Costume designer Liza Bracey shares the weird and wonderful stories behind her work on the new FXNetworks series “Pistol”
Think of the punk movement, and the lasting impression is as much about the sound—jangling guitar riffs, riotously shouty vocals, relentless four-to-the-floor beats—as it is about the look.
Really, the key thing, which turned out to be quite scary, was that Danny wanted to use real footage from that time. So then, of course, the costumes have to be exactly the same, so it works seamlessly. My first question was, “Do you know what footage we’re going to use, so we know which things we have to replicate?” And they said, “Well, we’re not entirely sure, it depends what we find.
Luckily, I have an amazing buyer called Julia, who is like a magician when it comes to finding things. I remember finding a picture of Chrissie Hynde in this stripy, shiny mac when she was really young, and I fell in love with it. I said to Julia, “Do you think we could find something a bit like this?” As I knew we wouldn’t be able to make it. I wasn’t expecting anything that would look exactly like it, but just something along those lines.
It was brilliant. They all loved it, even if they didn’t necessarily have a clue what it was all about until they started doing the job, as they’re all so young, so it was completely out of their orbit. But actually, I have to say Anson [Boon], who plays John [Lydon], he wasup for it. We’d have long discussions about his costumes between filming where he’d ask me what he’d be wearing for certain scenes, and we’d talk about what that meant.