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      How the Queen of Denmark Shaped the Look of Netflix’s “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction”

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      Once upon a time, there was a princess in Denmark who aspired to become an artist.Though she was the eldest child of the country’s reigning king, for the first 12 years of the princess’s life, only men had the right to inherit the throne. That changed when the Danish constitution was amended in 1953, and the princess became her father’s presumptive heir soon after turning 13. She continued to pursue her interest in art throughout her teenage years, producing drawings by the stacks before largely stopping in her 20s.Around the time the princess turned 30 — and after she had earned a diploma in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and had studied at Aarhus University in Denmark, the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics — she read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” It inspired her to start drawing again.Three years later, upon her father’s death in 1972, the princess was crowned as queen: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, to be specific.Margrethe, now 83, celebrated 50 years on the throne in 2022. But in assuming the role of queen, she did not abandon her artistic passions. As a monarch she has taken lessons in certain media, has taught herself others and has been asked to bring her eye to projects produced by the Royal Danish Ballet and Tivoli, the world’s oldest amusement park, in Copenhagen.Margrethe made 81 decoupages, a type of cut-and-paste artwork, that served as the basis for sets in “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction.” Interiors at a castle in the film were based on this decoupage.NetflixHer paintings have been shown at museums, including in a recent exhibition at the Musée Henri-Martin in Cahors, France. And her illustrations have been adapted into artwork for a Danish translation of “The Lord of the Rings.” (They were published under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer, and the book’s publisher approached her about using them after she sent copies to Tolkien as fan mail in 1970.)Margrethe recently notched another creative accomplishment: serving as the costume and production designer for “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction,” a feature film that debuted on Netflix in September and has wardrobes and sets based on her drawings and other artworks.The film is an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard” by Karen Blixen, a Danish baroness who published under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Set in a fictional kingdom, the story is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.“It was great fun,” Magrethe said of working on the film in an interview in August at the Château de Cayx, the Danish royal family’s estate in Luzech, a village near Cahors in the South of France.“I hope that Blixenites will accept the way we’ve done it,” she said.Conjuring AtmospheresThe Netflix adaptation, a sort of fantasy dramedy, has been more than a decade in the making.JJ Film, the Danish production company behind it, approached Margrethe about working on the movie after she served as production designer for two shorter films it produced, “The Snow Queen” and “The Wild Swans,” which were both adapted from Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Those films, released on Danish television in 2000 and 2009, also featured sets based on artworks by Margrethe, who in 2010 became an honorary member of the Danish Designers for Stage and Screen union.For the Netflix film, the queen designed 51 costumes and made 81 decoupages — a type of cut-and-paste artwork — that were used as the basis for sets. (She was not paid by Netflix or JJ Film.) Her sketches, along with some of the clothes and many of the decoupages, are being shown at the Karen Blixen Museum just outside Copenhagen through next April. Afterward, there are plans to show them in New York, Washington and Seattle.The movie, an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard,” is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.NetflixFor certain decoupages, the queen cut up images of interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like this sumptuous room.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesMargrethe based her costume designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period, which took place in parts of Europe from 1815 to 1848. Certain details, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at that time.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesTo compose the decoupages, the queen cut up images of various landscapes and interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like a sumptuous sitting room and a rocky canyon with a fortress and a waterfall.“Sometimes it takes hours, and sometimes things want to come together and they do as you want them to do, and suddenly you’ve done a whole decoupage in an afternoon,” she said. “It’s kind of a puzzle.”She was guided by Blixen’s “very visual writing,” she said, noting that Blixen, as well as Tolkien and Andersen, were writers who also painted or drew.Bille August, 74, the film’s director, described the queen’s decoupages as a “tuning fork” that he used to build “a world that is detached from reality without being a full-on fairy tale.” (He compared the general visual style he sought to the tone of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”)“Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” Mr. August said.Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, which set designers would then style with props to further emulate the artworks. Elements in the decoupages that couldn’t be found were rendered using computer-generated imagery. Some decoupages were scanned and details from the artworks were added to scenes in postproduction.Blixen did not set “Ehrengard” in a specific time, giving Margrethe freedom to interpret the look of the costumes. She chose to base her designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period in Austria and other parts of central and northern Europe, which took place from 1815 to 1848.Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen, 56, the film’s costume supervisor, said she generally translated Margrethe’s sketches “one to one” when fabricating the garments, which were made with textiles and trimmings that the queen helped select.Bille August, left, the film’s director, described Margrethe’s decoupages as a tuning fork. “Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” he said.Jacob Jørgensen/NetflixMargrethe said that for one costume she had sketched — a dress in hunter green with pink paisley-like specks — she had hoped to find a sprigged fabric. “But we couldn’t find one,” she said, so the pattern was custom printed. Another costume designed for the film’s grand duchess character was inspired by a portrait of a French queen.