How The Gilded Age, 1883, and Vienna Blood’s Costume Designers Marry "Magic" with Period Accuracy
We’re living through such a costume drama-rich time on TV that three shows covering roughly the same period have been simultaneously airing in the U.S.: HBO’s The Gilded Age, Peacock’s 1883, and PBS’s Vienna Blood. The arcs of these series cover the 25-year period spanning 1882-1907, giving viewers a bevy of glimpses into how fashions of the era developed incrementally, and the impact of a rural versus a metropolitan setting.
“Designing for period pieces is very similar to science fiction, because you can do whatever you want, as long as it's coherent. That world you draw has to make sense within itself,” costume designer Thomas Oláh recently told Town & Country. To conjure 1906-1907 in Vienna Blood, he relied on an eclectic combination of photographs, vintage inspiration pieces, and custom-built original designs. Oláh and his team used “a pan-European approach” to source items from rental houses in Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and even rural Bavaria.
Set just one year apart in America, The Gilded Age and 1883 could not be more distinct; where The Gilded Age offers a high-end, urbane soap opera à la Downton Abbey, where the fabulously wealthy main characters may wear up to three different gowns in a single day, 1883 aims for the gritty, sweaty, violent realities of Westward expansion while being limited to a single trunk’s worth of options for each character. In both cases, strict adherence to the slippery concept of accuracy takes a backseat to letting the imaginations of designers Kasia Walicka-Maimone (The Gilded Age) and Janie Bryant (1883) run free in service of creating characters who leap off the screen.
Below, a conversation about how the costume designers of each show approach the design process, from research and lookbooks to renting and building each character’s wardrobe.
Creating an Impression
In interviews with Town & Country, the designers for The Gilded Age and Vienna Blood particularly relished describing how their collaborations with colleagues and actors are informed by inspirations drawn from visual arts and social conditions of the eras depicted in the show.
Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s work with Jeanne Tripplehorn to visually realize her character, the controversial art collector Mrs. Chamberlain, was “heavily influenced by the paintings [of John Singer Sargent and James Tissot] because there’s a certain level of stepping back from the documentary approach to a bit more stylized approach, never leaving the era and historical grounding of the period.” Mrs. Chamberlain’s extraordinary wealth and her commitment to supporting art she believed in—her home is full of masterpieces by leading Impressionists including Degas, Monet, and Caillebotte, who, like Mrs. Chamberlain herself, were viewed with disdain in their time—gave Walicka-Maimone and Tripplehorn license to conceive of her costumes as wearable art, through “a sculptural approach.”
In Vienna Blood, the young Freudian Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard) needs to wear a certain upper middle-class uniform to fit into status-obsessed Viennese society, but he has to look even more respectable than the average young Austrian professional, because he’s Jewish. Thomas Oláh noted that while Vienna was the city of Freud and Mahler, 1906-7 was “exactly the time when Hitler lived in the city…of course, we considered how to pick up on that in the looks.” Max’s father runs a high-end drapery shop, so he has the income and access to afford the best fabrics in a mature, restrained palette of midnight blue, loden green, and charcoal gray. Little flashes of red and burgundy on his waistcoats and neckties nod to his interest in looking sharp, as well as providing a visual reminder that this is a murder procedural.
To introduce the scientist and Max’s sometime love interest Amelia Lydgate (played by Jessica De Gouw in season one, and Lucy Griffiths in season two), Oláh combined two opposing silhouettes: the body-hugging vertical pleats of a Fortuny gown in aubergine silk, under a velvet “cocoon coat with a high-rising collar that comes up almost to her ears, and then doesn’t show any waist at all.” This produced an intriguing “contrast in-between, being almost like in a shell protected by that overcoat, but then very much exposed when the coat goes away” in the following scene: Amelia is briefly nude during her hospital admission after suffering a violent psychological episode while viewing Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze. The monumental painting itself is a study in contrasts: beauty and vulgarity, voluptuousness and horror.
Building a Solid Foundation: Undergarments & Foundation Wear
Undergarments can’t be seen with the naked eye (unless the scene calls for it), but they instantly indicate the time frame. “You have a silhouette that tells you 'Oh okay, it's 1900 because she's wearing a long skirt and she’s not an hourglass, but she has a very tiny waist,'” says Oláh. “So you could assume there is a corset underneath.” Creating the foundation of this step back in time also occurs for the actors as they put on a costume. Oláh refers to moments in fittings where actors have resisted this additional support— “'Well I don't need that because I’m in good shape and doesn't show anyway'”—and he has asked the performer to give it a try because “It totally changes the way you move. To sit down and get up again is totally different when you wear a corset.” It is both a visual aid to the audience and a character-building garment for the performer.
