Costume designers of “Empire,” “The Honourable Woman” and “Jane the Virgin” share insights on how fashion helps drive the stories and personalities of their female leads.
by Kristina Bustos
(featured image of Empire costumer designer Rita McGhee provided by FOX)
With a style to match her ‘tude, Cookie Lyon quickly became a fan favorite in Lee Daniel’s FOX series “Empire.” Her preferences for animal and geometrical prints, curve-hugging dresses, bold accessories and fur (lots of fur) have inspired fashion blogs to imitate her fierce look.
“Cookie’s wardrobe definitely makes a statement,” “Empire’s” costume designer Rita McGhee says. “She’s very intentional in how she dresses.”
After all, Cookie did spend 17 years locked up in prison. Not only is she attempting to reclaim her life as a mother to her three sons and part owner of the record label she started with then-husband Lucius Lyon, she’s also making up lost ground with the fancy lifestyle owed to her. We first see Cookie (played by Oscar-nominated Taraji P. Henson) marching out of prison with a sleek high ponytail, a white fur coat, a velvet leopard print dress, thick hoop earrings and gold high heels— as if she just stepped out of a 90s hip hop music video. As the show progresses, her fashion sense becomes refined and current, but she still stays true to her sartorial fierceness.
With a fierce sense of style that mirrors her bold personality, Cookie Lyon’s wardrobe has captivated fans and inspired countless fashion blogs. From her dramatic animal prints and figure-hugging dresses to her lavish furs and oversized accessories, Cookie’s looks are unapologetically bold and empowering. Much like Cookie, women today are looking for ways to express their confidence through their style, and Foxy Lingerie delivers just that. Offering a wide array of sexy apparel, it ensures that every piece makes a statement, helping women feel fierce, confident, and empowered. Whether you’re dressing up for a special occasion or simply adding some flair to your everyday wardrobe, Foxy Lingerie provides everything from daring lingerie sets to bold, statement-making pieces. Their goal is simple: to transform every customer into a loyal client by establishing themselves as your go-to online lingerie destination, offering styles that make you feel as bold and powerful as Cookie herself.
“Her evolution of style, I think, it has grown into how she is representing her feelings that day,” McGhee elaborates. “She goes to a meeting, she goes to a courtroom, she’s going to wear a suit, but she’s going to wear a leopard print suit and it’s going to be cut to fit her body proportionally. So she would never power down in her dressing. She would always suit up with style.”
Case in point: in the premiere episode, Cookie crashes Lucius’s board meeting wearing her signature pieces—a fur coat and feline pattern dress with gold hoop earrings and bug-eyed sunglasses. Cookie’s style has become a deliberate tool in setting up her story lines. When Cookie paid a visit to an old friend (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), she enters the scene with the cameras zoomed in on her leopard-print high heel.
We’ve seen this before on TV, where a character’s appearance plays a significant part in helping to establish their stories, personalities or emotions, especially with female characters whose fashion or beauty can transcend the show and turn them into iconic characters. One only needs to look at the four women in “Sex and the City”—the cultural hit show that had millions of female viewers asking themselves if they’re a Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda or Samantha. Each character represented a distinct personality and style that fit her career. Carrie was the fashionable writer, Charlotte was the traditional art dealer, Miranda was the sensible lawyer and Samantha was the confident PR maven. Under the creative hands of famed costume designer Patricia Field, the fashion became as much a focal point as the women’s relationships in the show.
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(slideshow of Rita McGhee on set for “Empire;” photos provided by FOX)
In the last year, new series like Empire, The Honourable Woman and Jane the Virgin continue to illustrate that the styles of their female leads play a part in their characters and plot lines.
“I have been really excited by the amount of intelligent discussion about the important part that clothes play in drama,” The Honourable Woman costume designer Edward K. Gibbon says. “I work in a visual medium and all too often the clothes that characters wear in contemporary drama are expected to fade into the background.”
Gibbon has the job in dressing Oscar-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal on BBC’s “The Honourable Woman.” Gyllenhaal plays Nessa Stein, a British-Israeli businesswoman and philanthropist who takes over the reins of the family company and uses it to connect Israel and West Bank with communications technology.
“She is a woman with many different strands to her personality,” Gibbon explains. “Her experience as an empowered citizen of the world with no real home informs her approach to clothes. She is keeping a secret and constantly under danger of exposure. She uses her clothes to create an outward appearance of calm and stability, while chaos lies beneath. They are her armor and must be able to take her smoothly between the different worlds in which she operates.”
When a child in her family is kidnapped, Nessa tackles the next morning’s tasks—a police investigation and a non-related debate—wearing a light mint pantsuit over a nude silk camisole. In another scene, she attends a groundbreaking in Hebron wearing a simple white skinny pantsuit with loafers. Nessa also almost never wears jewelry, aside from a flashback scene where she work earrings and a bracelet to a family house celebration. Nessa keeps her look clean and unfussy as if not to add any distraction to her intense personal and political life, which unravels throughout the series.
