‘Elsbeth’ Costume Designer Dan Lawson Talks Recreating ‘My Fair Lady’ Outfits for Halloween Episode (Exclusive)

Elsbeth went big for its Halloween episode, and costume designer Dan Lawson spoke to PopCulture.com about the best part.

In Thursday’s episode, “Ick, a Bod,” Carrie Preston’s titular character celebrated Halloweek, donning a different look as Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady every day.

Guest starring Annaleigh Ashford as a suburban housewife, the episode saw a murder happen in the infamous Sleepy Hollow on Halloween night, but Elsbeth feels the need to celebrate the holiday for the entire week. She wears multiple costumes inspired by the 1964 movie starring Audrey Hepburn, an adaptation of the 1956 Lerner and Loewe stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play Pygmalion. There was a lot that went into it — from the dresses to the hats to making sure everything was precise. Take a look at what Lawson had to say about the fun and daunting process. (Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

PopCulture: Obviously, Elsbeth has some pretty unique costumes, but how does designing costumes for Halloween compare to just regular episodes?

Dan Lawson: I think that’s a really good question because Elsbeth wears a lot of pretty goofy costumes. They take a lot of time and a lot of attention. We’re working on the Christmas episode right now, prepping it. And it takes a lot of work to get this pulled together. But in this particular episode, and actually the Halloween episode from last season as well, we wanted to really put the time into designing those costumes and having them actually built and really creative, not just shopping them and really creating them from the sketchpad up.

And we did a lot of research. John Kristiansen Costumes, who built the costumes for us here in New York, did a great job. A lot of research, as I said, figuring out what to do. And of course, the episode has sort of different challenges than the movie had. We also had to sort of walk the line with recreating it faithfully and having the audience be like, “Oh, that dress is from My Fair Lady.” And, certainly, all the writing and the lines that go along with those particular costumes were in the script. And at the same time, we can’t make it exactly the same, for legal reasons. And then also, we can’t get the fabrics anymore. It’s all different.

So we sort of had new challenges that we had to come up with. For example, the giant hat. She had to do a lot of stuff in that hat. And Audrey Hepburn just sort of stayed erect and very careful. I remember Carrie actually coming to her fitting and in her beautiful southern accent, she’s like, “Dan, she didn’t do s— in that hat.” She’s like, “I have to do a lot.” I’m like, “I got it. I got it. I got it. I understand.” So, we had to really make sure that hat was secure. It was gonna stay on her head.

And we actually kind of created two hats for that. We created almost like a 1920s cloche hat that totally encompassed her head, and then built the hat on top of it. And it had to be super lightweight and still look gigantic at the same time. So, there’s a lot involved with creating costumes like that. And even down to the selection of the fabrics, the findings, the zippers, the hooks, everything is so involved. The tights, the footwear, the headwear, the wigs, how do they attach? A lot of elements come into play when you get to do such elaborate costumes like that.

And it’s great that CBS and Jonathan Tolins, our showrunner, allow me the opportunity to be able to do a project like that. It’s really fun. Even the scarecrow in the episode, they didn’t create that. The scenic department helped us paint it, and we had to kind of create and then to have a big old Broadway star like Annaleigh Ashford wear that costume, be comfortable in it, and do what she needed to do. But she is such a trooper, such a pro.

She’s wonderful. She really, really is. But to have a pumpkin head on, everything is perfect. It still has to be comfortable and all that. People just see everything. So this is a really fun episode to be able to challenge ourselves with.

PC: With Elsbeth wearing multiple costumes from My Fair Lady, how long did that whole process take?

Lawson: I started working on it before we actually even started prep for this season. I’m gonna say two or three weeks before I even started. I guess I was in New York, and I got a call from the producer, and we were just talking about when we might start up and all that. She said, “Hey. There is this project coming up. It’s gonna be the fourth episode.” Oh, it was originally gonna be the third episode, and then it got switched to the fourth episode. But she said, “You know, we’re gonna be recreating these My Fair Lady costumes, and it’s more than one costume, and we should look into this right away.”

