Yes, That Was a Real Bill Blass Dress in ‘Hacks.’ Mostly.

When “Hacks” costume designer Kathleen Felix-Hager read the script for the Season 3 premiere, a pivotal costume was just described as “the ugly dress.” And Felix-Hager delivered.

The premise is simple: a top-of-her-game Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) needs a speccatular dress for an event. After she rejects everything the stylists suggest, she takes them on a field trip to her storage warehouse — which looks like a CostCo for couture from the last 50 years. There, she finds something exactly right. But in the world of “Hacks,” that required something totally wrong.

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“It had to be something that was hideous,” Felix-Hager told IndieWire. “And it was believable that Deborah, at some point in her life, could have been convinced that it was a beautiful dress.”

And yes, Deborah spoke the truth when she proudly proclaimed it was a Bill Blass dress from the ’80s. And like every good designer shopper, Felix-Hager found it on The Real Real (though she went on to augment it for maximum impact). “The color was so atrocious to me that I thought that was just amazing. And then I actually embellished the ugliness [with] all of that sort of horsehair detail, and we added this big tulle piece.” The dress was so perfect for what the show needed that Felix-Hager bought it on her own credit card before she even started officially working on Season 3.

“I was like, ‘I have to have it,'” she said. “I was terrified someone — I mean, I don’t know who was going to buy that dress, but it’s the perfect thing, I just [had] to have it.”

The delicious irony is that Blass helped usher in the more relaxed couture of American design houses of the last 50 years (taking inspiration from Coco Chanel’s streamlined designs), famously saying, “Simplicity is the soul of modern elegance.”

But Felix-Hager’s reimagined Bill Blass original serves its purpose: Deborah’s career is so hot that no one wants to contradict her except the one person who has always told her the truth: Ava (Hannah Einbender). The dress serves as more than just a visual joke; it’s the pivotal thing that brings both women back into each other’s orbit beyond just an awkward encounter. And, as always, Smart’s performance elevates already Grade-A material.

As Felix-Hager pointed out, “She actually looked so cute. And she came out, and she modeled, and she just did the whole thing, and I was like, ‘She actually looks great!'”

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