Ayla Ruby
Alix Friedberg is responsible for the gorgeous world of costumes we see on screen in the shiny world of Palm Royale. The costume designer, who already has an Emmy win to her name from the show Big Little Lies, recently earned her third nomination for her impeccable work on the period show. The finale episode, Maxine Throws a Party, was especially striking and is the one for which Friedberg’s work is nominated.
The designer talked to us about everything that went into that episode and how the costumes supported the story and the characters throughout the whole season. Friedberg talked about dressing Maxine, played, by Kristen Wiig, and how that evolved to where we see her in the iconic white dress in the last episode. She shared some hometown inspiration for the sea costumes that helped make Maxine’s beach ball so impactful. And Friedberg even had a very small tease of what’s to come with season 2 of Palm Royale. Read on or listen below for the full conversation.
Ayla Ruby: Hi. I’m very excited to talk, and congratulations.
Alix Friedberg: Thank you so much.
Ayla Ruby: So this is your third nomination.
Alix Friedberg: Yeah.
Ayla Ruby: And it’s an amazing achievement.
Alix Friedberg: Oh, my God. I know. I’m so excited. I can’t believe it. Yeah, this one feels really, really special because I get to take the head of the workroom with me. I get to take more people with me, meaning I can share the nomination with more people, and that’s thrilling.
Ayla Ruby: That’s fantastic. So I’d love to talk about the show, so it’s amazing and the costumes on the show are gorgeous.
Alix Friedberg: Thank you.
Ayla Ruby: So, the costuming, I feel like, really immerses us in the world so much so and communicates story and character. And I’d love if you could talk about that and talk about your philosophy on that and how that works.
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of projects where you want to be the quietest person on screen. You want the clothes to feel like they are so innate to the characters that you don’t notice them. And a lot of the shows that I’ve done in the past in terms of a contemporary world have been, I think, really subtle and quiet and something like this, which is just the opposite of that, was really fun. It was really fun to get to play and not worry about too much color or too much pattern or dueling color palettes in a scene. It was all maximalist and joyful and purposely loud.
So I always start with the main character, and we started with Maxine and we created that sherbet palette for her. And her silhouettes started to evolve in the first few fittings where it seemed like she was less sophisticated than all the other ladies and it was these very doll like silhouettes. Lots of bows, lots of florals, lots of pastels, lots of A-line shapes, and then came the Brigitte Bardot blonde wig and the orangey tan skin. And it all started in this almost Barbie direction or doll like direction. And then from there you could spin the Evelyn as the beacon of style and where she aspires to be. So it’s a lot of chiffons and organza and drapey kaftans and things that enter a room and have a presence and billow after her as she enters a room. And then Norma, of course, most of the seasons she’s in a bed, but she’s fully done, like some magical elf in the middle of the night comes and does her. It’s done, but it’s flat in the back or something. But she’s got jewelry and she’s got feathers, and she’s Carol Burnett, and she’s pretty fabulous.
So there was all these moments where you could see where Maxine is just wide-eyed and hungry for that. Dinah, who is played by the great Leslie Bibb, she was just much more tailored and had a little bit of sense of restraint with her silhouettes. And it was fun to play with that group of ladies and give them all personality before they even speak, so you understand who they are a little bit by the choices they make before you even have a chance to get to know them.
Ayla Ruby: I’m glad you mentioned Maxine’s evolution because I was thinking about it, because she starts with the pink and then there’s this white dress in the very last episode. It’s so very different.
Alix Friedberg: Yeah. Well, the culmination of the season is this ball that she’s been looking forward to the all year, all season, and it felt like her coronation and that felt like her wedding somehow. And so white felt like a really good choice color-wise. We also wanted it to be like she was stepping on Norma’s light, so Norma is also in white-
Ayla Ruby: And she’s got a crown, right?
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, like dueling queens in different ways. And that dress was a really fun one to build, and one of my favorites actually from this season. It’s just in it’s silliness. It was inspired by a Givenchy runway show that I saw on YouTube. It was a compilation of couture runway shows in the late ’60s. I was just watching them and the model comes down the stairs and the dress itself was a bright fuchsia pink. And she does this twirl and takes off this cape, and it’s basically the same dress underneath. So it’s a moment, but not at all a moment. And so the silliness of that felt quintessentially Maxine to me.
Ayla Ruby: So I’m curious, when you talk about building a dress, what goes into that? What’s your process there? How do you get from the idea to the dress? Because it seems like a lot of work.
Alix Friedberg: It is. It’s an extraordinary amount of work. Sometimes dresses come from, if you find a trim, it inspires an idea or the right fabric or some magazine cutout you’ve seen. So for us, it was just taking a sketch, or in this case, the video of that couture show and bringing it to the incredible Valerie Keiser, who’s our pattern maker and riffing off that. So she’ll drape, she’ll cut out a pattern, probably in a muslin pattern, and then we can play. Then the fabric comes into play and it starts from there. So the dress usually is evolving until it’s on camera and we can’t mess with it anymore. That’s usually the process.
Ayla Ruby: Now I think I read, so Maxine has the shorter mini dress earlier in the season-
Alix Friedberg: She does.
Ayla Ruby: … and I read that there were several versions of that dress. Can you talk about that and how that worked for you?
