In an unassuming corner, feet away from the 1950s-style garb that earned Zakowska an Emmy, images of rhinestone nipple tassels and feathered brassieres can’t help but catch the eye. “I’ve sort of become an expert on pasties and g-strings, and how to remove people’s clothing in about five seconds. Now, it’s like second nature to me,” Zakowska says during our July tour, just days after filming on the fourth season wrapped. “I never really thought Mrs. Maisel was going to go in that direction. But here we are.”
Doubts about whether Midge’s tentative entrance into a strip joint would become a full-fledged story line are quelled at the start of episode three, when a woman dressed as an angel descends from the sky, removing layer after ruffled layer—until she’s left in little more than her wings. And there’s plenty more where that came from. Nipple tassels, multicolored feathers, fishnets, plastic bubbles, and even a Bo Peep–esque costume clutter the backstage scenes of episodes three and four, which premiered on Prime Video Friday.
Every season of Maisel begins with an intense research process in which Zakowska and her team gather real vintage prototypes for the show. But the fourth season’s early-1960s time period and strip club setting presented a departure from the show’s well-established aesthetic. Zakowska fully immersed herself in the unknown. “As a costume designer, you live every character,” she tells me. “I’ve always said this. For that moment, even if it’s a mass murderer, you imagine, what would it be like to be a mass murder?”
One of the more surprising revelations to emerge from Zakowska’s research is that stripping in the ’50s and ’60s was less about what’s shown than what’s concealed. “I mean, there’s a strange little bit of modesty and there’s more of a theatricality, which is what interested me,” she says. “It isn’t about being naked, but it’s about being theatrical.”
The strip show Midge emcees is full of kinks—and not necessarily the sexual kind. Technical malfunctions leave performers injured; dust wafts from the curtain; cues are often missed while members of the venue’s band snooze. Zakowska faced some creative hurdles of her own while shooting Maisel’s fourth season. “Eight thousand extras—during COVID,” she says simply when asked about filming. “It started out with this feeling of, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to do this? We’ll only do 40 extras and then we’re going to computer generate them.’” But after numerous meetings, and with stringent testing protocols in place, Maisel managed to wrangle a larger crowd.
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