“She was wearing a lovely get-up,” Margrethe said. “It seemed to me exactly what the grand duchess should be wearing.”Certain elements of the costumes, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at the time of the Biedermeier period. “I quite like that style,” Margrethe said. “I’ve been interested in style and in the history of style and costume for a very long time.”Other details were less historically accurate: Some dresses had waistlines that were slightly lower than those typical of that era, to give them a more flattering fit.Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, 39, the actor who played the court painter, Cazotte, said that when Margrethe saw an early version of his costume, she thought it lacked color. “And she was clear about exactly which colors she wanted to see,” he added.The actress Alice Bier Zanden, 28, who played the title role of Ehrengard in the film, said that at a costume fitting attended by Margrethe, the queen’s enthusiasm was palpable. “You’re just smitten by it,” she said.Sidse Babett Knudsen, 54, who played the grand duchess, described the queen’s presence at the fitting this way: “bare legs, beautiful shoes, nice jewelry — smoking away.” (Margrethe has made no secret of her fondness for cigarettes.)Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, like this one Margrethe made using clippings from images of landscapes. NetflixMs. Knudsen added that she felt comfortable “clowning around” in front of Margrethe, who has generally been popular in Denmark. According to a 2021 poll by YouGov Denmark, she was the most admired woman in the country (the most admired man was Barack Obama), and in a 2013 Gallup poll conducted for Berlingske, Denmark’s oldest newspaper, 82 percent of participants agreed or partly agreed that the country benefits from the monarchy.Her critics have included members of her family. Prince Joachim, the younger of her two sons, bristled at her recent decision to shrink the monarchy by stripping his children of their royal titles. In 2017 her husband, Prince Henrik, announced that he did not wish to be buried beside Margrethe because he had never been given the titles king or king consort. (He died six months later.)Helle Kannik Haastrup, 58, an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Copenhagen, who specializes in celebrity culture, said that some detractors have dismissed Margrethe as “a Sunday painter.”But to other people, Professor Haastrup added, the fact that Margrethe is a head of state with a “side hustle” has made her more relatable.‘Honestly, She Can’t Stop’Margrethe sketches and makes art at the chateau in France and at studios at Amalienborg Palace and Fredensborg Palace, the royal family’s residences in Denmark. She described the studios as places “where I can let things lie about,” adding, “I try to clear them up occasionally — but not too often!”“I work when I can find the time,” she said, “and I seem usually to be able to find the time.”“Sometimes, I think people are at their wit’s end because I’m trying to do these two things at the same time,” Margrethe said of her royal duties and her creative undertakings. “But it usually works, doesn’t it?”Annelise Wern, one of the queen’s four ladies-in-waiting, said, “Honestly, she can’t stop.”In the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, Margrethe took weekly painting lessons. She has mostly concentrated on painting landscapes with watercolors and acrylics — or “lazy girl’s oils,” as she called them.The queen said that when she started to make decoupages in the early 1990s, she didn’t know there was a name for the artworks. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking,’” she said.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesThen, in the early 1990s, she started cutting up pages from The World of Interiors magazines and catalogs from auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and using the paper cutouts to decorate objects.“I didn’t even know there was a smart name for it,” she said, referring to decoupage. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking.’”Since then, her relatives have occasionally been “smothered in decoupage,” as she jokingly put it. And in needlepoint, which she had learned as a girl and picked up again later in life.Her colorful needlepoint designs, some of which were recently featured in an exhibition at the Museum Kolding in Kolding, Denmark, have been fashioned into purses for family members and have been used to upholster fireplace screens, footstools and cushions for the royal family’s yacht, Dannebrog, which shares its name with the Danish flag.Margrethe’s taste for bold colors can be also seen in her wardrobe. In a 1989 biography of the queen by the Danish journalist Anne Wolden-Raethinge, Margrethe said: “I always dream in color. At full blast. Technicolor. Everywhere. Every shade.”Her clothes often feature vivid prints and fur trims, and are almost always accessorized with jewelry. Among the items in her personal collection are gold pieces by the Danish jewelers Arje Griegst and Torben Hardenberg, whose designs are both baroque and gothic-punk, and costume jewelry like plastic clip-on earrings she found at a Danish drugstore.For her 80th birthday, in 2020, Margrethe had a gown made using velvet that she had requested be dyed a particular shade of sky blue. A floral raincoat she had made with a waxed fabric meant for tablecloths, which she picked out at the department store Peter Jones & Partners in London, has inspired other fashion designers’ collections.“I usually am quite deeply involved,” she said of having clothes made for her.Ulf Pilgaard, 82, a Danish stage and screen actor, has parodied the queen some dozen times over the decades. (He was knighted by Margrethe in 2007.) “I always wore earrings and a necklace and very nice colorful outfits,” Mr. Pilgaard said.For his last turn as Margrethe, in 2021, he wore a bright yellow dress with oversize pearl earrings and a chunky turquoise ring. At the end of the performance, she surprised him onstage.“People got on their feet and started roaring and clapping,” he said. “For a few seconds, I thought it was all for me.”Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo) to the film’s premiere in Copenhagen last month.Valdemar Ren/NetflixAt the premiere of “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” in Copenhagen last month, Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo), along with a hefty turquoise brooch and matching earrings by Mr. Hardenberg, who before starting his namesake jewelry line made costumes and props for theater and film productions.Nanna Fabricius, 38, a Danish singer and songwriter known as Oh Land, who has worked alongside Margrethe on recent productions at Tivoli, said, “I think a very big part of why the queen is so liked is because she does things.”“We aren’t totally surprised when she makes a Netflix movie,” she added.“She’s kind of what Barbie wants to be,” Ms. Fabricius said. “She does it all.” More

