In the final episode of Daisy Jones & the Six, Daisy (Riley Keough) saunters onto the stage in a breathtaking Halston gold lamé cape. As the wind cascades through the cape and her long, red locks, it’s a literally show-stopping moment that cements the character as a larger-than-life rock star. “The first time she lifted her arms, it looked amazing,” says costume designer Denise Wingate. “It was so magical and everybody gasped.”
For Wingate, that final outfit is the culmination of Daisy’s journey on the show, but even she couldn’t anticipate its dramatic effect. On the night of filming, a storm brought a humid wind into New Orleans, allowing the ensemble to flow in a way it never would have in the city’s usual still, sticky weather. “It was the perfect storm, so to speak,” Wingate tells Vanity Fair.
Several of the Emmy nominees this year in the category for costume design in a limited series had a similar task to Wingate: creating magic for onstage performances that had to feel larger than life. Their stories were all very different—from the formation of a tumultuous 1970s rock group to the tale of a pair of country music icons that spanned three decades, to the creation of the 1980s male stripper phenomenon—but each designer was tasked with creating dynamic stage performances that would be appropriate for the period, harken back to the iconic looks of the time, and make the performers feel as confident as they looked. As Welcome to Chippendales costume designer Peggy Schnitzer puts it, “You are always on pins and needles hoping that it’s going to work because you don’t want to be the one to hold up the show,” she says.
Costume designer Mitchell Travers was tasked for the second time to create iconic looks for a character named Tammy for Jessica Chastain. After working with her on the 2021 film The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Travers returned to help her transform into country music icon Tammy Wynette, whose partnership with George Jones is chronicled in Showtime’s George & Tammy. He began his research by talking to Wynette’s daughter Georgette about what life was like with her mother. “I was like, ‘How many pairs of shoes did your mom own? Where did your mom keep her jewelry?’” Travers tells Vanity Fair. “I was fascinated to learn that her closet was never super organized.”
Musicians often didn’t have formal stylists at that time, picking up their looks on the road. Travers embarked on his own road trip. “I was able to pick up really bizarre pieces throughout my travels, and then take little elements from them to create Tammy’s show wardrobe,” he says.
Both he and Chastain gravitated towards fringe, his main inspiration for a custom red beaded dress that Wynette wears in the third episode. “It started out fairly humble, I mean as humble as a fully beaded gown can be,” he says with a laugh. “And then of course we added hundreds and hundreds of these handmade silver bugle bead tassels so that the whole thing became like fringe.”
The show-stopping number had originally been conceived as a jumpsuit, but Travers went back to the drawing board, knowing he hadn’t gotten it just right. When Chastain walked out onto the stage in the dress version for the first time, they both knew it was the right choice. “When you start to work with these theatrical costumes, you understand why they worked for so long,” he says. “They worked so beautifully under theatrical lighting. You’re able to capture an entire theater or speedway or whatever the performance venue was—you’re able to capture all of those eyeballs onto this one red dress because it’s covered in fringe.”
That ability to hold the stage was one of the biggest challenges facing all three designers. For Schnitzer on Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales, she needed the dancers’ looks to whet the appetite of a room full of screaming women. The Chippendales’ signature bow tie and cuffs were doable, but the breakaway pants became the biggest challenge. She called her good friend Christopher Peterson, who did the costumes for the Magic Mike franchise, who told her that the obvious choice—pants made of stretchy material—would actually be more difficult to pull off. “He said, ‘I’m gonna save you a lot of tears,’ which was true—I mean, it saved me hours of trial and error,” says Schnitzer.
She eventually realized some other key tricks for the pants, including snapping only every other snap and not closing the ones at the bottom. She also made multiple versions of the pants, some with more give for the full-on dance numbers and some with less for the moments when they pulled the pants off. “They’re dancers, they’re not actors, so they know how to move. They know how their body works,” she says. “So once we figured it out and with each of the dancers, it worked really well.”
