Lou Eyrich (‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ costume designer) on the ‘simple elegance’ of Babe Paley, the occasionally ‘slovenly’ Truman Capote [Exclusive Video Interview]
“It was fun to pivot,” shares Lou Eyrich about the change of milieu from the first to second installments of FX’s anthology series “Feud.” She was the costume designer on the first season “Bette and Joan” back in 2017, and though she now mostly collaborates with Ryan Murphy as a producer, she seized on the opportunity to return as costumer for “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” The designer describes the difference between the two sets of episodes as “going from a Hollywood movie perspective to this elite group of socialite jet-setters in New York, Manhattan, at the time, and they were the original influencers.” Gold Derby spoke with Eyrich as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV costume design panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Though the series focuses on the title “swans,” the tight-knit group of elites who writer Truman Capote skewered in his unfinished book “Answered Prayers,” each character had to express their unique personality through their wardrobe. Eyrich says she arrived at the individual looks through “studying their personal lives,” and there was no shortage of material because “each one of them had written a book or a memoir, or someone has written about them.” Her “swans” include C. Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), who “wore a lot of American designers,” Nancy “Slim” Keith (Diane Lane), who “didn’t like frills” and had a little “masculine bent” to her wardrobe, and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), who “always had her finger on the pulse of what was happening and had personal relationships with all the designers at the time.”
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WATCH our exclusive video interview with Jason McCormick, ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ cinematographer
At the heart of this season is Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, who is one of the women whose reputation is most damaged by what Capote has written. Eyrich says her “word for her was grace” when designing her wardrobe, noting that her flourishes came through her jewelry. “We kept her palette very pale, very muted and pale,” notes the costumer, continuing, “She’s fragile, so we kept the clothes very muted and a simple elegance, it was never flashy.” She stresses that “her hairstyles were probably the most iconic part” of the real Paley’s look.
The other central figure in the season is Capote, played by Tom Hollander. Though there exists a lot of footage of the real writer and there have been other fictional depictions of him, Eyrich wanted to put her own stamp on the character by collaborating with Hollander and exploring “how he would want to be in the scene,” at which point they “stopped looking at the photos” they had of the figure. The costume designer’s work on this character begins at a time when he was “becoming his own bit of a celebrity” and he was wearing tailored clothes and “embracing being part of the La Côte Basque,” referring to the restaurant where the swans congregated. That all changes once he starts abusing alcohol and drugs, at which point the costumer made him look “a little bit more slovenly… his clothes were not fitting well and nothing matched and it was probably picked up off a heap on the floor.”
WATCH our exclusive video interview with Alexa Fogel, ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ casting director
This season not only boasts Watts, Hollander, Lane, Sevigny and Flockhart in the ensemble, but also Jessica Lange, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Treat Williams and more. Eyrich says “everybody was as equally as excited to do the project as I was,” adding, “I love to collaborate and it was just a gift.” “Formed some new friendships, for sure,” adds the designer.
“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” unfolds over decades, which offered Eyrich an opportunity to showcase how styles evolved. In the 1950s, which is the earliest point of time in the season, “there tended to be a style and a structure with the way especially women were dressed, the hemlines were basically all the same, everything was very tailored,” shares the costume designer; however, “fashion started loosening up toward the late 60s, early 70s,” which introduced “a lot more freedom in the way people dressed.” The designer stressed that despite these changes, “The swans basically never really went too far other than they started wearing more pants.”
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