So right away, I designed it out, figured out what we needed to do, and then contacted John Kristiansen Costumes in New York, who built the costumes for us, both the headwear as well as the dresses themselves, and the underpinnings. And got estimates from them for what it would cost, looked at fabrics and everything. And that was all before we even started prep on the show. So that was probably mid-June. And then I think we shot it, maybe, the third or the beginning of the fourth week of August. We had a couple of good, strong two months that we could work on this and pull it out.

Also, those costumes aren’t cheap to build. It was important to us, Megan, that we not just rent them. We wanted them. We wanted to buy them. We wanted them to be of elegant quality, not sort of like schlocky rent costumes from somewhere. We tried to make the show look expensive and lavish. So, we were really lucky that we had the time to build the wardrobe for this episode. That scarecrow that we created as well. It was fun to be able to do all that.

PC: What was it like creating outfits from such an iconic film?

Lawson: Well, it is daunting, isn’t it? You have big shoes to fill. So, you definitely feel the pressure. I think it ups the ante. I think Elsbeth is sort of known for its costumes on the show because she dresses so extravagantly. But then to have an episode that really revolves around the clothes like that. We had the same thing at the end of the first season with the two fashion shows, and it was all about clothes.

And so you do feel an extra little bit of pressure to get it right, to make it look good, to make sure your actors are comfortable and happy, and that the producers are happy, and that you’re serving the story you’re trying to tell. And we had Carrie for two fittings for these costumes. So it’s great. We got to fit the first version, not in the fabrics. And then we were able to have a second fitting, a final fitting with her in the fabrics, with it all pretty much made. But the hat didn’t quite work. So we had to go back to the drawing board, and I caught her on set, or I really think maybe it was five in the morning or something in New York, on the streets with this gigantic hat and Tarsha Marshall, who’s our hair designer on the show.

And we’re like, “Okay. This hat is fresh off the presses. We just got it.” And the people were there from John Kristiansen. Lending brought the hat early in the morning in a taxi cab, and we put it on Carrie’s hat and made sure it would work okay for when she needed to wear it the next day. So we were really lucky that we got a third fitting with that hat.

PC: There are some pretty iconic clothes throughout both the musical and the movie. How did you land on what outfits would be worn and when?

Lawson: It was in the script, Megan. Jonathan Tolins is so thorough and so thought-out, truly. He’s really a brilliant writer. And the fact that even the order of the costumes in the episode had to be as written. We couldn’t flip-flop them around. There was one point where it looked like one of the costumes wasn’t maybe gonna be ready in time. And so I asked if we could flip-flop, “Oh, could she just wear this dress first instead of the other one?” But the thing is, and I knew it even before I asked, but there were always all kinds of words and lines and stuff that directly reference the specific dress, and that’s the episode. So we had to be very truthful to that.

PC: You’ve talked about this a little bit already, but with this being the Halloween episode, were there any other costumes aside from the scarecrow that you were really excited to design?

Lawson: Yeah. First of all, anytime I get to design for Annaleigh, I’m thrilled. I know that sounds so hokey to say, but we really were excited to have Annaleigh join us on the show, and she got to wear so many costumes. And then her next-door neighbor, the painter, who paints topless and all that stuff. The woman who gets murdered, it was really fun to do her costumes, her sort of bohemian yet wealthy person. So that was really fun to be able to investigate as well.

And the moody daughter was a good time to do as well. So it was a really fun episode to work on. It really was. I think they’re all fun, but then you always look back over a season, and it’s like that one’s always going to stand out as a favorite for me. And I think part of it had to do with where we were shooting, and it was just such beautiful weather and a beautiful location, and everybody was so happy, and it wasn’t terribly hot. And it was just a lovely, lovely experience.

New episodes of Elsbeth air on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS, streaming the next day on Paramount+.