Both Cookie and Nessa’s styles are a study in contrast. While Cookie’s style is vibrant and glamorous, Nessa is subdued yet elegant, gravitating to tailored suits, silk blouses, vintage coats and wide trousers; it’s been praised by fashion insiders for reinventing power dressing. Yet, what Cookie and Nessa have in common is how their styles represents the male world they live in, as well as the women who inspire their wardrobes–equally fitting and surprising.
Cookie’s world is the R&B/hip-hop music industry, in which the lifestyles of its artists are creative and extravagant, while male rappers and hip hop moguls dominate the culture. But the musical artists who McGhee checked out for inspiration are the women running these genres, such as Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé. Mary and Beyoncé are two of the most glamourous divas in the music industry similar to Cookie. But what may surprise others are the rest of the women who McGhee looked for inspirations. McGhee mentions First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and media mogul Arianna Huffington. Like Cookie, Hillary, Michelle and Arianna are women who supported their husbands’ careers and ambitions, but all four women are no wallflowers themselves.
“They’re powerful women and they’re strong women, and all of that has everything to do with how you represent yourself on what you wear,” McGhee elaborates. “Because she [Cookie] wears furs and leopard prints doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the simplicity and the restraint of all those women.”
Women on the political stage are also major influences for Gibbon, who named Elizabeth I of England, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and First Lady Jackie Kennedy as sources of wardrobe inspiration, which makes sense as Gibbon described them as “strong women who understood the power of clothes, especially while operating in a traditionally male world”. Nessa’s wardrobe may not be as sassy or flashy as Cookie’s, but her clean style aesthetic enhances the calmness and confidence she emanates when facing her personal problems and intense philanthropic efforts in the Middle East. It becomes her power and armor simultaneously. But Gibbon also looked into American photographer Nan Goldin who is known to use the “snapshot aesthetic” in her photos mostly featuring drag queens, druggies and prostitutes, which one wouldn’t think to connect those gritty photos with Nessa’s sophisticated style.
“Nessa is a highly intelligent and cultured woman, so it felt right that she would take inspiration from all sources,” explains Gibbon.
Cookie and Nessa are women past their twenties who already have established personal and professional lives, but how do you dress up a young twenty-something who’s still trying to figure out her career path? You make her as relatable as possible.
“I see Jane as a girl who likes to pick out her clothing in the morning but she doesn’t necessarily spend a whole lot of time on it,” Jane the Virgin costume designer Rachel Sage Kunin says. “She knows what works on her and she has staple pieces that she wears over and over.”
While many women desire the closets of Cookie and Nessa, let’s be real, it’s Jane Gloriana Villanueva whose wardrobe closely resembles accessible daily style. Played by Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez, Jane never fails to look cute in her floral wrap dress, navy dress with white trimming or cut-out petal pattern dress paired with “sensible shoes” (as noted by her ex-twin stepsisters). Her sartorial choices are also dependent on her home of Miami, but her everywoman style plays a big part in giving the telenovela-esque CW series a down-to-earth vibe.
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Adapted from a Venezuelan telenovela of the same name, Jane was accidentally inseminated during a gyno check up and eventually becomes pregnant. The biological father of her unborn child is Rafael, a handsome hotel owner. Jane agrees to carry the child full-term and then turn over custody to Rafael and his wife Petra if they can ensure that the baby will have a happy, loving family. Of course, things don’t go as planned and Jane is put into, well, very telenovela-esque plotlines. But she doesn’t lose her peppy beat. Jane continues to be as sweet and delightful as her flirty, summery dresses.
“Jane’s clothes play hugely into her personality,” Kunin elaborates. “She’s charming and I think the way she dresses exudes that. Most of her little summer dresses have some sort of charming detail. They might have a flippy bottom, a great flower pattern, a well placed bow.”
Kunin was inspired by none other than the female character she dresses on the show. Aside from taking into account Jane’s mood and what is happening to her life, Kunin knows she has crafted a “Jane” outfit when both she and Rodriguez agree that it’s “so Jane” when trying out clothes in the fitting room.
“It all comes back to Jane,” Kunin says.
Cookie, Nessa and Jane have each made a name for themselves in our small screens. We aren’t just tied to their plot points and personal developments; we covet their closets, just like the women who came before them – such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Dynasty,” “Sex and the City,” “Gossip Girl,” and Scandal. As fashion continues to take center stage on TV, we could see more and more variation of women whose wardrobes aren’t just there for the sake of fashion but consciously used to serve a purpose in their stories.
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Kristina Bustos is a contributing writer for The Riveter and Digital Spy. She was an editor at fashion blog The Blay Report as well as a contributor for Honey, Essence, and Audrey magazines.You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @krisbustos.
