Emmy spotlight: ‘Yellowjackets’ costume designer Amy Parris deserves first nomination for that gnarly winter gear
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The second season of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” begins as winter finally envelops the Canadian Rockies and visits greater misery upon Wiskayok High’s girls soccer team. For the hit survival thriller’s costume department, though, it comes bearing a shot at an Emmy.
“Yellowjackets,” seventh in our combined Drama Series odds and clawing its way toward the top five, follows the aforementioned regional champions after the plane carrying them to nationals crashes in the wilderness, as well as their dysfunctional adult lives back in society two and a half decades later. The verdant setting to which they’d acclimated in Season 1 has become a gnarled, frostbitten Neverland. Amy Parris (“Stranger Things”), taking over for Emmy-winning costume designer Marie Schley (“Transparent”), rises to the creative challenge with striking designs that approximate what wardrobes for retro genre hits like “The Goonies” and “The Breakfast Club” would look like in an A24-produced folk horror.
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Speaking with The Daily Beast, Parris said, “They’re stuck there for 19 months, so they only have whatever they brought with them. It was a tricky balance of wanting to maintain the continuity of the show but also make it even more ’90s.” To inject drab, snow-coated scenes with decade-appropriate colors, she layered “up to five tops at once…[but properly], so you can see each one as the viewer and it doesn’t look like just a big pad of clothing on the screen,” Parris told Harper’s Bazaar.
Resident markswoman Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) sports one of the show’s most memorable outfits – an ensemble of furs, headgear and repurposed safety belts that wouldn’t appear misplaced on a Lost Boy out of a demented “Peter Pan” adaptation (Schley herself has discussed how the clothes, including those designed for scenes set in the present, are meant to “emphasize arrested development”). Parris created the costume using “a fake deerskin rug…[and] applied this latex rubbery effect to give it a freshly-skinned texture, so it had some sinews, some muscle tone, this darker brown-red gooey effect.” After the pilot, which offered us a peek at the group’s grisly winter garb, we saw a florid rendition – “the prettier, fall version that goes dark real quick” – in “Doomcoming,” the first season’s penultimate episode. This year, Parris foreshadowed, “You really see the transition…of how desperate they are.”
SEE Emmys spotlight: ‘Yellowjackets’ 1996 cast deserves awards recognition as Season 2 MVPs
Redditors have fixated on distinct sartorial features to decipher the show’s symbolism and match characters with their roles in the Antler Queen’s court. “Each animal [represents] a hierarchical position in their mean girl clique,” Schley, who based the concepts on anthropological research into occult ceremonies from around the world, explained to Gold Derby’s Kevin Jacobsen after the series completed its freshman run. Parris devised a number of ways to sustain fan engagement and continue fueling the internet’s favorite “Yellowjackets” mystery (re: who is Pit Girl?), such as rotating wardrobes and weaving decoys of outfits worn during key scenes. “We were very specific and strategic…just so the audience can still speculate about who’s at the edge of [and inside] the pit.”
The split-timeline narrative leaves open the question of placement. While lumping ‘90s fashion with that of 18th-century Europe may seem strange, “American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson” competed for Best Period Costume Design and provides precedent for “Yellowjackets” to do the same. However, “ACS: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and “Pose” both won Contemporary (despite being set in the same era as the Simpson trial). It’s certainly the lighter category and offers safe harbor from heavyweights “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “The Great.”
Parris’ delivery on winter’s dreadful promise, along with the work done by production designer Margot Ready, has made “Yellowjackets” a formidable below-the-line contender in its sophomore season.
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