“George & Tammy” costume designer Mitchell Travers’ approach to any project is to start with rock solid foundation. “You get asked a billion questions every day, and because I shoot moves so quickly, I love to have that ready,” he says.
Travers reunited with Jessica Chastain (the two previously worked on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) for the intimate look at country singer Tammy Wynette. With a storyline that spanned three decades, Travers needed to know the answer to any costume questions thrown at him. “When Tammy needed a coat, in the script, it was about what coat did she grab? Was it short? Long? Fitted? Oversized? Embellished?”
And since there was a plethora of photos and videos out there, Travers did a deep dive into who this woman was both on and off the stage to build a collection of outfits in order to tell a story of the singer’s journey across the decades.
Color was another factor.
Says Travers, “It was one of our biggest tools. It was so informative about the human experience. When we feel great, we wear color, when we want to be seen, we wear color, when we don’t, we mute ourselves and cover ourselves.”
For Wynette, Chastain and Travers decided yellow felt appropriate. While it wasn’t his favorite color to work with, it was deeply country. “It was optimistic, and that spring yellow was vulnerable, fragile, beautiful, and gave us a lovely range that we got to play with. For Tammy, it just made sense.”
He also collaborated with Chastain’s go-to hair team head Stephanie Ingram “to understand how yellow worked with blonde and how blonde changes throughout the story.”
While color consistency was important, Travers looked at the bigger picture of how Wynette was dressing. “Dolly Parton is at her peak, Reba McIntyre is coming in, and ABBA is taking over the world, so, it’s about how all of these little influences find their way into her closet. Does she reject or join it? We wanted to feel that ebb and flow and how Tammy could work within certain aesthetics that were coming in and out throughout her fame.”
A major costume moment comes early in the series after Wynette meets George, played by Michael Shannon, and decides she is going to run away with him.
Three big costume moments happen, one after the next. Says Travers, “I put her in the most electric orange suit you can imagine because I wanted to shock the audience. I wanted it to feel like we were watching this woman who was in her power and control demanding to be seen.”
Immediately following that, Travers switched Chastain into a gray flannel polo with a matching wool coat. “We needed to present that the orange was just a costume and it’s not really who this woman was yet. It was a moment that clued the audience into the idea that this is someone who knows how to use clothes to get what they want and they know how to present themselves.”
Wynette’s neckline was another important factor Chastain and Travers considered. He says, “Jessica was intent on opening up Tammy to feeling comfortable with herself and being seen. Tammy was somebody who used femininity as a power superpower.”
He says this was a woman who loved being in the world of country music and she loved her femininity. So, they wanted to use her neckline in certain ways and how to open it up. Importantly, Chastain sang all the vocals live in the show. “You want to get in there and see the neck muscles moving. I wanted the audience to know she is singing,” Travers says.
But as Wynette’s story continues, the walls that she took down go back up again. “We started to build it up again, so at the wedding, we cover her with lace and you never really see the neck again,” he says. Travers adds there was a practical reason too — the makeup. While Chastain didn’t have any prosthetics – it was a stipple effect using latex to show aging — her character had a port to transfer drugs to her heart. “So I was mindful in the costume for that.”
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