Janie Bryant isn’t as popular as Jon Hamm or John Slattery, but her costume designs on “Mad Men” are equally visible. On April 22, roughly two weeks after the show’s sixth season premiered, she spoke to Parsons students about her career.
Bryant spent a few years as a freelance costume designer and stylist. In 2004, she began work on the HBO western series “Deadwood.” During her time on the show, she won an Emmy in 2005 and was nominated for the same award in 2006 and 2007.
The designer spent most of the evening discussing her work on “Mad Men,” the small-screen phenomenon that has whisked viewers to a 1960s world of cigarette smoke, sexual tension and Madison Avenue advertising. The main faces of the AMC series are Don and Betty Draper, a fictional American power-couple.
But despite the larger-than-life personalities of the show’s many characters, Bryant aims to portray reality as much as possible. For this reason, many of the characters’ outfits repeat throughout the series. For promotional shoots, Bryant will put the characters in looks that they never actually wear on the show. She calls this technique “heightened reality.”
When the series premiered in 2007, the cast’s wardrobe mainly featured vintage items from numerous Los Angeles costume stores. Now most of the show’s garments are custom-designed by Bryant herself.
Now, the show has inspired garments of its own. With Bryant’s direction, Banana Republic released the Mad Men Collection in August 2011. The items in the set are meant to simulate clothing that the show’s characters have worn throughout its duration. Bryant and Banana Republic added more designs to the collection in March 2012 and over this past spring.