No matter the era, underpinnings are essential for creating a silhouette reflecting aesthetics of the period, and when designing a 19th-century closet there is an expectation that corsets will factor in. “I designed the camisoles, the bloomers, the petticoats, [and] the corsets because we do see the women in all of those undergarments,” Bryant says about the undergarments in 1883. But Bryant’s research also revealed that some of the European immigrant characters did not partake in these clothing customs at this time at all. Elsa Dutton’s (Isabel May) many extremely physical scenes on horseback necessitated another exception to the corset rule. Bryant used a waist cincher from Rago that maintained the same shape, but that didn’t “have the restrictive bones of a period corset because [May] wasn't capable of wearing the corset and riding—it was too difficult.” One actress who did wear a corset throughout is Faith Hill, as fierce matriarch Margaret Dutton: “She felt fine and that she could physically do the work with the corset.”
Manhattan and the Oregon Trail didn’t have a lot in common in the 1880s, but structural foundation garments provide a thread stretching across the country. During this period, trends were changing and Walicka-Maimone observes, “The bustle was becoming much smaller, and that's what's being represented on Gladys, Marian, Bertha. They are embracing the new style of fashions.” Corsets, petticoats, and bustle cages are intrinsic to building the recognizable shapes and the designer likens this process to the “architectural discovery of building a house.” Without this foundation, everything would fall in on itself.
The Gilded Age cast is a who's who of Broadway stars, and Walicka-Maimone notes that their theater background was beneficial, as most of the actors “were very familiar with wearing corsets.” Not only does this garment reshape the body, but it impacts breathing, and “there's a whole engineering technical aspect that was handled extremely well by the collaboration of our costumers and actors on the set.”
Whereas Bryant used a corset alternative to make scenes on horseback easier for one of her actors to manage, Walicka-Maimone had to accommodate Carrie Coon’s real-life pregnancy after Bertha’s silhouette had been established. In those early conversations with Coon, she recalled urging the actor to consult with her doctor about costume safety, “because I've never dealt with corseting pregnancy and we want to be smart and respectful and logical about it. So we modified her corsets, we modified the stretch panels in certain corsets, and it was genius engineering” by Tricorne, the studio whose makers built those costumes.
Symbolic details
Corsets are not the only tools a costume designer can use to encourage period or character-specific posture: the stiff, high collars featured in both The Gilded Age and Vienna Blood visually signify the sartorial (and societal) rigidity of the era. Oláh observes that this style choice further emphasizes actor Matthew Beard’s tall slender frame, as he needs to hold his head high to avoid being jabbed in the chin by the pointed collar ends. This also adds a “slightly arrogant notion” to his body language that some might infer reflects Max’s profession or exhaustion with the casual antisemitism he experiences daily, but the actor is actually refraining from dipping his chin to avoid hurting himself.
Menswear visually links Max with Amelia Lydgate, who as the rare professional woman working as a scientist in the city museum, wears similarly stiff (though not as high) collars and ties. This purposeful design flourish reflects the evolving influences on what some women wore in the workplace. “You could see it in the 1900s, obviously strong in the '10s, and finally it turned ladies’ fashion upside down in the '20s,” says Oláh.
Incorporating design elements from the era provides an immediate visual hint for the audience, but Oláh also deliberately used an anachronistic accessory that a contemporary viewer might register as a clue to understanding the character, nonetheless. “I don't know if you noticed his hat, which period-wise is totally wrong,” says the designer. Out of several choices for Max, the borsalino fedora was Oláh’s preferred style, as it is a nod to the hats that are still de rigeur for Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.
Max eschews flashy accessories in Vienna Blood, but one character who embraces bells and whistles—or rather pocket watches, tie pins, and sunglasses—is The Gilded Age’s Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson). He's not shy in showing his fondness for the finer things in life and unlike his mother, he has zero qualms about fraternizing with (and even wooing!) the new money set. “The combination with the prop masters who found those glasses and then created the slightly extravagant look for Oscar was definitely a super fun discovery,” she says.
Floor-skimming gowns are always showstoppers, but footwear is on display when getting in and out of horse-drawn carriages—the actors can’t make do with comfy Uggs. “It was a combination of us making shoes for the principals and renting shoes from Europe. We did have to remake some of the shoes. They don't exist from the period,” explains Walicka-Maimone. Every outfit also requires the perfect hat to match—and an expert to construct it. “For the principals, we made all the hats with several genius-ly talented milliners,” says the designer. “We have an in-house millinery team and we collaborated with a few milliners outside of the studios.”
Experts assist each costume department’s ability to bring the past to life, and in 1883, Bryant establishes early on during our conversation that the production hired consultants to ensure the different Indigenous tribes featured are represented accurately and with specificity. Later in the first season, Elsa receives a vest from a member of the Comanche tribe as a romantic gesture, and this design drew on consultant guidance. Bryant was particularly careful to incorporate meaningful symbols that were in line with “what the Comanches used at that time”: horse tracks are “a symbol of coming home,” the water bird is a “good luck symbol,” and the elk teeth “are all about wealth and prosperity.”
