Rachel Sennott’s new show, I Love LA, is extending the Sex and the City/Girls/Broad City treatment to Gen Z—placing the perpetually online cohort, along with its language, priorities, and aesthetics in the spotlight. In the new HBO comedy, Sennott skewers the culture surrounding today’s twenty-somethings, packaging the commentary around a friend group in LA navigating love, friendship, and career. But it’s costume designer Christina Flannery who really cinches it all together in a vintage Vivienne Westwood corset. With the help of Dior saddle bags, Tabi flats, and a whole lot of whale tales, Flannery illustrates the Los Angeles Gen Z fashion experience in a way that feels covetable and eye-catching, yet still authentic.
“I wanted there to be good fashion, but I didn’t want it to be distracting,” Flannery tells W. Yes, you might notice a Rick Owens dress at a funeral or a completely impractical pair of kitten heels, but you’re not losing track of the plot because you’re too busy thinking, what is she wearing?
While Flannery shares a laidback, cool girl attitude with many of the characters on I Love LA, the project was a bit of a departure for her. The costume designer spent a lot of time working with gold lamé and rhinestones on the HBO series The Righteous Gemstones and most recently clothed Sydney Sweeney in the Oscar-buzzy biopic Christy. To prepare for I Love LA, then, she had to completely switch up her mindset—and her social media feeds.
“When I was working on Gemstones, I was following a bunch of hype priests and churches like Hillsong,” she says. “For this one, I followed It girls like Gabriette.” The overhaul clearly worked, because in I Love LA, Flannery presents a wardrobe that, yes, feels heightened and silly at times, but also completely in line with the TikTok-adjacent, self-deprecating, sometimes cringe-worthy world Sennott has created.
Below, Flannery discusses dressing the four main characters of the show, drawing inspiration from everything from punk bands to Y2K rom-coms, and her favorite look, which you barely even get to see.
Maia (Rachel Sennott)
The first time we meet Sennott’s Maia, she’s enjoying some morning birthday sex with her boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). It’s a perfect introduction to Sennott’s character, and not just because she ignores a bedroom-shaking earthquake in favor of a body-shaking orgasm. The top Maia is wearing in this scene also hints at what we can expect from her in the next eight episodes—a shrunken tank featuring The Powerpuff Girls. “That literally is Maia,” says Flannery. “It’s cute and feminine, but it’s still sexy.” Perhaps a relic of her childhood, now, worn without a bra while atop her boyfriend, the top projects a sexy babygirl air that not only epitomizes her wardrobe, but also her approach to life.
When dressing Sennott for I Love LA, Flannery balanced a range of inspirations, from Julia Stiles’s romcom era to Lily-Rose Depp’s current street style. Maia isn’t supposed to be the quintessential fashion girl, though, so her choices had to feel grounded in her reality of a 27-year-old making it on her own in LA. When she wears vintage Marc Jacobs, it’s a girly cherry top that she could’ve bought at the mall at 17. “I wanted it to feel like she went to a random Buffalo Exchange and said, ‘Oh, look at that cute top with the cherries on it.”
Still, eagle-eyed viewers will spot plenty of vintage throughout Maia’s closet, including pieces by Todd Oldham and Betsy Johnson, as well as modern labels like Dilara Findikoglu and Cou Cou Intimates. In sourcing Maia’s wardrobe, Flannery and her team scoured LA’s vintage scene. “My assistant costume designer found Maia’s Dior saddlebag in the bottom of a box at a rental house,” Flannery recalls. “We were both just like, ‘What the fuck?’”
To be fair, that’s likely where Maia would have found it as well. Despite her impressive collection of vintage, Maia isn’t exactly an archivist. That is made evident by the way she takes care of (or rather, doesn’t) a vintage Pucci top she wears to Tenants of the Trees in the show’s first episode and wakes up in the next day. “She’s tangled up in the Pucci sweater, and I just thought that was so fucking stupid and classic,” Flannery says. “You go out to the bar, you get wasted, you’re supposed to do something the next day, and you’re waking up in a vintage Pucci top she probably got from The Real Real. That’s like her prized possession, but she just doesn’t care. She just needs some Gatorade.”
