It started, inevitably, with the turtleneck.
In Amanda Seyfried’s first edit for her role as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout,” Claire Parkinson, the show’s costume designer, focused on the disgraced top of Theranos founder: a black Issey Miyake turtleneck sweater emerging from the uniform. from her idol Steve Jobs. The shirt won’t appear until halfway through the Hulu series, which premieres March 3, but, said Ms. Parkinson, “we had to figure out where we wanted to build.”
She had found a vintage Miyake turtleneck sweater and dupes from dozens of other brands. In the end, she went for a semi-synthetic Wolford song.
“It had the perfect stretch that she could play with,” Ms. Parkinson said, referring to the fiddling and finger tips Ms. Seyfried performs throughout the series, her jaw flexed and her eyes wide. Even as her voice deepens and her posture straightens, Hulu’s Elizabeth Holmes looks constantly awkward and maladroit.
“I’d make Amanda crumple her face when I was putting on her makeup,” said Jorjee Douglass, the makeup artist who reinterpreted Ms. Holmes’ clumpy mascara and cake-like foundation.
Such details were essential to constructing Ms. Holmes’s Silicon Valley identity, from her first investor meetings to her fraud trial, where she showed up wearing beach waves and a diaper bag. (Mrs. Holmes was found guilty of one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud, and will be sentenced in September.)
“Elizabeth Holmes dresses up herself, and we dress her up as she dresses herself,” said Elizabeth. Meriwether, creator and executive producer of “The Dropout,” an adaptation of the podcast of the same name. “There’s always a lot of emotional weight behind what she’s wearing.”
Understand the Elizabeth Holmes Process
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, was found guilty on four counts of fraud in a case that symbolized the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s culture of hustle, hype and greed. She will be sentenced on September 26.
The costume team dressed Mrs. Seyfried in versions of pieces in which Mrs. Holmes had been photographed or resonated with the story’s place and time period, from her childhood in Houston in the 1990s to 2015, when the Stanford dropout became a biotech titan worth billions.
Her wardrobe is filled with ill-fitting and unflattering second-hand pieces that Mrs. Parkinson, who was nominated for two Emmys for her work for ‘The Politician’, was sourced from eBay, Etsy, Depop, Poshmark and costume warehouses in Los Angeles, where she and her wife live part-time. The items are boring, the labels practical: Banana Republic, J. Crew and the like.
Ana Arriola, a former Apple designer who worked briefly at Theranos and hosted an image intervention with Ms. Holmes when she was her boss, met the show’s writers’ room. “She told us how she wore Christmas sweaters when she met Elizabeth,” said Ms. Meriwether. “We pressed her and we were like, ‘Real reindeer sweaters?'”
It turned out that Ms. Arriola was referring to fair-isle and snowflake-patterned pullovers, which appear on the show, before being swapped out for a gloss black replica of a Patagonia vest that Ms. Parkinson’s team made by hand.
While the overall look of the production is unobtrusive and heavy on earth tones, Ms. Parkinson left the surrounding cast in chic contrast to the central figure. Elizabeth’s mother wears Chanel and Tory Burch (Mrs. Parkinson’s inspiration for her was Princess Diana), George Shultz (Sam Waterston) has “beautiful tailor-made” costumes and Ian Gibbons (the British chemist played by Stephen Fry) wears sweaters and pants that telegraph taste and integrity. “Every character had huge closets,” said Ms. Parkinson.
When fitting with Mrs. Seyfried, Mrs. Parkinson tried to skew something about the fit. “Most people look good in black,” she said. “So how can we make sure it doesn’t look right?” Her solution was to play with the bunching, waves and creases.
Elizabeth’s wardrobe gets more polished as the show goes on (out with the Gap, in with the Gucci!), but the pieces still sit oddly on Mrs. Seyfried. “My goal here was to make it look like it’s a costume,” said Ms. Parkinson.
She was hired to work on the show in March 2020. Due to the pandemic, the shooting did not start for a year and a half, after which Kate McKinnon dropped out as the lead and Ms. Seyfried intervened.
Separately, Mrs. Parkinson married; bought an 1860 home in Litchfield County, Conn.; and dealt with a case of Covid-19 in March 2021, which forced her to pull out of a project filming in Atlanta and send her sister, Lily Parkinson, also a costume designer and personal stylist, in her stead.
When ‘The Dropout’ started filming in June 2021, Ms. Parkinson had spent over a year thinking about Ms. Holmes’ inner life and appearance. Wearing a uniform as armor has long been a favorite strategy of women seeking respect in the male-dominated realm of Silicon Valley. While men are encouraged to telegraph their maverick credibility through sweatshirts and football slides, women are pressured to look sleek yet fashion-agnostic.
Victoria Hitchcock, a Bay Area stylist, keeps a list of chic yet smart designers she proposes to female clients, including The Row, Stella McCartney and Saint Laurent. “I also have a list of designers I wouldn’t recommend my clients wear,” she said. “Things that are super feminine and floral” are big no-nos.
“I’m wearing an Ulla Johnson blouse now, but I wouldn’t wear that on someone who wants to exude confidence and knowledge,” Ms Hitchcock added.
Mrs. Holmes’s uniform of choice, which would become a punch line, started out as Soylent tailoring for someone who didn’t care. Clothing was a nuisance to her, a point dramatized in a scene before the turtleneck with an annoying bra strap and scissors.
“‘Why’ was a word I kept asking myself,” Mrs. Parkinson said of her time investigating Mrs. Holmes. “I was always like, ‘Why is she wearing that?’ It was all confusing choices.” But one image struck her as the most natural: Mrs. Holmes at Burning Man, wearing a thick coat with a furry collar and oversized pink sunglasses.
“What I liked about that is that it’s a costume, and it almost feels like she’s comfortable in it,” said Ms. Parkinson. “She’s completely happy and in her own world.”
