As she began her work on Hacks, it became quickly apparent to costume designer Kathleen Felix-Hager that perfecting the look of Deborah Vance was an immediate priority. “I’m really proud of the collaboration between Jean [Smart] and I, and Paul [W. Downs] and Lucia [Aniello] in creating this character,” she says. “We just wanted to make her vibrant and alive, not a caricature and not a derivative of any other female comedian we’ve seen. She’s definitely a combination of people, but we also took influence from Sam Kinison and we incorporated a lot of visuals to create her.”
Hacks follows the relationship between legendary Las Vegas comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder). As the costume designer since the beginning of the series, Felix-Hager has seen Deborah’s looks subtly shift to fit the narrative.
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“Season 1, we saw her a lot in Vegas,” she says, “with a lot of her Vegas costumes. Season 2 took her on the road, so she stripped down a little bit and her silhouette changed slightly. She’s a bit more casual – still in sequins but not head-to-toe sequins. And then season 3, she’s going after the late-night show, so she’s dressing for that part… So, she uses her clothes as a jumping off point for how she wants people to perceive her in the world and I think it’s a useful tool for her.”
Although her style has shifted a bit to dress for the part of late-night host, it was important for Felix-Hager to make sure she didn’t stray away from Deborah’s basic style. “As people, we tend to get stuck in a style when we felt the prettiest or the most successful,” she says. “I think for Deborah, that was the heyday of her stand-up career. That’s when she was at her peak… but also, we’ve established that Deborah’s a lover of clothes, a collector of clothes. She has taste, a very specific taste, but it’s not tacky, it’s elegant and she puts clothes together in a way that feel organic and feel good for her. And I think there’s a sense of vibrancy and joy and aliveness in her choices. She’s not hiding from the world, she’s out there in full force for the world to see.”
The choice to not hide an outfit from the world is a bold one used in “Just For Laughs”, the episode nominated for its costume design, which features the perfect “elegant Bill Blass dress” that Felix-Hager found. “That dress is an actual Bill Blass design from the 1986 collection,” she says. “I did a lot of embellishment to make it even uglier than the original design. We added a lot of detail to that dress that didn’t initially exist… The color really spoke to me, because yellow can be quite a hard color to wear, and the yellow and the black together was sort of reminiscent of a giant bumblebee. I just thought it was hilarious.”
Although the script simply asked for an “ugly dress”, it was important that this outfit make sense for Deborah to own at some point in her life. “It had to be something that Deborah would have gravitated towards in 1986,” she says, “so that was very Dynasty-era, with the big shoulders and the big, puffy sleeves. A lot of details, so it served the story well. Even when we first see her come out in the dress, you can tell she feels kind of good in it. She’s strutting around, she’s doing her little catwalk poses, and she does look really pretty in that dress.”
Click the video above to watch the full interview.