‘Julia’ Costume Designer John Dunn on Dressing the Childs, Drag Performers for the Early 1960s

The heavily public, well documented public personas of Julia and Paul Child did make it easier for costume designer John Dunn to recreate their looks for the HBO Max series Julia. However, costuming for actors portraying real-world icons doesn’t necessarily have to exactly reflect their exact original looks.

Instead, costume design becomes more of a partnership with the actors to ensure they’re able to fully create and inhabit the characters on their own terms.

“We did a great deal of photographic research, as you can well imagine, which included both Julia’s public persona but then also the private pictures that Paul was taking of her. We really just steeped ourselves in the aesthetic of their clothing, and how they worked their wardrobes and even coordinated their wardrobes. They had a charming way of dressing as a couple,” Dunn revealed. “But I do feel it’s important that the actors don’t believe that they are a carbon copy of the actual character or personality that they are portraying. It’s really helpful to take the aesthetic and apply it onto that particular actor and give them the freedom to sort of explore that character’s dressing without actually copying fabrics and cuts. Then, it sort of keeps the actor from feeling like wax museum characters and be able to interpret it.”

Julia explores Julia Child’s personal and professional friendship circles as she filmed the first season of her ground-breaking cooking show The French Chef. Aside from helping define the characters, Dunn’s costuming did serve one major functional task: masking the true height of its star Sarah Lancashire.

Child, herself, towered at 6’2″ while Lancashire, according to Google, lands somewhere around 5’8″.

To help create the illusion of extraordinary height for Lancashire, Dunn had a few tricks up his sleeve. First, he dressed Lancashire in Child’s signature colorful aesthetic, reflecting her colorful Pasadena, California, upbringing. That bold color palate helps create an appropriate presence and physicality.

But there were also two sets of shoes for Lancashire.

“We had very identical shoes. One shoe was for camera. That’s what you see whenever you see her feet or any foot shot or long shot at all. Other times, she has this very same shoe with a platform on it that’s built up easily three to four inches,” Dunn shared. “So that was a lot for Sarah to negotiate, but she felt she needed that physical presence.”

The other characters that pepper the world of Julia were dressed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appropriate tweed and other conservative fabrics appropriate for a university town. Interestingly enough, even though the series is set in 1962, Julia‘s characters still dress in a style more reminiscent of the fashion of the 1950s than the dramatically different choices in the mid-1960s.

Bebe Neuwirth’s Avis lounges with a martini in her 1950s gowns. There are no Halston pill box hats (yet). And that’s exactly how Dunn intended it.

“I always say, whenever I’m doing a series, that a decade doesn’t really become the decade until usually about the fifth year. If you’re going to create that world, then you have to have those people that are still dressing there. The guy’s got his suit in the early 50s, and it hasn’t worn out. Why should he get rid of it? That was much more the way of life back then. People didn’t have to change over their wardrobes every 20 minutes.”

But there were some characters within the series who perhaps did change their wardrobes more frequently. Julia meets old friend James Beard (Christian Clemenson) in San Francisco during a book tour. Out for a night of fun, Beard quietly takes Julia to a drag club where she meets a host of performers, including one modeled after her.

Dunn’s process required training the broad range of Boston-based drag performers who acted in the scene about the drag gowns of the early 1960s.

They were very different styles that what we know of drag today.

“Their current aesthetic and just the broader spectrum of how they dress and the combinations of what they put together was so different from what a drag queen was wearing in 1962. Their jaws just dropped open when I presented this rack of dresses that were often nothing like anything they had ever worn because the world has moved on,” Dunn laughed. “We know from something like RuPaul’s Drag Race that drag queens come in all shapes and sizes now, but I had to reel them back into Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and explain to them who those people were.”

Julia streams exclusively on HBO Max.