Danny Jarabek
Costume designer Olga Mill has built a reputation working in contemporary settings, a register that demands a particular kind of finesse, since everyone has a personal relationship with the clothes they wear every day. Her credits include First Reformed, Hereditary, Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Love Lies Bleeding, and now she brings that same sharp eye to Beef Season Two, Lee Sung Jin’s anthology continuation of the acclaimed Netflix series. Set against the world of California country clubs and old money, the season uses clothing to map layers of class. Awards Radar spoke with Mill about her research process, the color-season framework she built for each couple, and the subtle work of dressing characters who are always trying to fit in.
Read our full conversation with costume designer Olga Mill below.
Hi Olga! I’m very excited to chat with you. I feel like it’s a great weekend to be talking about costumes. Devil Wears Prada 2 coming out, the Met Gala.
Olga Mill: Yes, it’s a fun weekend!
Looking at some of your work, you’ve done a lot of contemporary-set films and TV, which feels like a really distinct register to operate in as a costume designer. What draws you to that kind of work?
Olga Mill: I tend to go by script rather than trying to stay in any particular period. I can’t say I set some kind of radar to only do contemporary work. I like how versatile the job is, each project takes you down a different path, almost academically.
That said, I do think contemporary is really challenging. When I’ve done period work, the sourcing is harder, especially when you have multiples and things like that. But with contemporary, everybody dresses themselves, and everybody judges each other based on what they’re wearing in the present day. It takes a little more finesse to get your point across and to overcome people’s personal relationships to clothing. When you’re doing period, you can just say you’ve done the research and it’s there. There’s a disconnect between the person, be it the actor, the director, or myself, and whatever personal bias they might bring. With contemporary, that distance doesn’t exist.
Some of the films you’ve worked on, by the way, are some of my favorites. I just recommended Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Love Lies Bleeding to people this past weekend. With Beef as a starting point, we have this country club setting, which is very different from what Season One had to offer. How did that look for you in terms of researching and establishing a vision?
Olga Mill: I did not grow up in that orbit. I had never been to country clubs, so it was really new territory for me. I approach research like a journalist or almost anthropologically, when in doubt, gather as much information as possible. Sonny helped coordinate research trips to Montecito Country Club for myself, Grace [Yun], Bailey [Gardner], and the set decorator [Kellie Jo Tinney]. We also went with the cast and James [Laxton] at one point, so we had these recon missions where we’d take a tour and just absorb the environment. Grace and I also did a Zoom with the general manager of another large, fancy country club. My approach to research sometimes is that yes, you have to go there physically, you have to look at photos, all of that. But I really like to find a point person you can ask questions to. Having some of these general managers that Sonny connected us with, being able to email and ask, “Does this seem right?”, was really helpful. We also just spent time walking around Montecito and Ojai, absorbing it. Those towns tend to have their own retail world, very specific designers and shops that we ended up working with that made everything feel genuinely regional. Another place I research heavily is Instagram. It is such a gift for costume designers. Imagine not having access to everybody’s photo albums twenty years ago. Especially in Montecito and Ojai, the whole point of social media is to show how you want to present yourself, so I go deep into accounts, not famous people or big influencers, but accounts where little pieces resonate with the characters. Sonny and I would go back and forth, and I would send him references and say, “Doesn’t this feel a little bit like Ashley and Austin?”
I wanted to run through the levels of class divide the show embraces, since you have three couples each representing a different generation and a different style. Starting with Austin and Ashley, they have this more Gen Z attitude. What was your thought process with dressing them?
Olga Mill: I’m solidly millennial, so with Gen Z I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just leaning on meme tropes, the crew socks versus ankle socks, wide leg jeans versus skinny jeans. I was really curious to go a little deeper and understand the underlying philosophy. What I kept hearing was that millennial culture is a lot more about optimization and the artisanal, this is a brand nobody has, a small shop, a limited edition. Whereas the Gen Z approach was that things were cooler if they were thrifted or a hand-me-down, or there was a craftiness to it, a turning-your-back-on-consumerism feeling. I remember talking to a friend of a friend and she said Urban Outfitters was not cool, and Old Navy kind of was. Brands that were traditionally marketed toward teens were lame, and brands that were once considered a little dorkier had had a turnaround. It’s all cyclical in the end.So I leaned into that. I wanted everything Austin and Ashley owned to feel lived in. The backstory we had for them was that they moved to be a beachy couple, so everything feels a little sun kissed. Whereas with Josh and Lindsay, I wanted it to feel like they had just ripped the tags off right before they walked out the door.
For Josh and Lindsay, you mentioned that just-took-the-tags-off feeling. They also have to exist in the country club atmosphere, which has a very different class emphasis. What did that look like for you?
Olga Mill: The club, and Montecito in general, we thought of as kind of boomer land. The club is trying to be fresh and young, it has younger celebrities and a younger crowd, but the town itself has established money. Ojai, where Josh and Lindsay live, felt more like a millennial fantasy: leave LA, it’s going to be artisanal ceramics, handcrafted everything. To go back to Josh and Lindsay specifically, they both have to exist in that world. They need to be able to move through it easily, but they’re also not fully part of it. For one, Josh is an employee, not a club member, even though he wants to feel like he is. So they’re a couple that knows how to fit in everywhere, dressing-wise. If you’re getting invited into all of these elite, exclusive spaces and you didn’t grow up with that kind of money, you don’t have the luxury to just wear whatever. You’re more thoughtful about it because you don’t want to feel like you don’t belong. We imagined that every time Josh and Lindsay get invited somewhere, there’s a lot of online shopping happening. Even when they go to check out the competing retreat, those looks took a long time to work on. We were trying to make them look almost matchy, like they’re dressing the part. There’s a couple I found online that I would reference who were constantly going to events and there was this quality to it that was almost like social LARPing. Very California cool on the surface, but also a little costumey. That captures Josh and Lindsay pretty well.
As for the last couple, Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim (and Eunice as well) there’s a much more businesslike approach to their look. What was the thought process there?
Olga Mill: We divided each couple into a color season as a framework. Josh and Lindsay were autumnal, their relationship is past the heat and passion of summer, kind of drying out and going into dormancy, so all their colors are autumnal. Ashley and Austin were spring, budding and romantic. And Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim were wintery: icy blues, grays, and whites. Everything in Korea and connected to their world was in that palette. They represent something else entirely. Korean culture and aesthetics are so gorgeous, and I looked at that a lot. But Chairwoman Park also had to have an edge to her, a sexiness. She has a younger husband, she bought a club in California, hence the moto leather jacket and pieces that felt a little unexpected given the research we’d done. Everything in their world was genuinely more expensive and higher end. Compared to the overprinted, heavily saturated quality of Lindsay’s wardrobe and the rooms she designs, Chairwoman Park’s aesthetic is so much more modern and streamlined. For lack of a better word, just cool.
How did sourcing work for this show? Were you making originals, pulling from vendors, a mix of both?
Olga Mill: It was a mix. For a modern show, we did some building, but a lot of it was purchases that we would then Frankenstein a little bit. We also did a lot of retail because we had the luxury of shooting in LA, where the show takes place, so you can physically go to the places where these characters would actually shop. We also pulled a lot from a place in LA called The Ruby, which is a rental fashion library, that was really helpful. We used The RealReal quite a bit, especially for Chairwoman Park and Eunice. But we had a great team of shoppers and a fantastic tailor, so it was really a combination of all of it.
Olga, thank you so much for the time. Like I said, I really loved watching the show and seeing how the costumes expressed the identity of these different characters in the storytelling. So thank you for the insight and congratulations on the work.
Comments
Loading…