Yahoo News ‘Lady in the Lake’ Costume Designer Shiona Turini Calls That Gold Sequined Catsuit a ‘Career Highlight’
Personal style carries weight in “Lady in the Lake,” particularly when it comes to the light blue coat that Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) wears throughout the Apple TV+ series. Set in 1960s Baltimore, the limited series from director and writer Alma Har’el follows the dovetailing stories of Cleo and Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman).
Cleo’s coat is a visual marker throughout the seven-episode series. It was important to costume designer Shiona Turini to get the perfect ice blue — leading to trying and discarding at least 17 different shades of blue. “We were doing coat research,” Turini told IndieWire. “I had ideas. Alma had ideas. Then she found this reference, and it was a swing coat, and it was actually from the ’50s. She had found a photo from a documentary South Street photographer, and it was a little girl, and her coat was this beautiful shade of blue. So we were inspired by these images, one from the ’50s and the other from the ’60s, and we wanted to marry them together. And we started with fabric research because, with Cleo, her story has so much texture.”
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They made the coat in-house alongside many of the other costumes. Turini has a background in fashion editorial and styling; if you were awed by Beyonce’s Renaissance tour wardrobe, that was all Turini’s doing, as well as costumes for “Insecure” and “Queen & Slim.” She had long wanted to do a 1960s-era period piece, and a perfectly timed DM from Har’el led to her work on the show.
Turini worked closely with Har’el to establish different styles for Cleo and Maddie, starting with a specific color palette, highlighting that ice blue alongside a plethora of neutrals, mustard yellow, and metallics. “By the time I joined the project, Alma had a pretty clear idea of the color palettes that she wanted for both storylines,” Turini said. “She was really specific about, ‘These are Maddie’s colors, and these are Cleo’s colors, and here’s when they contrast, and here’s when they complement each other or overlap.’ It was amazing to play in color, and also know this scene will cut to this scene, and we want to make sure that the color palettes between the women contrast so they feel like opposites.”
Working on each individual woman was important in creating the character and added to the visual language. When creating Cleo’s wardrobe, Turini wanted to make sure there was a lot of texture to her wardrobe, which consists of neutrals, suede, and knits during the daytime. But her work at the Pharoah Club in the evenings allows for some serious glamor, reflected in a gorgeous black dress with a full rhinestone collar that they sourced stones for and created a pattern. Inspired by Diana Ross performing with The Supremes, Turini wanted Cleo to look like a queen.
“Cleo knows who she is, and she knows what she wants, and she has a purpose,” she said. “For mapping out Cleo’s wardrobe, I thought a lot about the women in my family and in the ’60s, they were making their own clothes. They were so super stylish. I had a huge Baltimore team. They would bring photos of their own families. And so we were able to really try and kind of identify that Baltimore style and give it a little bit more edge than Maddie’s side of the story.”
Maddie is the opposite of Cleo — while she’s stylish in skirt suits and dresses, something is always a bit off. Her hair is frizzy, or her dress is rumpled, but that disheveledness was something that Turini wanted to explore in Maddie’s wardrobe to signify her lack of self. “Maddie doesn’t know who she is,” she said. “She’s wearing the suit because that’s the suit she’s supposed to be wearing. She’s buying the dress because she is trying to fill a hole and she’s a bored housewife and she’s out shopping and she saw it in a magazine or she saw it in the newspaper. Everything feels a little out of place because she doesn’t know who she is. She’s doing what she thinks she is supposed to do or supposed to be, but it’s always a little off because she doesn’t have that self-assuredness that Cleo’s side of the story does.”
The women’s stories parallel through the use of color — that ice blue that both women end up wearing, trading off neutrals and the glimmer of metallics. However, there’s one breathtaking costume that both women wear in Episode 6: an Esther Williams-inspired sequined catsuit and crown. For Turini, putting together that look for both women is a career highlight. “I love that costume. I love the custom crowns that we made,” she said. “It was such a fun moment to design. We did a lot of research on both ends of the story, obviously on Black musicians and researching the work of Black photographers and then to support Maddie’s side of the story, Jewish designers of the time and Jewish film stars. And we thought about what would the costume be that Maddie wants to wear? And it was based on Esther Williams and I got to deep dive into the actress. [We got] the team at Valentino to make that. It looks so beautiful in the light.”
The series is also a love letter to Baltimore, something Turini wanted the costuming to reflect as well, even putting lyrics from Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” on each slide of her presentation for Har’el. While they made a lot of the costumes in-house, some vintage pieces came from local Baltimore boutiques. Ultimately, Turini, alongside Ha’rel, created one of the richest costume designs of late, including 25 versions of that perfect blue coat.
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