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      in Theater

      Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

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      She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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      in Movies

      Summer Fashion Inspired By Eric Rohmer’s Films

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      The outfits featured in the late French filmmaker’s work, celebrated by a new Instagram account, offer an antidote to all that is plastic and pink.She’s rolling in the grass dressed in sunflower yellow, kissing a man about whom she’s passionately ambivalent (“Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” 1987). She’s strolling through the countryside in a fleecy blue sweater, having no fun at all (“The Green Ray,” 1986). She’s lounging on a beach in a red bikini and ivory bucket hat, about to embark on a confusingly ambiguous friendship with the shirtless Frenchman she’s observing (“A Summer’s Tale,” 1996).This is summer love, Eric Rohmer-style: It isn’t easy, but it sure is chic.The outfits featured in the late French filmmaker’s works have long been celebrated, and continue to build a following, now quite literally, on an Instagram account called @Rohmerfits, which debuted in May.Rohmer’s films, which spanned the 1960s to 2000s, were famous for their unhurried plots: Characters bounce around France, in between the countryside, the seaside and the city; they analyze their romantic entanglements; they read Balzac; they seduce and irritate each other — and they do it all while wearing Mediterranean-blue sweaters, high-waisted jeans, billowy cotton shirts and pops of red.“There’s just this air about them where you want to be within them,” Alexandra Tell, the creator of @Rohmerfits, said of the costumes. The characters are “often on vacation, so you want something that’s sort of breezy that you can move in,” she said. “His clothes aren’t extravagant, but they’re elegant in this easy, ineffable way.”The secret to such aesthetic ease may lie in Rohmer’s devotion to naturalism. Like his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Rohmer, who died in 2010, began as a film critic. These critics-turned-auteurs “were very much against a sense of artificiality that stemmed from the shooting in studios,” said Ludovic Cortade, a film scholar who teaches French cinema at New York University.Amanda Langlet plays Margot in “A Summer’s Tale” (1996). Rohmer often asked actors “to come up with several costume options that would reflect their own tastes,” said Ludovic Cortade, a film scholar.via The Criterion ChannelAn extension of that naturalism, Professor Cortade said, was Rohmer’s decision not to use costume designers for many of his films, and instead asked actors “to come up with several costume options that would reflect their own tastes, which was a great strategy to convey a sense of authenticity.”The aesthetic is a sharp contrast to movies like the upcoming “Barbie,” which will be released this month. While “Barbie” plays with literal plastic, Rohmer did the opposite. “Maybe the ‘Barbie’ world is more reflective of our reality,” Ms. Tell said, while Rohmer’s earthy naturalism now “feels like more of an escape.”Though the looks were fastidiously curated by Rohmer, they never felt forced, Professor Cortade said. In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” for example, a marigold tank top and belt, as worn by Blanche, who is played by Emmanuelle Chaulet, match the color of some orange juice in a glass cup. “You can see the wrinkles in the clothes,” said Ms. Tell, a 32-year-old writer and curatorial assistant who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s very tactile.”The outfits’ simplicity allows audiences to focus on the characters and their relationships as they grapple with complex questions of morality and love. Though Rohmer’s tone could be witty and farcical, his films astutely tackled “the challenges of personal interactions and the awkwardness behind that” — a dynamic that has only been heightened with the advent of digital technology, Professor Cortade added.In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” a marigold tank top and belt, as worn by Blanche, who is played by Emmanuelle Chaulet, match the color of some orange juice in a glass cup.via MetrographIn “The Green Ray,” Delphine is wearing a crimson blazer when she says to a friend, played by Rosette, through sobs: “I need a real vacation.”via The Criterion ChannelOnce she does go on vacation, Delphine wanders around morosely, lonely and dressed in all blue.via The Criterion ChannelIn other words, it’s Rohmer’s blend of aspiration and realism that keeps his films — and costumes — so fresh, Ms. Tell said: His characters, like Margot in “A Summer’s Tale,” played by Amanda Langlet, wear clothes you would wear, but better styled. They too have challenging so-called situationships, but with the handsome Gaspard, played by Melvil Poupaud, and amid the backdrop of a grassy path.In one scene in “The Green Ray,” Delphine, played by Marie Rivière, moans about going on vacation with her family after a breakup. Clad in a glorious crimson blazer, Delphine says through sobs: “I need a real vacation.” A friend, played by Rosette, convinces her to join a trip to Cherbourg, promising her they’ll “have fun and meet people.” Instead Delphine wanders around against the muted sun, morosely, lonely and dressed in all blue. More

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      in Television

      Does ‘And Just Like That …’ Signal the End of Stealth Wealth?

