In the sherbet-colored world of Apple TV+’s Palm Royale, set in 1969 Palm Beach, appearances are everything. The campy, high-spirited series, loosely based on the 2018 novel Mr. & Mrs. American Pie by Juliet McDaniel, follows Maxine Dellacourt (Kristen Wiig)—a Chattanooga-born orphan turned beauty-pageant queen—as she begs, borrows, and steals her way into Palm Beach high society. Sure, she’s married the nephew of one of the town’s grand dames, Norma Dellacourt (the iconic Carol Burnett), but the inheritance she’d need to really rise through the ranks is controlled by Norma…who doesn’t plan on giving Maxine and her husband a nickel of the plastics-and-mouthwash family fortune. The fact that Norma’s fallen into a coma, and can’t be charmed (or conned) by Maxine any further, doesn’t help either.
As the show’s costume designer, Alix Friedberg, explains, fashioning Maxine and her fellow housewives was central to Palm Royale’s storytelling. “There’s a gala or a ball in almost every episode,” she says. “We go from gowns to lunch to tennis to fittings at the boutique on Worth Avenue—there’s so much fashion and so many different levels to it.”
Palm Royale’s 10 episodes unfurl with caftans that swirl in marbly prints, candy-colored beaded dresses that look dipped in sprinkles, and plenty of statement sunglasses. And as the story hurtles toward 1970 (there’s a highly amusing space-race subplot), the powdery, gauzy town of Palm Beach becomes louder, zanier, and more outlandish—with preppy Lilly Pulitzer swapped out for psychedelic Pucci.
Much to our delight, a lot of what’s seen onscreen is real vintage: pristine pieces of Bill Blass, Galanos, and Malcolm Starr from the 1960s. “It’s really tough to get things that don’t feel like they have 30, 40 years of wear on them—we got lucky,” Friedberg says. “Everybody needed to look like they had just cut the tags off something. Certainly, nobody ever repeats anything. God forbid!”
Where did she find it all? Friedberg is happy to share. She cites Etsy (“a phenomenal source”), Arcade Vintage, the Paper Bag Princess, Carny Couture, The Frippery, and Recess as some of her go-tos. “We had a list of 10 to 15 vendors that we would send mood boards to. We’d say, ‘This is the palette for Allison Janney’s character, this is her size run, do you have anything that might work for a gala?’” In some cases the vintage looks were shot in one setting, but when characters needed to move outside, or had scenes that could cause a bit more wear and tear, faithful reproductions were made.
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