Seth Rogen’s ‘Platonic’ Costumes Are Peak Eastside L.A.
Costume designer Kameron Lennox has spent the last few years in the ’80s (Apple TV+’s “Physical”) and the ’90s (Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy”). But her work on Apple TV+’s 10-episode comedy “Platonic” is joyously, hilariously now.
Starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen (and created, with Francesca Delbanco, by their “Neighbors” director Nicholas Stoller), “Platonic” finds estranged best friends Sylvia (Byrne) and Will (Rogen) falling back into their old habits when they reconnect after his divorce. Sylvia’s a bored stay-at-home mother married to a Ken doll of a lawyer (Luke Macfarlane), while Will is the man behind popular Arts District bar Lucky Penny, content to coast on his brew skills and whatever cachet comes from co-owning a brewery in one’s 40s. And both of them are immediately known through their clothes.
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“I’m from L.A. And L.A.’s just such a melting pot, but wherever you live in the city really kind drives the way that you dress,” Lennox told IndieWire. “[Sylvia and her family] live in Culver City, so they have a little bit of money. They’re a little close to Venice Beach. So I tried to kind of hit the designers and companies that the people in that area would wear.”
But Byrne’s Sylvia is a tightly wound ball of anxiety and frustration, a former lawyer who left work to have kids and has been waiting for someone to invite her back into the workforce ever since. Even in dropping off and picking up her children, she’s carefully put together.
“She wears a lot of Alex Mill. Clare V. Like, suburban-mom-that-has-style look, if that makes sense,” Lennox said with a laugh. “She’s not in leggings and oversized T-shirts and sweatpants. She had a career. And we didn’t feel like she would just throw it away and not care about the way she looked. And also, she sends her kids to a liberal private school and there is this thought like, ‘Well, I better put myself together. I’m gonna see all those ladies in the parking lot.’ So that was another reason for her to have the purse and tuck her shirt in.”
For Lennox, every new project begins with the scripts and the creation of mood boards — though she’s very careful to clarify for everyone involved in the production that those boards aren’t literal. “It’s more of just a feeling. And often, I will screengrab from actual films. It helps me to kind of see things alive. Pulling things from catalog photos feels very flat and very dead, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a live person in what they’re wearing. So I’ll put together some boards, and then I’ll show them to the directors.”
The true work begins in the fittings, where the character’s personality emerges and the way in which the actors move in the clothes Lennox and her team pulled. “Whatever starts working is kind of the direction we’ll go in,” she said. And that includes Rogen’s show-stopping ensembles.
Rare is the series that pays such lavish attention to men’s fashion, but Lennox — who lives on the Eastside of L.A. — knew that she needed to bring it for Rogen’s Arts District brewmaster. “I started thinking about a lot of designers that have boutiques and shops on the Eastside,” she said. “I really wanted anybody that lives there to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s that guy.'”
Her work was helped considerably by Rogen’s ability to pull it all off (and their existing relationship after working together on “Pam & Tommy.”) “The one thing that he said to me — because he is good friends with Jonah Hill — is, ‘You know, it would be funny if we brought an element of him in there.’ And so that just kind of opened the door for me. Jonah, he dresses in a very specific way, but it’s all really good. It’s all designer. The way that he styles it, it’s so smart.”
Not that Will’s clothes — from boutiques and designers ranging from Marni and Jil Sander to Bode and Needles (not to mention Ian Charms for a candy necklace) — were a quick sell to the powers that be at Apple.
“I remember at one point Seth’s like, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll talk to them,’ because they were really kind of getting a little unsure of our choices,” Lennox said. “But it was fun too because we were finding a lot of smaller companies, that was just nice, to give them a little bit of screen time. So I felt like we were also paying back to our neighborhood.”
And though Sylvia and Will are opposites who manage to complement one another (to the increasing chagrin of everyone else in their lives), Will’s true opposite is Sylvia’s husband, the very handsome, very muscular Charlie.
“We have this like westside lawyer, super conservative and super fit. The polar opposite of this brewmaster from downtown.” Lennox said. “Luke’s incredible. I mean, even when they go to the baseball game. I think in the script [said] he is wearing a jersey, and I’m like, ‘This guy does not wear a jersey. We need to get something very corporate for him to wear.'” And, in Macfarlane’s case, fitted. “He works hard for that body!” Lennox said with a laugh.
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