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      So does the pop culture and fashion wheel turn.And just like that, stealth wealth, the aesthetic made viral by “Succession,” with its toxic billionaires in their Loro Piana baseball caps and Tom Ford hoodies locked in a C-suite cage match to the death, has been swept off screen.In its place: logomania, branding that can be seen from whole city blocks away and accessories that jangle and gleam with the blinding light of bragging rights.The outfits, that is to say, of Carrie and Co. in Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the “Sex and the City” reboot come recently to Max — the streamer that, as it happens, also gave us the Roys in their greige cashmere. Both shows are set in New York City, the home of strivers and entrepreneurs, of “Washington Square” and Wharton, of constantly evolving social castes highly, and literally, invested in their own identifiable camouflage.If watching “Succession” was in part like engaging in a detective game to suss out what character was wearing what brand, so insider were the fashion politics, watching “And Just Like That …” is like attending brandapalooza: the double Cs and Fs and Gs practically whacking you on the head with their presence. (Warning: Spoilers are coming.) All the over-the-top fashionista-ing is back. The room-size closets!It’s the yin to the “Succession” yang: a veritable celebration of the comforting aspirational dreams of self-realization (or self-escapism) embedded in stuff that may actually be the most striking part of an increasingly stale series. Certainly, the clothes, which often serve as their own plot points, are more memorable than any dialogue.Well … except maybe for that instantly classic line in Episode 1, uttered by Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on her way to the Met Gala in reference to her gown and feather hat: “It’s not crazy — it’s Valentino.” But that’s the exception that proves the rule.Lisa Todd Wexley stopping traffic on her way to the Met Gala in Valentino.Craig Blakenhorn/MaxThere is Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), with her multiple Manolos and Fendis, self-medicating with shopping, returning home one day with six Bergdorf Goodman bags. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) toting her Burberry doggy poop bag (also possessed of a Burberry apron and Burberry ear muffs) and bemoaning the fact that her teenage daughter hocked her Chanel dress to fund her musical aspirations.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her kids off for camp in a bright green Louis Vuitton jacket and scarf. And Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the character that passes for a restrained dresser thanks to her penchant for neutrals (and the occasional animal print), loudly lamenting the theft of her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin — one of her totems of self, ripped directly from her hands.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her children off for camp in Louis Vuitton.Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSeema with her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesThere is Loewe and Pierre Cardin; Altuzarra and Dries Van Noten. There is also an effort to repurpose clothes, like Carrie’s wedding dress, in order to promote the virtues of rewearing, but it’s pretty much lost in all the rest of the muchness. There is a dedicated Instagram account on which the costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago share their finds, with 277,000 followers. @Successionfashion, by contrast, has 184,000.All of which means what, exactly? Is the era of quiet luxury, so recently embraced by TikTok, already at an end? Have our attention spans, so famously abbreviated, moved on? Has the physics of fashion exerted its force and produced an equal and opposite reaction to an earlier action?As if. In many ways, the fashion in “And Just Like That …” seems to protest too much. In part that’s because it seems like a regurgitation of the fun that came before, which was itself a reaction to the minimalism of the early 1990s, which itself was born in that decade’s recession.The fact is, no matter how much lip service has been paid to quiet luxury or stealth wealth or whatever you want to call it, and how it is 2023’s “hottest new fashion trend,” it was never a recent invention. It has been around since way back when it was referred to as “shabby chic” or “connoisseurship” or “old money,” all synonyms for the kind of product that didn’t look overtly expensive but was a sign of aesthetic genealogy — the difference between new money and inherited money that fashion co-opted and regurgitated to its own ends. Just as more obviously coded consumption has been around since Louis Vuitton plunked his initials on some leather back in 1896 or since Jay Gatsby started tossing his shirts.Note the Fendi bag on the back of Carrie’s chair.HBO MaxFind the Burberry-branded doggy poop bag tucked on Charlotte’s arm.HBO MaxWe’ve been declaring the “end of logos” and, alternately, the “rise of stealth wealth” for decades now. There are cycles when one is more ubiquitous than the other (usually having to do with economic downturns when flaunting disposable income is not a great look), but they exist in tandem. They help define each other.Consider that during the current economic uncertainty, exactly the kind of environment that tends to fast-forward the appeal of low-key high-cost items, the most successful global brands have remained the most highly identifiable: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès. Or that in his recent debut for Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams introduced a bag called Millionaire that costs — yup — $1 million. (It’s a yellow croc Speedy with gold and diamond hardware.)What is more interesting is, as Carrie and the gang continue on their merry wardrobed way, how clichéd both styles now seem, how performative. Once they have trickled up to television, it’s impossible not to recognize the costume. Or the fact that whichever look you buy into, they are simply different ways of expressing wealth, in all its decorative strata. And wealth itself never goes out of fashion. More

