How ‘George and Tammy’ Costumes Transformed Jessica Chastain Over the Decades – WWD

Country music power couple George Jones and Tammy Wynette had one of the most complicated and storied relationships in entertainment. Their marriage, which lasted from 1969 to 1975 with ups and downs, inspired some of country music’s most famous songs.

Showtime chronicled the couple’s romance in the Emmy-nominated television series “George and Tammy.” The costumes, which were created over four decades from the late ’60s to the mid-’90s, were a key element in telling the story of two of country music’s greatest legends. Jessica Chastain played Wynette alongside Michael Shannon as Jones.

To bring fashion to life in this biographical docudrama, the miniseries enlisted costume designer Mitchell Travers, whose credits include Hustlers, Shotgun Wedding and In the Heights. Travers and co-stars Mitchell Wolfe, Laurel Rose, Eileen Abercrombie, Susan Russell and Charles Carter are nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Period Costume for a Limited Series or Anthology or Movie.

Travers previously worked with Chastain on costumes for her Oscar-winning role in Through the Eyes of Tammy Faye, where she played the title character.

Despite Wynette’s insistence as a music icon and her songs like “Stand by Your Man,” Travers was actually more familiar with Shannon’s Jones before he dove into the film. Jones was known for his bold approach to color and pattern, which made Travers a longtime fan.

“George’s fashionable ensembles and the way he dressed always caught my attention, especially as a costume designer,” Travers said. “Even though I was more familiar with George, I enjoyed learning more about Tammy Wynette and her style while working on this project.”

The process of setting up this Travers project began with him and his assistant traveling through the South. They visited every major city and went shopping for vintage clothing at thrift stores, yard sales, private collector sales and Goodwill. They collected a large collection of clothes that they planned to use for filming in Wilmington, North Carolina.

While they were on the trip, rumors began to circulate that he was costumed for the show, and many people they met told stories about Jones and Wynette. This became part of Travers’ treasure trove of research that helped him understand the characters.

One of Travers’ challenges was to figure out which looks he wanted to completely recreate and which ones he just wanted to inspire with style.

“There were moments in the film that were recreations of some of George and Tammy’s specific performances, and there was a question of what exactly they looked like for it,” Travers said. “There were certain milestones in their careers and we wanted the costumes to accurately recreate those moments, and there were other moments where we created looks that were largely inspired by what they wore. It became a balancing act between what had to be accurate and what could be embellished or just hinted at in some way.”

As for the album covers, the look has been completely recreated and remains virtually unchanged. Some items, such as the striking red hat Wynette wore in the final performance, were actually taken from the original so as not to distract from the performance.

While creating costumes for the series, Travers received donations and found collectors who were willing to donate some of Wynette’s original dresses for the film. Peanut Montgomery, a singer-songwriter and friend of Jones and Wynette, had one of Wynette’s original dresses, which had stains from her makeup and cigarette burns.

According to Travers, one of the most challenging sequences in the series to costume was the third episode, where Jones and Wynette have a fitting room scene, which is a very meta scene for the costume designers to work on. Each character was required to have enough options and even choose things that were intentionally not meant to work or end up in the performance.

The main problem was that the series spanned four decades, from the 60s to the 90s.

“There were days before the lunch break when the cast and crew were filming a scene in 1968, I could come back from lunch and we had to move to 1975, by the end of the day we could be in the 80s,” Travers said. “A dedicated team had to create all sorts of crazy charts and graphs just so we could follow the evolution. The mood board couldn’t just live in one place, it was the collective mind of the entire costume team.”

When asked which part of the George and Tammy costume was his favorite, Travers replied, “Tammy Wynette’s shoes. When working on film and television projects, most of the action is filmed from the waist up. Any opportunity to go to a shoe store excites me as a costume designer because it’s a special moment when the director agrees that shoes can really help tell the story.”

“George and Tammy” is now available to stream on the Showtime app.