Whether it’s Kim Kardashian divulging her dorsal cleavage in vintage Gaultier on All’s Fair, Sarah Pidgeon courting a Kennedy in the quiet luxury of Calvin Klein on Love Story or Bella Hadid revving from runway to rampage in custom red-wine leather on The Beauty, viewers can always expect a surfeit of style when they watch a Ryan Murphy production.
As Alayna Bell-Price, the costume designer who recently put Angela Bassett of 9-1-1 in a spacesuit so chic even Katy Perry would covet it, says, “Fashion is very dear to Ryan’s heart, and costumes are his bread and butter.”
The woman on top of these slathered slices of style is coexecutive producer Lou Eyrich, Murphy’s colleague since he hired her as a costume designer on Popular in 2000.
“I just remember being struck by this man, because he knew what furniture he wanted, what Gucci bag was the ‘it’ bag of 1999, which lip color the actors should wear,” she says. “It’s been more than 25 years, and I’m still blown away by his mind.”
Both have done quite well by their long partnership.
For conjuring up the glamorous witches of American Horror Story: Coven, dressing a bevy of beautiful birds on Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans and bringing both Miami and Milan to life (and death) for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Eyrich has been nominated for 20 Emmys since 2010 and won six.
The duo, sometimes juggling five or more shows, also has had a tremendous impact on the visual landscape of television by nurturing a legion of talent. “Most of our designers have already worked with us on some level,” Eyrich says. Rudy Mance, the costume designer of Love Story, dressed the background actors on Pose, for instance.
What unites all of their shows?
“The common thread is that episodic TV is fast and furious,” Eyrich says. “With 9-1-1, every episode has three to four emergencies, so [the designers] work 20 hours a day. With All’s Fair, they have to find fabulous clothes for six leading ladies. With The Beauty, it’s designing crazy futuristic things out of, you know, purple latex. And for Love Story, they have to find that exact 1996 pair of shoes. It’s hard!”
Somehow, though, they make it look easy.
All's Fair
PAULA BRADLEY
If designing for one of the chicest, most powerful women in Hollywood is daunting, imagine dressing a drove of them. That was the task Paula Bradley faced as costume designer of the female- and fashion-forward Hulu legal drama All’s Fair.
“Dressing Glenn Close like the female version of David Bowie is a career highlight,” Bradley says.
Although Kim Kardashian used her own personal stylist — the series star and executive producer was too busy for all the needed fittings — Bradley still had to dress such fashion-savvy stars as Sarah Paulson (“She knows what’s going to land!”), Glenn Close (“She loves clothes!”) and Niecy Nash-Betts (“She’s like Jessica Rabbit!”) in clothes from Armani, Dior, Etro, Tom Ford, Gucci, Harbison and Valentino.
“We stripped Rodeo Drive pretty clean,” says Bradley, a two-time Emmy nominee.
“I had five divas standing in a room constantly changing clothes,” she remembers. “I needed to know who was wearing the navy blue, who was wearing the camel, who’s standing next to each other, who’s got which designer on, so that they’re all different and yet they all feel equally taken care of. I want them to feel like total rock stars when they walk out of their trailers.”
A lifetime devotee of fashion — “I went to those fancy London schools, and I did London Fashion Week” — Bradley got her first job with Murphy in the marketing department of Nip/Tuck. She later assisted on various projects before getting her big shot in 2018 as the costume designer of American Horror Story: Apocalypse.
“I couldn’t have landed in a better place than working for Ryan, because he’s so style-driven. I love that I’m constantly on my toes. I know what I carry in my head visually. I can’t imagine what Ryan carries in his head visually. To disappoint Ryan … I’d be very disappointed in myself.”
Teyana Taylor as Milan: “Fashion has a color palette every season. But then Ryan will be like, ‘In episode five, I want everybody in berry colors!’ Dior happened to do a purple suit that was perfect for Sarah. But then everything else had to be custom made,” Bradley says.
But All’s Fair hasn’t disappointed anyone visually. “This is the show that puts all of the elements of everything I’ve done together,” Bradley says. Sure, she was nervous taking it on. “Every show for me is daunting, but the lineup of actresses on All’s Fair has a lot of female power.” The show’s theme of female empowerment is especially meaningful to her.
“I’m an older lady who’s grown up watching women get into positions of power and then dim their light,” Bradley says. “Now they might still be wearing a power suit, but it’s in bright yellow and worn with a pair of stilettos and ridiculous diamond earrings and maybe nothing under the jacket. This is our world now, and we’re taking possession of it.”
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette
RUDY MANCE
To transform Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon into the famous title characters of FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, costume designer Rudy Mance and his team spent countless hours scouring newspapers, magazines, fashion books and social media accounts dedicated to the duo’s style. “We left no stone unturned,” the three-time Emmy nominee says.
Legions of Kennedy family fanatics would expect no less.
Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr.
Accuracy meant approaching Bessette’s favorite fashion houses — Prada, Yohji Yamamoto, Valentino and Calvin Klein among them — for clothes. “Every single one was interested, because they loved Carolyn so much,” says Mance, who previously designed 2022’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story for Murphy and started his career as a fashion assistant at Condé Nast in New York. “We amassed the biggest collection of vintage Calvin pieces anywhere.”