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      in Theater

      5 Shows, 94 Actors, 450 Costumes: Emilio Sosa Dresses Broadway

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      With two Tony Award nominations in a single season, this prolific costume designer lets textiles tell the story.During the pre-Broadway run of “Good Night, Oscar” at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, the actress Emily Bergl was known to the staff as “the lady in the Dress.”As June, the wife of the troubled raconteur-pianist Oscar Levant, Bergl wears a floral dress and matching chartreuse coat. The dress radiates the energy of a Jackson Pollock canvas — black and daffodil-yellow on shimmering silver brocade, hand-painted to generate the perfect luster for the stage. It stands out in that show’s sea of impeccable suits.Bergl calls it the Dress.“I’m not discrediting my performance in ‘Good Night, Oscar’ when I say that the Dress does half the work,” she said.When Bergl first met the man behind the Dress, the costume designer Emilio Sosa, he told her, “June Levant’s clothes are armor.”“I knew right away that he understood the character completely, and that I was in good hands,” she said.In a recent phone interview, Sosa said: “Listening to actors is 95 percent of my design. You need to have your actors actively involved in the costume they’re going to wear.”This season, Sosa has dressed 94 actors for five Broadway productions in 450 costumes. He has earned two Tony nominations for his costume design, for “Good Night, Oscar” and “Ain’t No Mo’,” a satire on contemporary Black America. He also designed costumes for the revivals of “1776” and “Sweeney Todd,” and was co-credited with the designs for the Neil Diamond bio-musical “A Beautiful Noise,” alongside Annie J. Le.It has been a dizzying blur of looks, from sensible suits to sequins, from American colonial-era dress to Crayola-colored camp.“I knew right away that he understood the character completely,” said Emily Bergl, center, who collaborated with Sosa to develop her costume in “Good Night, Oscar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt his busiest, Sosa found himself working on three shows at once, averaging three hours’ sleep a night. He follows a maxim he picked up early on from his mentor, Geoffrey Holder, “The Wiz” director and multifaceted cultural figure: “‘Say ‘yes’ to everything — then figure out how to make it work.’”Sosa, 57, describes himself — tongue firmly in cheek, he wants to be clear — as an overnight sensation 30 years in the making. Sosa made his Broadway debut in 2002 with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” His second Broadway show, for which he earned his first Tony nomination, was “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012.Sosa was also a contestant on the reality TV competition “Project Runway,” in 2010 and 2012, an experience he credits with building the confidence that allowed him to present himself and his designs.In between, there has been a lot of “hustling, struggling, and trying to earn a living” including plenty of work in regional theater. “I was a broken kid with a tough upbringing,” Sosa said. “But I figured out, in the arts, no one could beat me. So I developed that. That’s where the drive comes from.”If there’s something Sosa’s diverse projects have in common, it might be his enthusiastic embrace of color. “In my culture, as a Latino, we’re not afraid of color,” he said.One of his earliest memories is of the color blue. Sosa and his family immigrated to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was 3 years old, flying Pan Am from Santo Domingo; Sosa loved the blue of the airline’s logo.Crystal Lucas-Perry, center, as an incarnation of Blackness who bursts onto the stage wearing a quilt, in “Ain’t No Mo’.” The play’s director said Sosa’s design made the character “a living, breathing pastiche of Black history and culture.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Blue was the first color I attached an emotion or memory to. I remember the logo, the color of the carpeting, the taste of the food, the flight attendants’ uniforms. That color has always stayed with me.”Growing up in the Fort Apache section of the Bronx in the 1970s, Sosa was fascinated — amid the “chaos and destruction” — by glimpses of color inside burned-out apartment buildings. “You could see the interior walls,” he said, “since half the building was gone.”His father worked as a super and handyman; his mother worked at a plastics factory. He stuttered, couldn’t play baseball and had trouble fitting in.“I never felt I belonged, I never felt I looked right, I never felt anything was right about me,” he said. “But then a teacher of mine used art to try to get me to come out of my shell. She put a colored pencil in my hand, and I never let it go.”He designed his first piece of clothing when he was 15: a blouse for his mother. He can still picture the print — in gold, brown, emerald, mustard — acquired at a fabric store near Union Square he’d once been afraid to enter. (His aunt, a seamstress, sewed the garment; Sosa wouldn’t dare sew around his father.)“I was a broken kid with a tough upbringing,” Sosa said. “But I figured out, in the arts, no one could beat me. So I developed that. That’s where the drive comes from.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesInitially, theater wasn’t on Sosa’s radar. That changed when, while studying fashion design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he took a summer job with Grace Costumes, founded by the stage costumer Grace Miceli. At the end of the day, he would volunteer to sweep up, sticking around to watch Miceli and her artisans at work.“It gave me an appreciation for the craftspeople — the makers,” he said. “It was better than getting a graduate degree from some tony-ass school. It was, ‘We need this costume done by 12 o’clock.’”After graduation, Sosa worked as an assistant wardrobe supervisor for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and styled music videos for SpikeDDB, the advertising agency founded by the director Spike Lee. Designing commercials, some only 15 seconds long, Sosa learned the importance of making an immediate visual impact. “Spike told me, ‘The audience needs to know who this person is the moment they step in front of the camera.’”But Sosa felt drawn to Broadway most of all, intrigued by the way a single costume could speak volumes.“He’s an innate storyteller,” said Stevie Walker-Webb, the director of “Ain’t No Mo.’” “He uses textiles instead of words, silhouettes instead of sentences.”A memorable moment in “Ain’t No Mo’” involved a character named Black — an incarnation of Blackness that bursts onto the stage wearing a quilt. The idea for the costume emerged from a Zoom call with Walker-Webb. Sosa noticed something behind the director; it was a photo of a 150-year-old family quilt, stitched by the director’s great-, great-, great-grandmother and passed through many generations. With that image as the seed, the character became, according to Walker-Webb, “a living, breathing pastiche of Black history and culture.”“It’s that sensitivity, and curiosity, that makes Emilio an invaluable collaborator,” he said.There’s anothers project Sosa takes very seriously: improving diversity backstage. In 2021, he was elected chairman of the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit that offers professional development opportunities to emerging theater artists. He closely observes the Springboard to Design program, which encourages and mentors students from communities underrepresented in the theater design industry. “They meet fellow costume designers who look like them,” he said. “We need more set designers of color, more lighting designers of color. I’m always trying to push young kids to get into those departments.”As busy as Sosa has been, this was also a year of learning for him. “I had to really dig deep, and really focus, and step my game up just to survive my schedule,” he said. If an intense schedule is the new norm, he’s prepared to make it work.“Planes, trains, and automobiles. Buses, park benches. I could sketch in the middle of Times Square if I had to.” More

