“Boobs are a big part of the show,” says Margo’s Got Money Troubles’s costume designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier. Anyone who has watched the Apple TV+ series starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nick Offerman knows that’s an understatement. Margo follows Fanning as Margo Millet, a college student with ambitions of becoming a writer who drops out after getting pregnant by her English professor. When she decides to keep the baby, she turns to OnlyFans to support her child, creating the sci-fi-inspired online persona Hungry Ghost. So yes, there are a lot of boobs—sometimes even green ones.
Gordon-Crozier was tasked with dressing both Margo and Hungry Ghost, two wildly different versions of Fanning’s character. Fortunately, the costume designer has plenty of experience transforming the 28-year-old actor. The pair have collaborated on five projects, including Margo, and have developed an easy shorthand over the years. “I know what looks good on her and what fabrics she likes,” Gordon-Crozier tells W, “But I always put her in itchy sweaters she complains about.”
Fanning and Gordon-Crozier on set.
Courtesy of Mirren Gordon-Crozier
Beyond the itchy sweaters, Margo saw Fanning in everything from 70-year-old knits to DIY cone bras while embodying her alien alter ego. Gordon-Crozier also relished dressing Pfeiffer as a kind of Real Housewives of Orange County reject, scooping up every fur-trimmed and snakeskin piece she could find across Southern California for the actor’s character, Margo’s mother, Shyanne. “She’s actually from Orange County,” Gordon-Crozier says of Pfeiffer. “So she was like, ‘This is who I would be if I hadn’t left.’” Below, Gordon-Crozier shares behind-the-scenes details from dressing the Margo cast—rounded out by Nicole Kidman, Greg Kinnear, Rico Nasty, Nick Offerman, and Thaddea Graham—along with exclusive images from the set.
“In the beginning of the show, Margo’s a student, and so I think she’s trying to fit in,” Gordon-Crozier says. “She’s emulating her professor’s style a bit, while putting her own twist on it. Like this knit [sweater] I got from the ’50s, but underneath she’s wearing a red lace top.”
“It was really important for us to get this alien t-shirt right. We wanted to bring in that element of what happens later on in the script, like she’s looking at herself in the mirror and seeing herself in that t-shirt and getting ideas.”
“Margo is in that age range where she’s definitely thrifting. She’s also probably taking clothes from her mother’s closet, and they have a little bit of a magpie essence to them where they like sparkly and flashy things, but Margo wears them in a different way. So, I definitely wanted to incorporate Shyanne’s wardrobe into Margo’s.”
“For Shyanne, I took a lot of inspiration from the first two seasons of Real Housewives of Orange County before they went into logomania,” Gordon-Crozier says. “Michelle is so game for everything. She really got the character.”
“During the fittings, a big conversation was, ‘Does [Shyanne’s partner] Kenny like the cleavage? Is he okay with the cleavage? Or, does he want her to hide the cleavage?’ We decided to go with something in between. We would veil the cleavage a lot, and then every day, we would move her cross necklace up or down, depending on what Michelle was wearing, so it would lie perfectly.”
“Susie was one of my favorite people to dress,” Gordon-Crozier says of Margo’s roommate, played by Thaddea Graham. “I was really inspired by Rosanna Arquette’s daughter, Zoë Blue. She has the most amazing style. It’s very whimsical. She’ll wear a slip from the 1800s with a black choker. Susie’s really creative, but we don’t see that until later, when their basic roommates leave, and she can start being herself. We also found a lot of inspiration from real girls on Instagram with homemade, quirky style. Susie can crochet. She has a glue gun. She knows how to make her own stuff. But she’s also figuring out her style. As the season progresses, you see that she becomes more and more of who she wants to be.”
“Susie is kind of the opposite of Margo in a way. She spends a lot more time thinking about her layers and what she’s going to wear, who she’s going to be that day.”
“Our whole thing with Margo is that she’s a bit of a slob, so that’s why sometimes her outfits are mismatched. She just grabs them from the ground.”
“Elle’s prosthetics were so good. We wanted to find a way to show her stomach, so we put her in this Poster Girl bodysuit,” Gordon-Crozier recalls. “But she’s not fully the Hungry Ghost yet, so she’s hiding it with a sweet little vintage ’70s cotton top. I think the lace skirt is Free People. She’s always a mix of sexy and sweet.”
