At the end of each NYFW day we could all use a little something to distract ourselves — and luckily, Netflix has just the thing. Arriving Thursday is “The Perfect Couple,” a delightfully soapy drama series based on the book by Elin Hilderbrand and directed by “The Night Manager” director Susanne Bier starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, and Eve Hewson, among others. The show is set at the compound of one of Nantucket’s wealthiest families, where one of the sons’ weddings is set to take place. On the morning of the big day, a dead body is discovered.
To bring the wealthy lifestyle alive, Bier tapped Danish costume designer Signe Sejlund, with whom she had worked on several projects. Sejlund had also worked with Kidman on the HBO series “The Undoing.”
“It’s just interesting to step into a world that I have — I mean, I have done wealth before in a few shows, but this particular area I didn’t know anything about,” Sejlund says. She consulted a friend who has a home on Nantucket, who helped guide her research.
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One of the first things she encountered in her research was the famed “Nantucket reds.”
“It’s a beautiful raspberry color, and I had never heard about Nantucket red. So when I was Googling all the pictures, I was like, ‘what is it with those red pants?’” Sejlund says. “And my friend told me it’s a thing. It’s not any red pants. It’s the red pants. So obviously we had to have a lot of red pants in the show.”
Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, the family’s matriarch, an accomplished writer who married into the Winbury legacy. Sejlund dressed her in lots of blues to match the sea, as well as creams and whites to exhibit her status.
“The more cream colors she could wear, the more complicated it is to stay clean. And that’s a way to show how you don’t have to care about whether you get spots on your clothes or whatever,” Sejlund says. “She might pretend that she’s cleaning the kitchen, but she’s not really. There’s housekeepers and gardeners and pool boys and there’s girls. That’s like people taking care of the whole thing.”
Sejlund made Amelia’s wedding dress, but otherwise mostly shopped widely for the wardrobe — with special attention paid to one designer.
“That’s how I work on every job. I try to create a wardrobe that is not from one particular designer, because I don’t think that the real world is like that,” she says. “And it never works if you just use one designer. But I will say, obviously Ralph Lauren is kind of a big thing on this show because it is that world.”
Standout items include a dress that Meghann Fahy’s character Merritt wears to the rehearsal dinner, which was purchased from Missoni.
“That was a really tricky thing because she needed a dress where she could go into the water, and also she had to be able to go into the water without taking the dress off, because that would be a little weird. And also, why would you go in the water in your dress? So I had a few sleepless nights about how to solve that problem,” Sejlund says. “Then one day I went into Missoni in New York, and there was that weird seaweed dress, and I thought, I wonder if maybe that could be it.”
She bought one and took it home to float in her bathtub to see how it would react in the water.
‘“It was kind of floating and beautiful in a sort of a seaweedy way, which I think looks quite nice on camera,” Sejlund says.
Another shopping stroke of luck happened at Dolce & Gabbana, where she spotted a red halter gown behind glass in its New York store that she thought would be perfect for the bride Amelia, played by Hewson, to wear at the rehearsal dinner.
“Finding a dress for the bride, for her rehearsal dinner, it’s like, ‘what do you do? Who picked the dress? Did Greer pick it or did [Amelia] buy it?’ I wanted to find something that she would’ve gotten, and it would stand out in front of everybody else,” Sejlund says. “The only color I kept away was red. She’s the only one wearing that red.”
In Sejlund’s opinion, it’s all about the little touches that really signify the family’s wealth — like the monogrammed blue bathrobes with an orange trim they each have with their initials on them.
“Another place where you can show that this is a wealthy family,” Sejlund says. “Those are the little things that do it, I think. More than a designer bag, more than a branded designer bag. It’s those little things that are just, it’s just there.”