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      The Maestro Wore Blue: Bringing Pizazz to the Pit at the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, dressed in a blazing sapphire jacket and trim black pants, stood before a mirror backstage on a recent afternoon and smiled.“Oh my God, it’s so good,” he said, waving his baton. “I love it so much.”There were three days until the opening of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and Nézet-Séguin, surrounded by a small team of tailors, designers and assistants, was offering feedback on his attire, which had been designed by the Met’s costume shop.His outfit was modeled on one worn onstage by a band leader in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. Could the golden braid that dangled from his right shoulder be fastened, so it did not create a distraction in the pit? Was the jacket comfortable enough to accommodate the sweeping gestures that the music demanded? And should there be more red, or maybe gold?The Met’s costume shop has designed outfits for Nézet-Séguin for eight productions, including this jacket for “Bohème.”“The more unusual elements,” he said, “the more fun for the audience.”Since the Met returned from the long pandemic shutdown, in the fall of 2021, Nézet-Séguin has been on a mission to challenge sartorial conventions, wearing eye-catching outfits designed by the Met’s costume shop in eight productions. There is limited space to make a statement; the designers focus on his back, since that is what most audience members will see.“We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” said Robert Bulla, the Met’s assistant head costumer. “Nothing too obnoxious, but something that occasionally catches the light.”A conductor’s look book: clockwise from top left, “Champion,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “The Hours” and “Lohengrin.”Nézet-Séguin sports a black-and-white hooded jacket modeled on a vintage Everlast boxing robe for Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” an opera about the boxer Emile Griffith that had its Met premiere this month. (At the start of the second act, he enters the pit wearing the hood and boxing gloves, but removing both to conduct.)For “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season in 2021, Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something special. The opera’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, suggested this fireworks pattern.Rose Callahan/Metropolitan OperaHe wore a stained-glass pattern on his jacket for a 2021 revival of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opens in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. And he switched from green to red to white shirts in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this season, mimicking the look of the choristers, whose robes changed colors throughout the show.Nézet-Séguin said his outfits helped strengthen the bond between the pit and the stage.“You don’t want to ignore the orchestra,” he said. “If the conductor is there and seen, I think that helps the connection. It’s much more integrated.”At work in the costume shop. The jacket being constructed echoes one worn by a band leader onstage in the production.The costumes are also part of his efforts to make opera, which has long had a reputation for conservatism, more exciting and accessible.“We have to be more modern and approachable,” he said. “We want to welcome everybody.”While earlier music directors at the Met, all men, favored white tie and tails, Nézet-Séguin, who has held the post since 2018, has long had a more eclectic style, both in his clothes and appearance. He has bleached-blond hair and wears a diamond earring and several gold rings. He is fond of performing in clothes by designers like the Canadian Marie Saint Pierre and can be seen onstage in red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.“The more unusual elements,” Nézet-Séguin said, “the more fun for the audience.”As the Met prepared to reopen its doors to the public after the pandemic shutdown in 2021, Nézet-Séguin felt it was time for a change.The Met was preparing to open the season with Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in the company’s history. Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something to reflect the importance of the moment. The costume designer for “Fire,” Paul Tazewell, suggested a fireworks pattern, with flashes of red, indigo, teal and orange.“To be plain dressed — it just felt wrong to me,” Nézet-Séguin said.Beyond white tie and tails. “We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” Robert Bulla, an assistant head costumer at the Met, said.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe designs often riff on an opera’s central themes. For Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired, he wore a floral pattern, a nod to the work’s many references to flowers.Comfort is a priority — the designers want to ensure that he feels unhindered, and they use lightweight and stretchable fabric for flexibility and to absorb sweat. The costume shop often produces several of each jacket so he can change into a fresh one between acts.Some operas are more challenging than others. The team struggled to come up with an idea for “Bohème” before recalling that the production includes a scene in which a band leader guides a procession of soldiers across the stage.Nézet-Séguin, who painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” sometimes adds his own touches.“It’s good to be breaking this mold of what everyone thinks classical music and opera is,” Bulla said. “Some people say it’s taken a long time to start this evolution process. But at least it’s evolving.”Nézet-Séguin sometimes adds his own touches. He painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” to match the purple robe worn onstage by Ryan Speedo Green, who plays Griffith. And he said he was eager for a day when the Met orchestra musicians would be allowed to dress with more variety. (The dress code demands tuxedos or long, flowing black clothes for evening performances.)“It’s baby steps,” he said. “When I make statements like this, mentalities can evolve. We have to think more creatively and ergonomically. This is only the beginning.” More

