Prep school vampires. Bronx bomber vampires. CitiBike vampires. JFK TSA vampires. “What We Do in the Shadows” isn’t leaving any New York (or vampire) subculture behind in Season 6; this in turn has given costume designer Laura Montgomery the gift of delivering new twists for the FX series’ final run around Staten Island.
The biggest lift of the season was probably Episode 9, “Come Out and Play,” the show’s loving tribute to “The Warriors” and confirmation of the hidden, evil agenda of every Brooklyn barista/artist-and-writer vampire. Montgomery and her team needed to dress the episode’s huge background cast with enough distinctiveness that each group read quickly and comedically as part of the show’s quick-panning, constantly readjusting mockumentary style.
“The show is 22 minutes long and [the costumes are] purely a visual gag when you’re calling out all these vampires,” Montgomery told IndieWire. “Because we had to dress crew, [we had] Location Support On Camera vampires, mobster vampires and their wives, Rockaway surfer vampires, Meatpacking District vampires, Old World vampires who were dressed that way because we didn’t want our cast to look out of place, and then 215 various vampires on top of all those groups.”
The scale of the episode didn’t phase the “Shadows” costume team — they even dressed series executive producer Yana Gorskaya and several department heads as a gang of “leatherette” vampires lingering near Alexander Skarsgård and/or his “True Blood” character Eric Northman, depending on how you choose to interpret the black T-shirt and leather jacket Montgomery put him in.
But the challenge and the joy of the series has been continuing to iterate on costume details and find themes for the characters that help push the story and the comedy forward.
For instance, because of Episode 9’s night exteriors, Montgomery put Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) in the lightest colors she’s ever worn on the series, with a moon-based theme to her lilac dress’ design. It’s in contrast to The Baron’s (Doug Jones) sunnier robes, meant to read better for Nadja’s and Lazlo’s (Matt Berry) heart-to-heart in a graveyard, and also gets to act as a comic contrast for Nadja’s dance-off with some subway vampires. The show is always trying to find fresh details and check off new designs and styles that it hasn’t yet shown.
“It was just a mix of everything, and you could kind of invent the period. So by the time we got into the fifth and the sixth season, we had a lot of creative license because I think Paul Simms and the other creatives really trusted [Shane Fox], the production designer, and I to know the show, know the characters,” Montgomery said. “So sometimes if a new character would come up, we’d be like, ‘Well, we haven’t done the 1600s yet. Can he be this old?’”
Even when working with contemporary clothing, all of the “What We Do in the Shadows” characters are a little bit mixed up in time, which allows Montgomery to design clothes for each of them that emphasize their idiosyncrasies.
With Guillermo’s (Harvey Guillén) sojourn into the world of venture capital, Montgomery didn’t just give him a standard-issue Patagonia vest. Even within the strictures of an office uniform, she let the costumes be guided by Guillermo’s idea of finance — which saw him upgrading his suspenders to a very “Wolf of Wall Street” black.
“[The show] was contemporary but also period. It was just a mix of everything,” Montgomery said. “Guillermo always has that ’90s feel to him. He stayed more in his idea of what that world would look like. Very ‘American Psycho.’” It’s a subtle contrast to the other finance bros at work — played by members of the show’s writing team — who look more modern and visually hammer home the point Nandor (Kayvan Novak) makes at the end of the episode: that Guillermo belongs with them.
Montgomery applies the same principle to Nadja in her Canon Capital disguise, just more so. “Nadja, she’s always straddled 1880 and 1980, toggling between the two. So it was very much ‘80s working girl,” Montgomery said.
Whatever incentive the “What We Do in the Shadows” costume team had to exaggerate for effect increased when Montgomery had to disguise Demetriou’s pregnancy during the shoot. “A lot of what I had designed still worked. The shoulders really kind of balance it and if she doesn’t turn to the side, you can’t really tell,” Montgomery said. “So we just had to try to make the shoulders even bigger to keep that same silhouette.”
As a whole, Season 6 of “What We Do in the Shadows” has gone bigger but kept the same shape. And with respect to the series finale barrelling towards us faster than a bat (BAT!), Montgomery would only say, “The finale was very nostalgic.”
It’s perhaps fitting that the costume team would get to play a few of the hits, after all their new work across Season 6. “Being able to show off kind of what my team did best, and what everyone did best… everyone got to showcase their skills, which was amazing,” Montgomery said.
The series finale of “What We Do in the Shadows” airs on FX on December 16.
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