So far in her enviable and unpredictable career, costume designer Lou Eyrich has styled Lea Michele into a perfectly prim schoolgirl, Jessica Lange into a vengeful nun and Angela Bassett into a voodoo empress.
And now, for her most daring stunt, she is tasked with costuming a man with lobsterlike claws, a woman with three breasts, a two-headed woman and other characters with similarly peculiar appendages and proportions in “American Horror Story: Freak Show.”
Eyrich, 55, has collaborated with “American Horror Story” creator Ryan Murphy since 1999 and has received design awards and credits from esteemed TV shows such as “Nip/Tuck,” “Glee” and “American Horror Story: Asylum” and “Coven.” In other words, feel free to blame her for a majority of those big, black, floppy hats you’ve seen bopping around town and down the runway in the past 11 months.
Eyrich talks about her inspirations for the fourth installment of “American Horror Story,” why “Coven” struck such a chord with designers and viewers alike, and what it was like to shun the black and move into the Technicolor world of “Freak Show.”
You’re facing a whole new set of design challenges this season with characters with two heads or claw hands, among many other things. How did those sorts of abnormalities play into your designs?
We had to work very closely with the special effects people this time around. To accommodate Evan (Peters)’s claw hands, we had to have the opening of his sleeve fit perfectly over his prosthetic, which took a lot of measurements for it to fit just right. It was really all about precision.
And then there was Jyoti (Amge), who’s just over 2 feet tall, and then we’ve got a character who’s over 7 feet tall. I researched them online and watched how they move and talked to them about where they shop and then we all worked together.
Did you consider those things challenges to build around or did you find yourself getting inspired?
They inspired me. We did a ton of research on carnivals, and I thought it was so exciting. I will say the two-headed woman was a challenge that scared me. It had to be exactly right to make the visual effects work. Everything had to be very wide in the body and Sarah (Paulson)’s so slight that we had to find a way to make it look like she was a regular girl with two heads rather than an actress wearing a massive harness.
Was there a place or theme that you drew inspiration from?
I definitely did a lot of research on Jupiter, Fla., in the ’50s, and then a ton of circus and carnival and freak show inspiration came in, too. When we first started, we did everything in Dust Bowl tones, and it just wasn’t doing it for us, so we changed it to Technicolor because when you look back at it, there really was all this satin and yellows and greens and bright blues.
That must have been exciting given last year’s nearly all-black wardrobe.
It was like going into a candy store as a kid. Because it was all black last season, we decided to have nearly no black this time around. It’s not even overwhelming. It’s really just thrilling for a designer to have all these doors open.
When you go back to last year and “Coven,” I feel like that’s when a lot of people became aware of your work and the fashion on the show. Why do you think that is?
Looking back, we were a few episodes in before we got to see anything, and then people started calling me about what we were doing. It was just the timing. It was fun and chic, and those big hats and the combining of the contemporary with the ’60s and ’70s. We were going to Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters, so it was accessible to nearly everybody, and we had that for all shapes and sizes. Everybody was included in this chic look, and I think that’s what struck a chord. Also, the show had a lot of humor last year, and it wasn’t as serious or scary as “Asylum” or “Murder House,” and I think that humor brought in a lot of young people who were inspired by how these women dressed.
Why was “Asylum” your favorite?
It was the first time that I got to do a whole time period in a long, long time. I also loved creating that environment and getting the audience into the ’60s and staying there and then bringing characters they love to other periods. And I just really love Sister Jude (that vengeful nun played by Jessica Lange) and Lana Banana (played by Sarah Paulson). I will say that I think this season, there will be a few characters that people will hold onto as their favorites, too.
