Meet Me at Crafty

We all made Sirens our Memorial Day weekend binge on Netflix, right? A show about wealthy people behaving badly near the beach practically screams, “Attention must be paid!” on a long weekend. So the time has come to talk about those costumes, because Molly Smith Metzler’s five-episode series is pocked with moments of what the team called “moments of the uncanny,” and many of those moments were enhanced by costume designer Caroline Duncan’s contributions, balanced on the knife’s edge between authentic and satiric.

Devon (Meghann Fahy) wakes up hungover in a Buffalo jail and promptly sets out to confront her younger sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), about abandoning her to care for their ailing father—except Simone has undergone a complete transformation as the personal assistant to socialite Michaela (Julianne Moore), a borderline cult leader who has a thing for birds of prey and maintaining a whispery control over her wealthy friends. Devon couldn’t be more grunge; Simone couldn’t be more Stepford Wife. The clash is equal parts hilarious and alarming.

If anyone was qualified for a design job enhancing the uncanny, it might be Duncan. Her career has encompassed the glitz (Jennifer Lopez in Marry Me) and the eerie (multiple M. Night Shyamalan projects, from the series Servant to Knock at the Cabin and Trap). Not to mention the eerie glitz of the short-lived series 666 Park Avenue.

Duncan saw the possibilities of Sirens as soon as she read the scripts. After losing herself for about a week researching mythology, Duncan ended up  submitting “probably a 30-page lookbook because I was so deeply desperate to blow them out of the water and get the job.”

It worked, and Duncan’s designs are delightfully deranged in their patterns and pastels. But look a little more closely, and things aren’t just headbands and salmon-colored pants on East Coast socialites. Starting with mostly steering clear of the doyenne of rich people’s leisurewear, Lilly Pulitzer.

 “Obviously, it’s heavily referenced in Simone’s costumes,” Duncan says of Pulitzer’s legendary print dresses. “But it became a little bit of a trap because Lilly Pulitzer, their audience is not Simone. So we did use some Lilly, but we ended up creating our own version by working with fabric vendors from Italy. You know what world you’re walking into when you get off that ferry, and then the pivot to, how do we make it even more alienating and terrifying to somebody like Devon?”

Much of the five episodes is given over to group functions, from cocktail hours to blowout bashes. And party scenes mean a lot of bodies in the frame, which becomes complicated to plan out when dealing with this many bright colors and bold patterns.

 “We wanted the world to feel very beautiful but also visually overwhelming,” Duncan says. “There was so much planning and curation that went into it as a costume department. A lot of it we built, but we were also sourcing vintage and borrowing from high-end brands, then laying it all out and gridding it to make sure that the very, very bold patterns were in harmony with one another to create that chaos. It has to feel very beautiful and curated [in quiet moments], but when they’re all buzzing around the party, it has to feel like a war of vibrancy and pastel and a horror show to Devon.”

Devon’s true horror show comes from her sister’s over-the-top embrace of that East Coast prep look.  “With Simone, when we meet her, we want to feel like she has fully drunk the Kool-Aid,” Duncan says. “She is the keenest, most squeaky member of the Michaela Cult. The poster girl for this aspirational lifestyle that she has curated for herself. It’s very difficult to maintain what she’s putting forward. In Episode 3, there’s a big shift after she’s had her [panic attack], where she goes from being the curated, front-of-house Simone to taking a step back from that. So we took the color down quite a lot, starting to desaturate her, and the silhouettes are starting to feel more natural.”

Overseeing them all is Michaela, who stands out from the crowd with a quiet luxury approach to her outfits. “ Julianne is one of the most collaborative, intelligent, intuitive actors I’ve been privileged to work with,” Duncan says. “And she’s really open and is looking to collaborate in ways that can enhance her performance or change her physicality. Her clothing was not really shopped. It was all built for the first two episodes. Even her running outfit we built.”

Wait, Duncan and her team built Michaela’s workout wear?

 “We wanted to give her a ballerina kind of silhouette,” Duncan says. ”And the colors were so specific that the cinematographer and the director were interested in seeing on the beach, and it just didn’t exist. So yeah, we ended up building her that wrap top look, which was her hero workout look for the show. In a funny way, we treated the whole show like it’s a fantasy. So we ended up building so much more than buying. And because of that, the actors were all very aware of what their costumes would be, because they had seen illustrations.”

Caroline Duncan’s credits include multiple movies with M. Night Shyamalan, The Affair, Royal Pains, 666 Park Avenue, and Canterbury’s Law. (More than usual, this partial list of credits is indicative solely of my idiosyncratic taste.) Her go-to at craft services is gummy bears. “ There always are gummy bears. But Sirens… I’m gonna put this out there: highest beverage game I’ve ever had on a job. You could get, like, a cucumber mint drink every day. That’s not normal.”