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      V&A Museum To Open David Bowie Archive

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      The London museum will house more than 80,000 items from the star’s music career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts. It will open in 2025.Over a 55-year career, David Bowie redefined the essence of cool by embracing an outsider status. Now, Ziggy Stardust and all of the musician’s other personas will have a permanent home.The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will house more than 80,000 items from Bowie’s career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts, the museum announced on Thursday. The center, which will be at a new outpost of the museum called the V&A East Storehouse at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the Stratford section of London, will open in 2025.“With David’s life’s work becoming part of the U.K.’s national collections, he takes his rightful place amongst many other cultural icons and artistic geniuses,” Bowie’s estate said in a statement. “David’s work can be shared with the public in ways that haven’t been possible before, and we’re so pleased to be working closely with the V&A to continue to commemorate David’s enduring cultural influence.”Bowie died in 2016, two days after his 69th birthday.In a statement, the museum said that the acquisition and the creation of the center had been made possible by a combined donation of 10 million pounds (about $12 million) from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group, adding that the donation would support “the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.” Warner Music bought Bowie’s entire songwriting catalog last year.Beyond 70,000 images of Bowie taken by the likes of Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton, the collection includes letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, other photography, film, music videos, set designs, instruments, album artwork, awards, and of course, fashion.Many of those will be familiar to fans: Bowie’s ensembles worn as his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust; Kansai Yamamoto’s costumes for the “Aladdin Sane” tour in 1973; the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and the British designer Alexander McQueen for the 1997 “Earthling” album cover.Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique. The artist looked to William S. Burroughs, the postmodern author, as inspiration to cut up written text and rearrange it into lyrics.Cut-up lyrics for “Blackout” from “Heroes,” recorded in 1977 by David Bowie.The David Bowie ArchiveIn 1997, Bowie told The Times that he worked with that method “about 40 percent of the time,” which, in that year, meant using a Macintosh computer.“I feed into it the fodder, and it spews out reams of paper with these arbitrary combinations of words and phrases,” he said.Bowie’s personal writing and “intimate notebooks from every year of Bowie’s life and career” and “unrealized projects” will also be on display, many of which have never been made available to the public, the museum said.The permanent collection comes 10 years after the museum created “David Bowie Is,” a vast survey that traced the beginnings of David Jones, a saxophone and blues player growing up in London, as he became David Bowie, a transcendent figure in music, art and fashion. The traveling exhibit made its final stop in 2018 in New York, the city Bowie called home at the end of his life.“I believe everyone will agree with me when I say that when I look back at the last 60 years of post-Beatles music, that if only one artist could be in the V&A it should be David Bowie,” Nile Rodgers, a longtime collaborator, said in a statement. “He didn’t just make art. He was art!” More

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      How the Creators of ‘M3gan’ Designed the Doll’s Costumes