“This is what Margo wears to meet [her baby’s father] Mark’s mother, so this is her dressing up. My assistant is very good at felting so we hand-felted this. We found a preexisting vest and just added those circles on. There’s a vintage ’70s lace top underneath.”
“The older people in this show are a little stuck in the era when they were most beautiful and thriving, before reality kicked in. So Shyanne and Jinx [Nick Offerman], and even Lace [Nicole Kidman] are a bit stuck in the ’90s.”
“That is a Paco Rabanne skirt, which she wears twice. I liked it with the body suit because of the juxtaposition.”
“There are a few repeat hero pieces,” Gordon-Crozier says. “Margo has her hero cowboy boots, which Elle actually took home because she loved them so much. There’s also her hero denim jacket which she wears a lot. She wears this white lace skirt twice. And then the red tassel jacket she wears a couple of times, too. I tried to repeat as much as possible.”
“Lace’s wrestling costume was all made of latex. I’d never worked with latex before so that was an interesting challenge. You can’t just cut and sew it. You have to go to a specialist.”
“This was in the beginning, when Margo didn’t really know what her OnlyFans character was. We thought, ‘What would Susie have?’ Susie’s into cosplaying, elves, and all that underworld stuff. So this is us essentially taking stuff from Susie’s closet.”
“This is one of my favorite outfits,” Gordon-Crozier says. “It’s a Poster Girl top and a Victoria’s Secret bra. The skirt is vintage from the ’80s. And there’s a vintage belt and metallic boots, which I think are from Santee Alley. This is where Margo and the Hungry Ghost come together. She’s a little more confident and she is finding her style. It’s a well-thought-out outfit for her—perfect for her going out on the town.”
“This is my favorite Shyanne look. It’s Roberto Cavalli and the boots are Paris Texas.”
“Both Margo and Shyanne are magpies. They like sparkly things. So I think Margo genuinely likes her maid-of-honor dress, even though it probably came right off the rack from Bloomingdale’s. But there was something less generic about it that I liked. In reality, it is vintage and we paired it with a Collina Strada necklace.”
“As she progresses into the world of OnlyFans, she has little money and she buys herself some new things. She’s meeting up with [her OnlyFans friends Rose and KC] and she’s playing into what maybe she thinks they would wear too.”
“We wanted [the Hungry Ghost look] to be DIY in a way because Susie is supposed to be making it all,” Gordon-Crozier says. “It’s sort of janky, for lack of a better word, in a purposeful way, using things you can get at the store and are easily accessible. It’s a throwback to that [fall/winter 2017] Gucci ad from Alessandro Michele [and Glenn Luchford]. That was a big inspiration. So were the ’60s. We tested the body paint color a lot. Instead of a straight blue or green, we went with a teal.”
“The platform boots are from Dolls Kill. We got a lot of things from there. Elle helped me add little moons and aliens to them. Everything was custom-made and special. We also made the cones with the tassels. I purposely put the cones on the outside. It’s a little tongue in cheek.”
“A lot of [Rico Nasty and Lindsey Normington’s] stuff was from Wasteland, Dolls Kill, and then costume houses like Western Costume or Palace. They just have the wildest things in there.”
“Hair, makeup, and wardrobe collaborated a lot. Here, KC and Rose are cowboys, so we made their hair into lassos. Everyone in my costume department helped bedazzle the hats and belts, and we added the marabou to the bottom of the pants.”
“This is another one of my favorite outfits. The bodysuit is Agent Provocateur. I don’t even want to say where the skirt is from because Margo probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. It’s Bode, but let’s say she found it at Wasteland and got a really good deal.”
“I’m obsessed with this look and the green. That coat is vintage—real mink. We got that from a costume house. Elle looks so good in these body suits, so we just kept putting her in them.”
“We had a bucket on set, and everyone would put their [soda] can tabs in it. We collected hundreds of them and sewed them all onto Susie’s Shadowheart costume. That was fun.”
“Lace was really fun to dress,” Gordon-Crozier says of Kidman’s character. “She’s a lawyer now, so I considered what sort of suits an ex-wrestler would be attracted to. I did a lot of ’90 silhouettes and superhero colors. This one is Thierry Mugler.”
