Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
I wrote to Barry yesterday [after] he released that reel.
Hed shot all these portraits during the show.
I didnt realize that he had gotten so many.
And with those portraits, you see the truth.
We built, we built, we built, she adds.
We had some incredible tailors on the show; an incredible cutter-fitter and milliner.
Its hundreds or thousands of garments that we made.
Heres how Eselin pulled off the monumental amount of work in support of Jenkinss artistic vision for the series.
The costumes had to be subtle, sometimes even invisible.The whole piece is a costume piece.
She purposely stayed away from sheen and shiny fabrics.
I wanted to check that that we never stole the limelight.
If the costumes are invisible sometimes, [then thats] good, weve done our job.
Thusos face alone, she gushes.
She goes from looking like a teenager [one moment] to an older woman [the next].
I didnt want your eye to go anywhere else.
With Barry, less is more.
That happened throughout the show.
Cora has two dressesin North Carolina, and maybe fourin Indiana.
Every state features a distinct, purposeful color palette.To Eselin, each chapter required its own deliberate world-building.
You know, yellows, greens, blues, and real true colors that you dont get in Georgia.
She continues, North Carolina is such a horrific place.
We kept the palette very dark for that wicked world.
[Green meant] new life and growth.
At times, color was also a way for Eselin to gently mislead the audience for narrative purposes.
You dont know what a horrific place shes in.
So we wanted to have a moment of like, Oh, maybe this isnt so bad.
And then it turns terrible.
Cora [being] in her best dress [throws you off].
Again, in South Carolina, her yellow dress is about optimism.
And the blues that she wears there are straight from the book.
James Baldwin wrote a lot of green forBeale Street.
Colson Whitehead wrote a lot of blue.
This mind-bending blend of historical time frames within a sometimes fantastical framework presented Eselin her biggest challenge.
Eugenics, elevators, and skyscrapers all started in the 1880s, she explains.
But the doctors were put in 1850s garments.
(Doctors were trying to control things by keeping them in the past.)
Coras day and evening dresses were also born out of a hybrid of chronologies and ideas.
Barry and I treated South Carolina almost like a prison.
We didnt put a bustle in the back of that skirt.
Jacobs lived in an attic for seven years, hiding from her captors sometime in the 1830s.
In Indiana, Cora is in a progressive community, a utopian [society].
So we had our white population dress in the 1850s to keep them in the past.
The passage of time also threw some unexpected, real-world setbacks Eselins way.
Chase grew during production, and about [an additional] two inches in lockdown.
So there was always a bit of refit to ensure that everything was still okay.
Similarly, her escape dress in the beginning had water levels on it from the swamp she walks through.
We had dirt samples from every location and we used them [for guidance].
For Georgia, it was mostly cottons: washed, rewashed, sun-bleached.
Thats why it is short and ragdoll-like.
She continues, Barry wanted [Indiana] to be impossibly beautiful.
I got about a dozen 19th-century original mens work shirts.
Eselin loves all those exquisite prints so much that she effusively wishes to reproduce a thousand of them someday.
Considering the refinement with which she pulled offThe Underground Railroads absolutely gigantic scope, she probably could.