Tallulah (Odessa A’zion)
It can be difficult to dress an Internet celebrity in a way that feels based in reality. “I didn’t want any Emily in Paris vibes,” Flannery says. There’s a fine line when replicating an ultimately unrealistic wardrobe of PR gifts and micro-trends. But Flannery managed to walk that tight rope when dressing Tallulah, a Z-List celebrity attempting to turn one Marc Jacobs Heaven ad into a sustainable career.
“Tallulah is just really cool,” Flannery says. “She’s punk as fuck and she doesn’t give a fuck.” Accordingly, Tallulah’s wardrobe plays with proportion in a wild manner. In any given scene, she’s either wearing a vintage tee that looks to be about four sizes too big, or the ittiest bittiest shorts you’ve ever seen—there’s hardly an in between.
Flannery looked to punk bands like the Melbourne-based Amyl and the Sniffers and Bikini Kill for inspiration: “Just cool ass shit from the nineties and early 2000s.” Modern inspiration, meanwhile, came from the “quintessential cool rock and roll chick,” Chrome Hearts founder Jessie Jo Stark.
Like Maia, Flannery wanted Tallulah’s wardrobe to have a thrifting element, like she could have picked up the pieces from Second Street before adding her own twist to them. And it was A’zion herself who helped style elements that gave the wardrobe an authentic feel. While Flannery admits that Tallulah’s wardrobe is worlds away from A’zion’s own, the actor—who favors oversized silhouettes—embraced the rave wear and shrunken pieces.
“Odessa liked to be involved as far as adding her own personal touches,” Flannery says. “She would place safety pins on things, or add four belts instead of just two.” For one look in episode seven, for example, she’s seen in another oversized tee and RUI string-adorned cutout shorts. Flannery explains that A’zion cut some of the string off her bottoms and wrapped up her t-shirt to add some shape to the top half of the look, to a successful effect. “It’s just a cool fucking wardrobe.”
Alani (True Whitaker)
When workshopping the wardrobe for True Whitaker’s self-aware nepobaby Alani, Flannery wanted to lean into the character’s prep school background, with plenty of pleated plaid mini skirts and layered polos. In the end, though, it was a few very specific brands that guided the path.
“It’s a lot of archival Dolce & Gabbana, vintage Dsquared2, and Jean Paul Gaultier,” Flannery says. Thanks to that trust fund from her Oscar-winning director father, Alani has a bigger budget than the other characters, so she can flaunt a bit more. “Her wardrobe definitely feels effortless in a way. She’s really cool, but she doesn’t really have to try,” Flannery says. We see this at play in the Tabis she purchases on a whim, or the designer bags she throws around, like the JPG Taurus bag she wears to Quen Blackwell’s house party in episode four.
“Maybe she grabs things from her mom’s closet whenever she’s home,” Flannery suggests. “They don’t necessarily have to be brand brand brand everywhere, and that, to me, speaks money.”
Fittingly, Whitaker wears one piece that belongs to her (actual) mom, a Dolce & Gabbana cross necklace she had on when she met Flannery for a fitting. They were able to find another one, so Whitaker wouldn’t have to put her family heirloom at risk, and Alani wears it throughout the season. “It just feels so her. And it’s very heartwarming.”
Charlie (Jordan Firstman)
And then there’s the screen printing king, Charlie. The pop star stylist’s affinity for custom pieces is made evident early on in the series thanks to his “Mimi Rush fired me for being gay and Jewish” trucker hat. Throughout the season, Charlie dons slightly less offensive, but just as confounding pieces, including shirts that ask, “What’s going on with my career?” and “Can I quiz you on ocean facts?”
The screen prints were Firstman’s brain children. “Jordan would text me like, ‘What about this?’” Flannery says of the various phrases. “So we made those babies for him.” And considering Charlie’s occupation as a stylist, they’re often paired with some very high-end pieces. “We put him in a lot of Martine Rose, Magliano, YSL,” she says.
In fact, Firstman got to wear Flannery’s favorite outfit of the season, and no, it isn’t the ERL jacket he dons for Quen’s house party (though she loves that one too, of course). It appears in episode three, when Charlie goes out to dinner with Alani and Tallulah. Along with his accusatory hat, Charlie wears an Acne jacket and PRISCAVera pants. “That outfit is fire,” Flannery says, though unfortunately, you barely get to see it, as he is sitting down at a table for the duration of the scene, so for Flannery’s take, be sure to take it in above.
Source: W Magazine
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