roominthecastle:

[ Michael’s a bit of a dandy, often very nattily dressed. Some of his bowties are made of feathers, I think. ] That’s correct. I think in the first episode we used the feathered bowtie. Initially, Michael was gonna be professorial. We know him – initially – as somebody who is this good guy, an architect who built this great place for the humans. He’s like a professor who loves all things human. So he’d like all the little knickknacks and things that we love to play with. He had a fascination for that kind of thing, so using a bowtie would make sense. If he’s watching things on Earth, that would be something that he’d be drawn to. And when we were in the fitting with Ted, initially we probably would have gone more the tweedy professor route, but as we were trying on looks, and we had bowties and ties and all kinds of things, Ted put on the bowtie and completely felt like “This is it. This is him.” We both felt that way and when that happens in a fitting room, that feels really good. [ The bowtie also works so well because it makes him seem so harmless, innocuous, and then the big reveal happens. ] I wasn’t told about the big reveal at the time but Ted was aware, so I won’t take credit at all but it circled around to perfection, I feel. And then we’ve moved on to different ties as we’re progressing.

When I read the first script, I felt very clear about what Janet looked like. When I was younger, I used to fly alone and the stewardesses were like goddesses to me. They helped me and lived in the skies as far as I was concerned as a 5-year old. I saw Janet like that. Mike is so generous to all departments, letting them be creative, and he was game. Then we found fabrics that we felt like would work perfectly. And I love the color purple because somehow it means unity to me. It’s harmonious and Janet is not taking any sides, she’s just giving out information and all sorts of things to everybody. We designed 10 to 12 outfits for her and made multiple shirts. Generally, since S1, Janet has been mainly in her purple suit and a white blouse with blue clouds. You can guess why we picked the clouds. In S2, when we kept rebooting her, we did many different looks and then kinda landed back at purple. But when we go to the Janet Warehouse, Janet is in white. When we see Bad Janet, again, it’s a different look. [ If Good Janet is a 60’s, 70’s airline hostess, what is Bad Janet? ] I don’t even like saying this because I don’t know what it is to Mike and D’Arcy, but in my mind, she is Olivia Newton-John in Grease. It’s like a good girl trying to be bad. Bad Janet just jumped off the page like that for me.

The Eleanor that we see in Arizona is a little bit more of a party girl and a little bit more of a wild dresser. The closet that she inherited when she arrived at the Good Place was supposedly the Good Eleanor’s. So she is the impostor and ends up wearing flannel shirts, clogs, and jeans that don’t really belong to her and wouldn’t be her natural clothing choice. She is wearing somebody else’s clothes. Whenever we see her as the Eleanor Shellstrop we know, she isn’t wearing clogs. Those were just like “the good person’s clogs”.

[ Was Tahani’s wardrobe informed by Jameela? ] Absolutely. She came in to the fitting dragging a suitcase. She brought lots of dresses for us to look at and we looked at silhouettes on her. We patterned some of her dresses and used fabric that we wanted. She has a great figure and everything looks good on her. She definitely has a closet full of dresses that look very similar to Tahani’s. Somebody told me that years ago they saw her at a casual California barbeque in this glamorous gown. She so easily pulls it off and never looks out of place. She does not love wearing pants. We don’t put her in a lot of pants but we did put her in cargo pants a couple of times in S2 and also in S3.

Mike picked the blue and yellow colors for the “chaos sequence fabric”. It’s a reference to the University of Michigan where his dad went to school. Mike is sweet like that. We ended up making bolts and bolts of that fabric because it doesn’t exist at fabric stores, definitely not in the amount that we needed. It’s a dream for me to be able to make bolts of fabric. You rarely get to do that. You go the fabric factory and you show them what you want it to look like and they print you a sample and ask “this?” before they make hundreds of yards. You say yes and they start printing. Once we got the bolts, we had a pretty big sewing room where we exactly patterned everything that everybody was wearing, and then sewed the costumes. Ted is wearing a bowtie made of this fabric and also a jacket exactly like the jacket he was wearing in a prior scene. Everybody is wearing their outfit in that blue/yellow fabric. Mike is so decisive and when he picked blue and yellow, I was thinking, “How can I make sense of these colors so that it feels right to me?” Well, green is the color of the Good Place. Blue and yellow equals green and what’s happening in those scenes is the teasing apart of good, pulling those two colors away from each other that would equal green.

– Kirston Mann, costume designer (The Good Place: The Podcast, chapter 11)