Alix Friedberg: It was written that she comes in and steals Norma’s Lilly Pulitzer dress. And for Maxine, a lot of those Lilly Pulitzer dresses were actually maxi’s. And for Maxine, it just felt like in that moment that that dress needed to be extra short. One, for the gag where she’s climbing over the wall and you get a glimpse of her underpants. And she’s sitting there at the Palm Royale with her grasshopper in this tiny, tiny dress, and everyone else is a little more elegant and refined, and she’s just walks in with her fanny out. And so there was a silliness about the shortness of that dress and introducing her to the ladies.
Ayla Ruby: So I guess I wanted to back out a little bit about, so your first impressions of Palm Royale. So it’s a period show. Does that change how you approach the process or how you work at all?
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, it does. I mean, every show starts with research and images. I always like to pull from real people. And so that was similar, contemporary or period, you pull from real people. But I went directly to the Western Costume Library. They’re an incredible resource for period research. And we just dove into the magazines. We dove into the magazines, we dove into socialite type magazines, anything Slim Aarons photography. We looked at a lot of Betsy Bloomingdale and the socialites of the time and any press that was done around their galas. And we really pulled inspo from real socialites that would season in Palm Beach in the late ’60s, and did our spin on that.
Ayla Ruby: I find too, so obviously there’s the socialite and we’ve talked about them a lot too. I think, so there is lots of the have nots too. And I think how you show that through costumes is so interesting and just really brilliant too.
Alix Friedberg: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I think the rest of the world was in a revolution, and it was bra burning and denim and macrame and earth tones and the hippie culture. And our women were just immune to, by choice, what was happening with the rest of the world. And I think there’s a plastic bubble around them. So it is really interesting to show the colors of Palm Royale as opposed to the earth tones and the natural fibers of Laura Dern’s character and Our Bodies, Our Shelves, the bookstore. And yeah, it’s nice when you can create a couple of different visual spaces within a project so that no matter where you are, you know which world you’re in. And when Maxine crosses over to that world, she’s a fish out of water immediately because of her colors.
Ayla Ruby: She sticks out very much in those scenes and it’s lovely. Is there anything that was really difficult or challenging to accomplish or pull off this season or really something that you’re really proud of?
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, there were quite a few difficult tasks just in terms of having a different gala and a theme in every episode. So the volume was staggering, really. And to build all of those scenes was staggering. But one of the most difficult costumes that we made, which was a blip, actually, I think it’s in Episode 2, where you’re introduced to Maxine in the 1940s in Tennessee. She’s at a pageant and she’s weaseling her way out of a beaded straight jacket. And it’s this moment where Douglas sees Maxine for the first time, and it was just explained to us that she would be in a straight jacket and then she would bust out of this straight jacket by magic and a gown would just come cascading down. And the complexity of that kept me up night after night after night. And finally, one of our cutters cracked it where she could pull a cord inside the jacket and then the fabric of the dress, which magically wasn’t wrinkling, magically, a lot of testing involved, was stuffed into a basket, and the basket released this gown, so it just came trickling down.
We had no rehearsal time whatsoever for this jacket, so we had no idea if it would work. And we got to the set, we were really, really late shooting that day, and the director was like, “Let’s just film it.” So we didn’t even have rehearsal with Kristen. She just tried it on for the first time, got on stage, and I still have a video of all of our faces. We were just absolutely breathless, and she pulled the string and the gown came falling down, and it was perfection. You could not have asked for a more perfect result. And no one talks about this costume. I have so many gray hairs on my head from thinking about this costume, and it’s still one of the craziest feats. And to have no time to tweak or to troubleshoot and just have it work like that, just never happens that way. It was a miracle.
Ayla Ruby: That’s amazing. And I need to go back and watch that and pay closer attention because without any rehearsal. Wow.
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, it’s crazy.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah, wow. Okay, so this is a little bit in the last episode, and I have to ask it because I was just so curious about them. So there was a different gala every episode, but in the beach ball, there’s these jellyfish costumes, and they’re not the main women of the show, but I thought they were so beautiful and interesting too, and can you talk about them?
Alix Friedberg:Yeah, I love those and the starfish, being able to do those costumes. I actually live on the beach on a little island called Vashon, which is right outside of Seattle. And we have huge jellyfish that anytime I’m paddle boarding, I’m always watching them. I’m so fascinated by the diaphanous quality of those heads. And I always wanted to do a giant jellyfish costume. So because it was a beach ball and we were given of free reign to do whatever we wanted, I thought that they would be so beautiful and architectural and fill the ballroom in a way that was a really interesting visual piece. I worked really hard with the production designer and the set decorator and we all glommed on to this jellyfish idea and these starfish and seahorse and the magical sea creatures that we could decorate the ballroom with. So they were both costume and set dec at the same time.
Ayla Ruby: I love that. That’s amazing. So we’re just about at time. Is there anything else you want people to know about your work on Palm Royale or anything else you’re working on?
Alix Friedberg: I mean, we’re working on Season 2 and it’s bananas. It’s going to be so bananas, so fun. So Abe Sylvia has even cranked up the heat more, if you can imagine. So that’s consuming us right now and we’re having a blast.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation.
Alix Friedberg: Yeah, thank you so much for the time.
Ayla Ruby: No problem. Thank you so much
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