2. Boardwalk Empire - John Dunn and Lisa Padovani
The roaring Twenties are back. Well, have been back for the last two years since Boardwalk began. Always an era people love to see on screen, it involved thick tweeds, three-piece suits and collar-pinned shirts, along with those stunning, delicate, lacy dresses that unfortunately for me, look best on not-so-curvy women. And it's all thanks to costume designers John Dunn and Lisa Padovani, who also worked on the pilot of Mad Men. Dunn said:
"We never anticipated how much impact the clothing of Boardwalk was going to have. Nobody had been looking at Twenties menswear in a long time, so we're exhilarated to see the younger generation embracing it."
In an interview, the pair was asked where they get their inspiration:
"We go to fashion museums and libraries and we also use tailoring books from ebay or antique vendors: they have these large scale over-sized tomes with cutter's plates and fabric swatches. That's where we discovered that the colors they were using were so vivid. We're so used to looking at the black and white photography of the Twenties but when we actually dove into the research, whether it was a fabric swatch or an actual piece of clothing, we realized there was a great deal of color being used after WWI."
Personally, I love the combination of immaculate clothing and ruthless gangsters. Obviously, this is not a new trend, made iconic by movies like The Godfather. I think it does the job of desensitizing us, the audience to the vulgarity of the "bad guys". If you were to see Nucky wearing sweats and shooting someone in the head, it would make sense, make it more human and almost mundane. But if you see a handsome man in a three piece suit, hat, shiny tie and a cane doing it, it makes it feel like a far away world where these type of crimes happen, and that makes it more watchable, less revolting. In addition, it also shows, in vivid specificity, who's boss. It tells apart the high and low ranks, much like "Downton" does. Here, however, you have the extra element of nationality. Nucky and Al Capone don't dress alike. Why? Because one is Irish, and the other is Italian. There was also the ill fated Rothstein, of the Jewish Mafia. This show displays it front and center. Not only that, there's a difference in clothes choices between mirroring characters, best explained by John and Lisa: "Chalky is sort of the mirror image of Nucky in that he's controlling a powerful force in town. We were actually consciously doing them as mirror images of one another. It was the nature of the actors too - Michael K. Williams is able to wear strong color and interesting patterns and pull it off."