Styling the Swans

The 2024 FX limited series Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans is about friendship, fame and betrayal — the true story of what happened when acclaimed author Truman Capote exposed the secrets of his “swans,” a group of New York City socialites with whom he’d become close. But let’s be honest: It’s also about the clothing. The clean-cut elegance of Babe Paley. The sporty-chic style of Slim Keith. C.Z. Guest’s impeccable tweeds and turtlenecks.

“These women were real fashion icons in their own way,” says costume designer Leah Katznelson ’02, who won a Creative Arts Emmy in September for her work on the show. But as real as they were, the aim with dressing their TV counterparts was not duplication. “We’re working with actors who are embodying these characters, so our job is to support that transformation,” Katznelson says. “Our goal was not to fully replicate head to toe what somebody would have worn. It was more to help paint a feeling.”

Katznelson, who is also known for her costuming on the Nixon-era White House Plumbers and the contemporary domestic drama Fleishman Is in Trouble, was an architecture major at the College and actually began in the film and television industry in the art department. But as an assistant on Sex and the City she found herself drawn in a different direction. “I started to feel like the scale that I wanted to work on was the human body — that I was interested in taking the elements that I thought about, texture and scale and other things, and applying it on a micro level.” She also wanted more collaboration. “I liked working with people. I realized, buildings can’t talk to me,” she says.

In November, Katznelson took a break from designing the second season of Poker Face to talk about her creative process, her most meaningful projects to date and how, as someone who spends time steeped in Hollywood glamour, it helps to have a second gig that keeps her grounded.

Congratulations on your Emmy Award! What was that experience like?

It was surreal. It’s sort of like everything stopped for a second — I looked at my sister, who was my date at the ceremony, and I said, “Oh, my God, did they just call our show?”

I had been nominated the year prior for Fleishman Is in Trouble, but obviously the win and getting up on the stage was amazing. It feels very much like not just an acknowledgement of the work of this particular show — of which I’m very proud — but also of working in this industry more or less since I graduated from school. It feels like a culmination of joy and honor and respect for a lot of the work that’s gone into the last 20-plus years.

Tell us about those years. How did you get into costume design?

I’ve always done drawing and painting, from when I was little through high school. I chose Columbia because I really wanted to study architecture within a liberal arts curriculum. That became my major alongside a concentration in film. While I was at the College, I did costumes for the Columbia Musical Theater Society, including Little Shop of Horrors and A Chorus Line. I also did costumes for a number of grad students who were doing their thesis projects at the film school.

My first formal instruction in costume design came when I took a costume construction class at Barnard; it met for an hour on Fridays, and then you needed studio time. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be the easiest class.’ [Laughs] It was by far one of the hardest things I ever did. Everybody had been making all of their own clothes since they were 3 years old. I was very much out of my depth. You had to design something for one of the Barnard on-campus productions, but before you could, you had to make your own pants. I made these giant — like giant — pants. But I really loved it. I liked being in that creative environment.

As I was moving toward graduation, I asked one of my film professors, Mike Hausman, if he knew anybody who was a costume designer that I could talk to, just to see what that path might look like. He introduced me to Hilary Rosenfeld, who was the costume designer from Dirty Dancing; she was designing an Off-Broadway production of The Odyssey and she asked if I wanted to be her intern. It was an adaptation where they were supposed to be on a Caribbean island, and all the clothes were made out of found objects; so it was all recycled materials, and we were hand-gluing everything. I’d never done anything like it. And then she called me again right before graduation. I already was set to work for an architecture firm, but she said, “I’m doing this very low-budget film in Colorado for the summer. Would you like to come and be the art director?” I said, “Sure. But I don’t even know what an art director does.” [Laughs]

And then I just loved it. I loved being on set. I loved the atmosphere of collaboration. I loved the pace. And I loved the energy of a film set and meeting lots of different people. I decided to move into the world of film and television, and I got a job on the final season of Sex and the City.

What draws you to a project nowadays? Where do you even start?

I really like storytelling. It’s like when you’re reading a novel, and you get to imagine the characters in your head. That’s what I get to do every time I read a script. I like quiet stories — contemplative, character-driven stories. That’s what excites me the most. I do like certain periods, too; I like the ’60s and ’70s very much as an aesthetic. And I like the research element of my job.

The very first thing I do is try to read the script once, all the way through, without making any notes. And then I go back and make copious notes. Sometimes a character gets introduced with a lot of details around who they are; sometimes it’s almost nothing: “Gray-haired, 40 years old.”

If there’s very little on the page, I try to pull from the writer’s voice — any indication of who they think this person is. Sometimes it’s the description of the neighborhood they live in, the music that they listen to, the car they drive, the school they go to, the food they’re eating. It’s like a sociological analysis, to look at their whole picture and then try to synthesize from that: What would their closet look like? What’s their socioeconomic status? Do they need to present a certain way or not?

If it’s an actual person that I’m referencing, I’ll go deep into the history. When working on White House Plumbers we were telling a story about [E. Howard] Hunt and [G. Gordon] Liddy at a time in their lives that was not heavily documented. These were regular people, and we didn’t have access to tons of photographs that were everyday candids of them with their families.

