Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson’s FX/Hulu series “The Beauty” kicks off with one of the great attention-grabbing scenes in recent television, as a gorgeous model played by Bella Hadid literally explodes on the runway after consuming an experimental drug with some extremely unfortunate side effects. The opening sets the tone for all that is to follow over the increasingly outrageous and unpredictable first season, with its story of FBI agents (Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall) investigating a series of gruesome deaths linked to what appears to be the world’s most dangerous sexually transmitted virus. It’s a difficult-to-classify show, a hybrid of horror, satire, and procedural that’s equal parts high fashion, graphic gore, and exquisite production design.
For costume designer Sarah Evelyn, the prospect of working on a Ryan Murphy show called “The Beauty” set in the fashion world was irresistible — if also a little stressful. “I was definitely intimidated, because the expectations are really high,” Evelyn told IndieWire. “I’m thinking to myself, how can you possibly make this world even more beautiful?” Luckily, Murphy had an abundance of visual references in mind that helped Evelyn see the world he wanted to create. “It starts with a meeting where he just talks about everything he’s been thinking, from Bertolucci and ‘Last Tango in Paris’ to Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’ to [the Tony Scott vampire film] ‘The Hunger.’”
The key for Evelyn was figuring out how to absorb these influences without being beholden to them, or merely imitative. “You’re not just recreating these things,” she said. “You’re trying to imbibe this new project with those feelings.” Just as “The Hunger” felt exceptionally modern and new in its moment, Evelyn wanted the costumes in “The Beauty” to feel cutting-edge in ours. “One of the things that was cool about ‘The Beauty’ is that it’s contemporary, but it feels like sci-fi. Our references weren’t sci-fi, so how do you give it a look that’s sci-fi, but also right now?”
The answer turned out to be in the way Evelyn played the textures of the clothes against the production design. “A lot of this was about texture and color, and playing it against the gauzy curtains, or the modern hospital or some more decrepit backgrounds in the European scenes,” Evelyn said, noting how closely she collaborated with the art department to evolve the visual language of the series. “These things keep evolving, and you never exactly land where you think you’re going to. You’re always pushing further.”
While finding inspiration in the locations and production design was one component of Evelyn’s process, another was responding to the actors who were cast and how their personas could intersect with the clothes to create iconic looks. “You’re always going to be affected by the casting, because the clothing plus the person is where the magic is made,” Evelyn said. When she learned that Ashton Kutcher had been cast as the nefarious billionaire whose company is responsible for letting the deadly virus out into the world, she knew she could be bold in her choices and take risks on clothes that might have seemed too flamboyant on other actors.
“The second I heard it was Ashton, I knew I could push it a little wilder with the suiting and take it to a Saint Laurent place, because he wears clothes so well,” Evelyn said. She said Kutcher himself influenced the direction of the costumes when he came up with ideas for his character, like the notion that he would be someone really into Burning Man. “The next thing we know, we’re shopping for kilts, and I’m making a great big teddy bear jacket. It all has to do with what people can wear, what they feel comfortable wearing, and the ideas they and Ryan workshop together.”
If the clothes Kutcher’s Byron Forst wears are occasionally outrageous, the fashion sense exhibited by his wife Franny (Isabella Rossellini) is positively insane. “That’s the best thing about working with Ryan,” Evelyn said. “I don’t think I would have had the balls to suggest to a director, ‘Okay, so it’s going to be late 19th-century morning dress silhouettes, but in bright crazy colors with insane headdresses.’ But with Ryan, that’s okay. He loves the entire tradition of morning dress silhouettes, and that’s where he started. Then he wants you to go as far as humanly possible. And when Isabella was cast, she was one hundred percent down for it.”
Since everything for Franny had to be built, Evelyn was grateful for the resources working on a Ryan Murphy show afforded her. “You can’t just whip these costumes out of nowhere,” Evelyn said. “It requires a lot of research and development.” Surprisingly, Evelyn found some of the show’s more subtle costumes to be the most challenging, as in the case of the FBI agents on Forst’s trail. “You need those characters to be more grounded, so the exact fit of Evan’s suit is really important. That’s an area where sometimes nuance can be more difficult than wild and crazy. We really worked on his suits; we custom-made them and tried to achieve a kind of Paul Newman fit.”
That’s just one case where costumes that look simple required a massive amount of testing and research; another is for the Condé Nast employees kept in a holding cell after an outbreak of the virus in their office. “We got to do so much cool R and D on those costumes, because where can you find a latex two-piece?” Evelyn said. “We went through a lot of iterations looking at different colors against the backdrop; it’s something where you would have no idea how much work it took to get to where we did.”
Evelyn said that the fact that so much was made to order is rare on a contemporary show, and one of the things that made working on “The Beauty” such a pleasure. “For Anthony Ramos’ assassin character, we ended up making most of his leather jackets,” Evelyn said, “because it’s not easy to get well-fitted alligator jackets — or alligator pattern in this case. It’s really like a puzzle making these jackets fit someone perfectly.” Evelyn credits Murphy with prioritizing costumes not only “The Beauty” but all of his shows, including earlier ones she worked on like “American Horror Story” and “Hollywood.”
“Ryan has a really specific system, because he does so many shows and costumes are so important to him,” Evelyn said. “He actually has a costume producer position.” That costume producer, Lou Eyrich, works on all Murphy’s shows and collaborated closely with Evelyn to craft the show’s aesthetic and manage the sheer magnitude of costumes. “It was such an enormous project,” Evelyn concluded. “But it was also really, really fun.”
The season finale of “The Beauty” airs on FX on March 4. All episodes are currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
