After serving as the head costume designer on the first two seasons of “The Morning Show,” Sophie de Rakoff took on a slightly reduced role in Season 3 of the Apple TV+ drama. She continued to act as the head of the department for three full episodes, but was otherwise responsible for designing the costumes exclusively for Reese Witherspoon, with whom she’s collaborated on and off since “Legally Blonde” (2001). Jennifer Aniston‘s wardrobe, meanwhile, was handled by Debra McGuire, who boarded the show as the star’s designer in Season 2, while the remaining duties were taken over by de Rakoff’s assistant costume designer on the first two seasons, Beth Lancaster.
“It’s definitely an unusual way of working,” de Rakoff admits during a recent webchat with Gold Derby (watch the full exclusive video interview above). “I mean, quite often, you’ll find teams of designers… and we’re kind of an expanded version of that, with really specific duties.” And what is the key to making this system work? “Communication,” the costume designer says. “When you have so many characters, part of the job is making sure that visually, everything melds and works on screen, as well as emotionally for the characters.”
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Season 3 of “The Morning Show” picks up roughly two years after the events of the Season 2 finale, which chronicle the tipping point of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. “I think there was a shift, culturally, during the pandemic, especially for professional people, who were at home and were communicating via Zoom and not in person. So how everybody dressed obviously changed,” de Rakoff argues about the impact of the pandemic on people’s clothing habits. “I think, culturally, when we came out of it, what I saw — and maybe it’s because I wanted to see it; I think you see what you want to see sometimes — was a shift in how people expressed themselves… And this is all about the individuals. So I saw some people were getting more excited to get dressed up [again] because they had been so shuttered for so long. And then there were other people who got so used to being comfortable that it was hard for them to go back.”
So naturally, the pandemic also influenced how de Rakoff approached the costumes in Season 3. “We explore power dynamics a lot on our show — on all different levels — and we explore it with the costumes,” she highlights. “So it was kind of, like, this great, meta opportunity to be able to really explore the people who were defining their own style and came out of the pandemic in a certain way, and the other people who felt safer just going straight back into the corporate world, because they used it as a uniform and a defense.”
Witherspoon’s character, Bradley Jackson, finds herself at a new stage in her life, both emotionally and professionally, coming out of the pandemic at the beginning of Season 3. That is because she, a former field reporter in West Virginia and co-anchor of the show’s titular daily morning news program alongside Aniston’s Alex Levy, has landed her dream job in the anchor position of UBA’s nightly news. When it came to designing the character’s anchor looks, de Rakoff wanted to communicate the “dualistic performance mode” that she’s in.
“Bradley has always had a conflicted persona: She comes from West Virginia, [but] she finds herself in New York. We learn, as the seasons go on, that she’s bisexual. [There’s always been her] performative nature as an anchor and who she is as a real person… She’s also centrist; she speaks to, in some ways, both sides of the country,” she explains. “So on a very, kind of micro, simplistic level, we see her in pantsuits, and we see her in skirt suits. We see her hyperfeminine, and then we see here slightly more degendered.”
In terms of Bradley’s off-duty wear, de Rakoff notes that she opted for a more “basic” and “straightforward” look for the character in Season 1 as clothes weren’t a top priority for Bradley at the time. But as she spends more time in New York’s corporate culture as the series progresses, she starts “picking things up by osmosis,” the costume designer says. “Her silhouette is always the same — it’s the jeans, the leather jackets, the T-shirts, the sweater, the sweat pants, dresses every once in a while — but it’s elevated over the seasons as her status has elevated,” she elaborates. “We were very specific earlier on about using affordable, low-key mass market designers, and then as we’ve gone forward, it’s been about: She has more money, she has more access, the character probably has a stylist. And so everything has been upgraded.”
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