So a lot of what we had to do was to think about who they were behind the scenes. I read everybody’s biographies; I read newspaper clippings. And then you look at the architecture and the art and the food that was around them in that time period; how would that inform things? What did politicians in government from 1968 to 1972 look like? What did their secretaries look like? You create a whole world.

You mentioned earlier that you thrive on collaboration. Tell me more about that.

Collaboration is everything in this industry. It’s one of the things I value the most. It’s many concentric circles, and it makes every day totally different and fun. Essentially, I present concept boards to the director first, saying, “Is this how you’re seeing your film?” And then once the actors get introduced to it, I show them that board. Sometimes the actor comes to it with something radically different, like, “I only want to wear purple,” and you’re like, “OK, hold on.” [Laughs]

There’s also collaboration with the director of photography, because I want to know, are we going to be lighting things very dimly or with natural light? Are there any colors that won’t work with their lighting scheme? And likewise with the production designer. Do we want the person to camouflage into the couch that they’re sitting on? Or should there be a stark contrast? These are conversations that as a collective, as department heads, we all spend a lot of time talking about and working through together.

The other element of collaboration comes from my department itself. I work with an extraordinary team of craftspeople and design people and wardrobe supervisors and on-set dressers and tailors and more. Every one of them is an integral part of my team, of a team. And while I have ideas, everyone around me has them, too. We have conversations, and who knows what might spark? The best part of this job is pulling together a creative family.

Let’s talk about Feud. Was there anything distinctive about that experience for you?

Getting to see New York and tell that story in that time period was really special. And the cast was exceptional. I co-designed the first four episodes with Lou Eyrich, who has been Ryan Murphy’s costume designer for 20-plus years — but she was a mentor for me. I worked for her when I lived in Los Angeles many years ago. And so the opportunity to design together was great.

Also, we had a lot of material to review, including original footage from Capote’s Black and White Ball that has been seen only on a very limited scale. So that level of detail was really exciting. All those people like Babe Paley and Slim Keith are real and known, and also were real fashion icons in their own way.

In real life, they [the women] had a lot more budget than we had in terms of the universe we were creating. We had a fantastic member of our team who was able to find one of the jewelers whom these women, Paley in particular, got all of her jewelry from — custom jewelry. And the jeweler had replicas and notes from every piece she ever got from them. We were even able to borrow some of the real pieces. So there were elements that got layered in that really helped to keep the story feeling elevated and luxurious, and really in the world of these women.

That brings up an interesting point. How do you navigate recreating a look that existed, versus channeling it in a way that feels true to the story?

I think it’s a balance. Obviously, there was a lot of photography that we were able to look at for these women. But again, we’re working with actors who are embodying these characters, and so our job is to help support that transformation. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a carbon copy. Our goal was not to fully replicate head to toe what somebody would have worn. It was more to help paint that feeling.

There are certain details that we leaned into that were important to the storytelling. For example, Capote always wore hats or very long scarves. But then, take the kind of shoes that people wore; they make you move in a certain way. You stand differently in heels versus boots or something else. And it was important for an actor to feel like they could step into the shoes of whomever they were portraying and move physically. So that was sometimes more of a choice about their movement needs than about the visual.

As you look back on your career so far, what projects stand out as having been especially meaningful?

I would say, Fleishman Is in Trouble. I really loved that project. I had read the book [by Taffy Brodesser-Akner] as part of my book club, and I loved it. So when the directors, whom I had worked with previously, reached out to me, I was so excited. And then it was a kind of a perfect storm of creative people working on it — Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan. The story takes place from 1986 through 2013, so it was contemporary storytelling. In those instances you shouldn’t notice the clothes most of the time. Or rather, if I’ve done my job right, you may notice the clothes, but they shouldn’t ever pull you from the story.

One of the great things about Fleishman was the ability to make these people feel really real. I grew up on the Upper West Side; it was like I knew them. So to be able to make it feel grounded and layered all at the same time, was really special.

I also want to say Private Life, which was a film I did with Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti, about a couple who were struggling with infertility and their challenges to become parents. The two actors were both creatives in the story, within the film, so my job was making them feel a bit messy and real. I often use repetition in a character’s wardrobe and pay close attention to the nuances of how people wear their clothes in order to keep the costumes feeling authentic. It’s always very important to me that even when things are stylized, that there’s an element of reality to it.

I read that you are also a doula?! How does that fit in?

I have two kids— Ezra is 13 and Cleo is 15 — and when I had my daughter, I had a doula who worked with us. I came out of that experience feeling like I wish every birthing person and their partners or families could have another layer of support like I had. So I did my training and I thought, I’m going to leave TV behind and I’m going to teach childbirth education. And I did do that, for about six months. But then I got a call to do 21 Jump Street, and I just decided to go back into film. But I still take on clients.

As much as I love the creative work as a costume designer, there’s a lot of excess that goes into Hollywood. I spend sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes that end up on screen for 30 seconds. It’s very hard for me to wrestle with that, and it’s balancing for me to do another kind of work where I feel like I’m really supporting families and helping to tell their story in a completely different way.