To recreate ’90s looks, Mance sent teams of shoppers to costume shops and vintage stores in New York and Los Angeles. For Bessette’s wedding dress, which was designed by Narcisco Rodriguez for Cerruti, he sourced the exact fabric from the same Italian mill and had a Philadelphia couturier recreate it.
Other famous pieces, like the casual outerwear Bessette was wearing during a heartbreaking fight scene, were found online. “It was just a men’s Patagonia jacket, but one of my assistants found it on eBay Japan. Her bag came from Etsy Croatia. My favorite piece was a tan Prada military coat that she was photographed in [constantly]. When we found one, it was like the Holy Grail.”
Kennedy was no style slouch, either.
Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette
“John was one of the original New York City hipsters,” Mance says. “He would wear a beautiful Armani suit with a backpack, a backwards cap and hiking boots and go biking around town.” Recreating such looks and having them worn by a former model like Kelly and a stunning actress like Pidgeon, he says, “was a really fun puzzle to put together.”
Does a costume designer have to be a bit obsessive to solve such a puzzle?
“The term we kick around a lot is ‘perfectionism,’” Mance says. “We all just really wanted to honor their legacy and be true to who they were.”
9-1-1
ALAYNA BELL-PRICE
Angela Bassett as Athena Grant
What do you wear to a tsunami?
That was the first question Alayna Bell-Price faced when she became costume designer of the high-stakes ABC action thriller 9-1-1 in 2019, when the show still aired on Fox.
“I had to find fun summertime clothes that looked good underwater and could show blood and dirt but could also hide wetsuits and harnesses, because the actors were swinging from the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier,” she remembers. “It was a bit of a challenge.”
Bell-Price rose to that challenge, of course. Since her trial by water, she has dressed the heroic cast for an upside-down cruise, a tornado of killer bees and recently a trip into space that, naturally, went dangerously wrong.
“We wanted something chic, very [space tech company] Blue Origin, and it ended up looking great on camera,” she says. It didn’t hurt that she was dressing Angela Bassett and Aisha Hinds. “Every day I pinch myself. Angela Bassett is a queen. I remember coming to her and saying, ‘I’m designing the show now,’ and she just gave me the biggest hug. I cried.” Bell-Price studied fashion business at Columbia College Chicago and first came into the orbit of series cocreator Ryan Murphy as a day player on Scream Queens. While working on American Horror Story: Cult, she mentioned to costume designer Lou Eyrich that she was interested in designing for television. Eyrich encouraged her to shadow assistant designers.
Bell-Price soon became a “trailer costumer,” prepping wardrobe in the truck, before being promoted to assistant designer herself. Then came 9-1-1.
“Ryan Murphy Productions is great at giving people chances,” Bell-Price says. “I started designing this show when I was 26 years old. I just couldn’t believe it. To give a young Black girl an opportunity at a time like this was just a blessing. Even nine seasons in, I’m like, ‘How did this little girl from Chicago get here?’ I’m just so grateful every day.”
The Beauty
SARAH EVELYN
Bella Hadid as Ruby Rossdale: “Bella’s waist is 23 inches. I gave her these crazy-ass pants, and she got into them and looked amazing. Supermodels are like, ‘It’s my job,’” Evelyn says.
When creating costumes for a high-fashion body-horror series, Lady Gaga is a good place to start. That’s Sarah Evelyn’s story anyway.
A student of art history and conservation, she helped dress “Mother Monster” to play the Countess on 2015’s American Horror Story: Hotel and so impressed her bosses that she was promoted to costume designer of 2017’s American Horror Story: Cult and then 2020’s Hollywood, which earned her an Emmy nomination.
Now she finds herself beautifying The Beauty — custom-making suits for murderous moguls and creating couture leather motocross gear for a supermodel who quite literally explodes on the scene.
“Ryan expects every frame to be beautiful and full of references from the lexicon of cinema,” she says. The Beauty’s references include the 1983 David Bowie vampire movie The Hunger and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I really enjoy the creativity, and I don’t mind the mayhem that comes with it,” Evelyn says. “I’m like, ‘Do a good job or die trying!’”
Doing a good job on the FX series has meant coming up with looks that are “sort of sci-fi, but now.” Evelyn takes the latest runway quirks — “a good place to start R&D,” she says — and ratchets up the fashion even further.
Evelyn’s sketches of Ruby’s runway look
“Ryan was one of the earliest people making very, very beautiful TV. Now, a lot of shows look really beautiful, so he’s had to amp it up. The audience expects to see something novel, something forward and something a little crazy.”
Which brings us to Isabella Rossellini. As fashionista Franny Forst, estranged wife of corrupt billionaire Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher), the exotic screen legend (and sometime fashion model) gets to wear the show’s most fabulously outré attire.
“Ryan had a vision for Isabella,” Evelyn recalls. “We knew we were going to have these really big skirts — Alessandro Michele’s Valentino runway show had just happened — but when he cast Isabella, instead of black, it turned into wild, wonderful colors. She was so much fun. Someone like Isabella Rossellini doesn’t need to listen to what I have to say. But she liked playing dress-up with me.”
What more could a costume designer ask for?
This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue #4, 2026, under the title "Dressed to Thrill."
