Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. “We kept to the norms of those shows,” says De Rakoff. “So the dresses shouldn’t be too short, or too revealing. Those parameters help you tell the story of these women, their jobs, the authority they have, the achievements they have amassed.“
Television costume design, once something of an afterthought, has become big business, especially as lockdowns continue and we spend more and more time in front of our screens. Netflix now has a store where it sells shoes inspired by Bridgerton, and a Killing Eve clothing collection is coming, for example.
The opportunity to commercialise costume design is significant, says De Rakoff, but requires some forethought to be successful.
“I don’t think [the streaming services] have cracked it yet. They don’t have the technology or the inventory. You need to start with the costume department rather than the other way around, and reverse engineer it.”
The pull of clothing seen on screen, and the potential to monetise television in this way – to click on a dress Witherspoon wears, for instance – is something McGuire is well acquainted with, though she agrees it is tricky to get right.
“We did Friends more than 25 years ago and it is still so popular,” she says. “And that is so fascinating to me. It’s really cool to see young people discovering it. When the show first started I would get letters from people in their 20s, and then it was 17-year-olds, and 13-year-olds, now I get 10-year-olds writing to me. And people still ask me, where do I find this T-shirt? I say, ‘It was 30 years ago!’ But sometimes I do send them the patterns.”
The second season of Morning Wars streams on Apple TV+ from September 17, screened on Fridays for 10 weeks.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiiAFodHRwczovL3d3dy5hZnIuY29tL2xpZmUtYW5kLWx1eHVyeS9mYXNoaW9uLWFuZC1zdHlsZS9ob3ctcmVlc2Utd2l0aGVyc3Bvb24tcy1jb3N0dW1lLWRlc2lnbmVyLWhlbHBlZC1oZXItZmluZC1oZXItcG93ZXItMjAyMTA4MjMtcDU4bDgx0gEA?oc=5
2021-09-16 23:57:00Z
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