Making It Work
Of course, every television production faces unexpected challenges, but the COVID-19 pandemic created massively disruptive supply chain issues in addition to necessitating the creation of new and expensive on-set health and safety protocols.
Janie Bryant and her team had prepared many of 1883’s costumes in Los Angeles before decamping to Texas and later Montana for shooting. When Elsa arrives at Fort Worth, her pristine pleated blue Polonaise traveling dress reflects her youthful naivety. The gown (which Bryant refers to as “a character in itself”) goes through several alterations during the journey west, requiring 100 yards of fabric to construct the eight versions, plus multiples for stunts and to ensure always having at least one clean enough to wear in wildly disparate weather conditions across the American West.
When the time came to create Elsa’s iconic blue-and-white floral frock, Bryant and her team realized they would need “a ton of yards to create” the heavily pleated skirt so that actor Isabel May could drape it comfortably for her many scenes on horseback. Unfortunately, this realization came just as manufacturing in many industries ground to a halt, and as Bryant recalled, “we were in a panic about finding yardage for creating these Victorian garments,” until one of the costumers found a solution on Amazon: bed sheets. In Texas, the team had access to far fewer sources for materials than in Los Angeles, so contemporary sheets with a pretty, vintage-inspired floral pattern—ones you might have on your bed at home!—came to the rescue.
Production on The Gilded Age was also impacted by the pandemic. They had shot several episodes when the first wave of COVID lockdowns took effect in New York. When filming resumed several months later, accommodating Carrie Coon’s pregnancy went beyond adjusting the corset to maintain the requisite silhouette. Kasia Walicka-Maimone described the full-team collaborative effort to make this work as “a good exploration, experimenting a little bit” with methods of concealing the pregnancy. On the costume side, they incorporated trompe l’oeil strategies such as using panels across the midsection and color-blocking to create the illusion of a smaller waist, and then scene-by-scene collaborations with both Coon and the director of photography to develop blocking and prop placement that wouldn’t draw attention to her belly. The one distinctly noticeable—and rather endearing—strategy appears in the penultimate episode, where Bertha, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), and Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) are visiting the swells’ summer playground in Newport, when a strategically placed parasol blocks Bertha’s entire midsection from view.
The Real Deal
For the most part, the garments you see on screen in these three television shows are either custom builds designed and made by the costume designer and their extensive teams, or they come from one of a number of costume houses across the globe. “The 1880s was a long time ago, and things don't last that long,” Bryant says of the shortage of vintage garments from this era. In addition, Walicka-Mamione notes the pieces that do exist are “very rare to come by on the market. If they are in any decent shape they are in museum collections.”
Bryant likes to use authentic materials that reflect the era where possible (this includes leather, feathers, wooden buttons, elk button, and fur). “I like real,” she says, though she compromises when materials aren’t accessible. And despite their rarity, there are several unicorn finds—original pieces from the 1880s—in the Yellowstone prequel. The first is a Victorian chatelain worn by Elsa on her belt when she arrives in Fort Worth on the train. The ornate purse featured items like keys and scissors hung on the outside, was available because sterling silver is so durable: “I was able to use that genuine piece and then I had my shop make a purse cover, and I used this gorgeous wide-wale navy blue corduroy. It’s like cut velvet.”
Accessories are made to last, but the velvet gown worn by guest star Rita Wilson as storekeeper Carolyn was an unexpected original that Bryant unearthed in the Helen Larson Collection at the Los Angeles-based Western Costume Co.—the rental house that’s been serving the film industry since 1912. “I was looking for an inspiration piece, but I found this genuine piece from the 1880s. I couldn't believe it. Not only that, but it fit her perfectly, and that is also a miracle because these garments are not made for a contemporary body.”
Similarly, Oláh notes that the way bodies have changed over the last century impacts the usability of vintage originals—“We all grew taller and bigger.” As a result, he has to contend with both the delicate nature of these garments and the likelihood that the sizing will be off. “With Vienna Blood, we had that totally unusual lucky situation that Charlene McKenna and Amelia Bullmore have perfect bodies for period costumes because they're so petite,” Oláh says about the actresses who play Max’s sister Leah and mother Rachel. “Most of the items they wear are originals. We had to do a little touch-up here and there,” he adds. The fragility of an authentic garment impacts the actor’s posture as much as a corset does, because “feeling how delicate it is, you develop a certain way of movement, which I liked very much and I think it's obvious in the film.”
The designers use words like “miracle” and “magic” to describe these near-unbelievable finds. “It's that space that comes in between translation or transportation from words to visuals or vice versa. My magical moment is when you have an actor or actress completely dressed, and I would always stand behind him or her and look into the mirror so that our eyes would meet in the mirror,” describes Oláh. “That's the magic moment because you can see it all—within a tenth of a second you can see it's there.”
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