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      The titular star of the horror film “M3gan,” released last week, had to try on several outfits before finding a signature look.A doll’s clothes can be as memorable as any worn by a human, especially if that doll has a taste for blood.Talky Tina, the demonic toy made famous by “The Twilight Zone,” had her plaid dress with a dainty lace-trimmed collar. Annabelle, the sinister doll that first appeared in “The Conjuring,” has her white gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And even those who have not seen “Child’s Play” (or its sequels) probably know of Chucky and his blue overalls.The titular star of the horror film “M3gan” stands to be another murderous doll recognized for a killer outfit. Not least because M3gan, whose name is pronounced like Megan, for most of the film wears a striped, silk twill scarf tied in a pussy bow — a sartorial choice that tends to elicit strong reactions.M3gan, which stands for Model 3 Generative Android, is a life-size artificially intelligent doll designed to provide companionship and emotional support — until a programming glitch turns her into a Terminator-esque killing machine. There are parts of the film where the doll is played by a high-tech puppet, but in most scenes, M3gan is played by the actress Amie Donald, 12, wearing a mask.M3gan, who has wide eyes with long dark lashes and dirty blonde hair that falls below her shoulders, wears the pussy-bow scarf with an inverted-pleat shift dress layered over a striped long-sleeve shirt, white stockings and shiny black Mary Janes. Gerard Johnstone, the director of “M3gan,” described the doll as having clothes that evoke the mod fashion of the 1960s and “long, flowing hair” like the “Mod Squad” actress Peggy Lipton.“I wanted her to be classy and elegant and unexpected, almost like the toy equivalent of those automotive shows from the ’60s, where the car would appear on the turntable and everyone’s minds would be blown,” Mr. Johnstone said.Three of the possible outfits for M3gan that ended up on the dressing room floor. Universal PicturesThe film’s original script, written by Akela Cooper, only referenced M3gan wearing children’s clothes, Mr. Johnstone said. Putting her in a loose-hanging shift dress was both a stylistic and practical decision.“M3gan has to move quickly and unencumbered. She’s got to run on all fours. She’s going to attack people,” he said. “With the shift dress, I could see the possibilities.”About 25 versions of the dress were produced by the film’s costume and wardrobe department. “They lasted through all of the dancing, all of the killing,” said Daniel Cruden, the film’s costume designer. Lizzy Gardiner, an Oscar-winning costume designer who created M3gan’s main outfit with Mr. Johnstone, said the pussy-bow scarf was also painstakingly reproduced.“We needed so many perfect replicas that each one had to be cut and hand sewn with the stripe in the silk in exactly the same place,” she wrote in an email. “It needed to be fluid without being bouncy. Large but consistent with a young, tiny girl. Doll-like but fashion forward.”While developing M3gan’s wardrobe, many other possible outfits ended up on the dressing room floor. “Initially I wanted her to have a bunch,” Mr. Johnstone said. But by giving her a signature look, “that one costume can be really the focus,” he added. “People could dress up as her for Halloween.”Dressing M3gan in a shift dress was as much a stylistic as a practical decision. “She’s got to run on all fours,” Mr. Johnstone said. “She’s going to attack people.”Universal PicturesWhere did you look for inspiration for M3gan’s clothes?GERARD JOHNSTONE I was on Pinterest every night looking at fashion, trying to figure it out. Originally it was just me and my wife, for a female perspective. I kept going back to the ’60s because of the detailing and the fabrics. Everything was so rich. And Gucci kids’ dresses ended up being a big inspiration. I loved a yellow one with red ribbons that I saw online, but we couldn’t physically get our hands on it.If Gucci was such an inspiration why isn’t M3gan wearing the label?JOHNSTONE I wondered if we could get them on board. But you have to get approval and it takes a long time, especially when you’re making a horror movie, so we went our own way. We hadn’t proved ourselves. The hope now is that it wouldn’t be too hard to get some designers if we do another film.DANIEL CRUDEN If a toy from a film gets licensed and there isn’t clothing approval, it could be seen as replicating for a profit. Even if I’d found a pair of vintage Gucci sunglasses, we’d have put them through clearance to make sure they were OK to use.When viewers see M3gan commit her first murder, she wears a different outfit — a black cloak with gold buttons and a fur collar, black stockings and leather gloves. What inspired that look?JOHNSTONE It was kind of a subversion of Little Red Riding Hood. I also thought of her as a bit like Damien from “The Omen.” The black gloves were a practical consideration because the gloves made the hands feel more robotic. And she’s a doll — she has to have some accessories.The all-black look worn by M3gan when viewers see her commit her first murder “was kind of a subversion of Little Red Riding Hood,” Mr. Johnstone said.Universal PicturesSpeaking of accessories, in another scene M3gan wears a pair of purple sunglasses. Why?JOHNSTONE I really fought for her to have that moment. It felt like it could either be great or ridiculous. I was worried some people might think, “Is this going to diminish the scares?” But once everyone saw her really rocking the look, they started to get on board.CRUDEN We had a real hunt for the sunglasses because we knew they were going to be a statement.JOHNSTONE I wanted Prada.CRUDEN We ended up with a brand called Minista, they came from a children’s boutique in Auckland, New Zealand.From left, M3gan’s equestrian, Audrey Hepburn-inspired and sporty looks designed by Mr. Cruden for a scene that was cut from the film.Universal PicturesWhat are some of the outfits that didn’t make it into the movie?CRUDEN There was a scene that showed different M3gans on a turntable wearing looks I created for her. One was French-inspired, with a black beret, black turtleneck and high-waisted flared silk pants. We had a beach M3gan with a peasant blouse, beach hat and espadrilles. Equestrian M3gan had jodhpurs and riding boots. Sporty M3gan looked like she was ready for tennis.JOHNSTONE Daniel did a very Audrey Hepburn look with a scarf and sunglasses. But the looks were on a dummy M3gan, and she didn’t look alive. If we’d been able to do it with our main M3gan, it would have worked. It was a shame.Interviews with Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Cruden have been edited and condensed. More