‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Costume Designer Created the Look for a Comedian’s Swan Song (original) (raw)

In the series finale of Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the eponymous Midge Maisel, played with Emmy-winning sparkle by Rachel Brosnahan, lands a big break appearing as a talk show guest on The Gordon Ford Show. For one of her last looks of the entire series, costume designer Donna Zakowska, also an Emmy winner, crafted a custom, gorgeous black gown fit for a comedy superstar.

Costume Sketch for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Courtesy of Amazon Studios

1.”Sometimes I love to do a collage technique,” Donna Zakowska explains of her sketch for this dress. “The photograph is vintage, from the ’50s. I have a few different techniques of sketching. But this is one in particular that I really wanted to have a feeling like a photograph, something that was more of an impression, a little bit more abstract, versus creating the absolute sketch with all the details. It was more about the feeling, and the black and white and then the pink [background] coming from behind, which was this shadow of pink that is always around Midge Maisel.”

2. Zakowska has developed a very close relationship with Maisel’s creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. “I instinctively have a sense of what they are thinking,” she says. “I knew this was a parting dress in its own way, and yet it was something that she was supposed to have bought. So it couldn’t be overly designed. The simplicity and the elegance of this last look was very, very important to me.”

3. Getting the silhouette right was all about playing with subtleties for Zakowska. “The shape of it was sort of early ’60s — the full skirt, but not that full,” she says. Her favorite dresses of Midge’s, she explains, “were a little bit like party dresses: elegant but simple. It was important that it had an impact reminiscent of what we’ve seen her in before, but went one step higher.”

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Still Philippe Antonello/Amazon Studios

4. For Zakowska, it was crucial to get the neckline of the gown right, “because I wanted to highlight Rachel’s face — she has this beautiful skin, and I wanted it to be very open, so that your focus was on her.” While the dress recalls some of Midge’s previous performance looks, “I pushed the neckline being much more open and more dramatic than I had in any of the other performance dresses, because I felt this last dress is really about the last time we see her performing, the last time she is Midge Maisel.”

5. An understructure was created to help the dress hold its shape, Zakowska says, “like a Victorian dress, so that [it] really keeps its sculptural form. For me, it’s always about three elements: simple, elegant and playful.”

6. “The most important thing for the dress was the fabric,” Zakowska says, explaining that she examined over 200 swatches of black silk to find the right material. “This particular one is Italian, [and] had both a shiny and a matte quality.” She adds: “Finding that particular black silk became a big part of the process to me, because it really was the beginning of the palette.”

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Still Philippe Antonello/Amazon Studios

7. Midge is barely wearing any jewelry, Zakowska notes, explaining: “The gold bow basically becomes the jewelry.”

8. The focal point of the dress is the bow, which “is one of the images that became very much reminiscent of Midge Maisel, and of her look,” Zakowska explains. To elevate the bow for her finale gown, she approached it in a new way by beading it. To keep it true to the character, Zakowska used “gold sequins, but not having them be really shiny, more of a matte gold.” To Zakowska, that reflected “the idea of what her success would be. She was going to reach this level of success — you had to feel that at the end. But she was going to do it in a subtle, celebratory way.”

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.