Costume designer Christina Flannery had only about three weeks of prep to finesse some very different styles for the new Rachel Sennott comedy “I Love LA.” Whether going to a funeral or a casual game night, the core ensemble on the HBO comedy — messily ambitious and ambitiously messy Maya (Rachel Sennott), disaster freelancer celebrity stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), #blessed nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), New York bestie/stormy influencer Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), and Maya’s ever-patient boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson) — each needed a distinct vibe but still needed to look like friends. Flannery wanted to make sure the show had a little bit of flash, too.

Related Stories

“We knew that we had to get brands, and we knew we didn’t have the money, so we spent a lot of time before the paychecks even hit just reaching out — it takes so much time — and we were also going up against fashion events. People were like, ‘Oh sorry, we can’t send anything. It’s the Met, it’s Fashion Week,” Flannery told IndieWire. “Luckily, in LA, there are great resources for vintage, and there are amazing rental houses. There’s also a lot of archival vintage places — being in LA [to shoot] was so exciting; most of the time I’m in a clothing desert.”

Flannery and her team were also able to lean on Sennott, a little bit, who’s done work with Balenciaga, to get more than a bi-coastal bag for “I Love LA.” The trickle-down effect helped secure key plot-specific pieces of costuming, but also will set the groundwork for Season 2 and beyond. “This was so perfect for me, because there is a groundedness [to the show] but there is still a level of stylization,” Flannery said. “So it was a really good match of doing a little bit of flash and flare but still keeping it in a zone that doesn’t alienate people.”

Part of creating the overall success came from pushing the realism of the show’s costumes in different directions for each of the main characters. LA, after all, is a melting pot of different types of people, some who are out there to chase Hollywood dreams, but equally plenty who are natives not connected to the world that Maya wants to belong to by managing Tallulah’s tentative hold on stardom.

‘I Love LA’ Kenny Laubbacher/HBO

“I feel like Josh’s character specifically is like the Rose Bowl Farmer’s Market boyfriend. That was the vibe we were going for. We have to have that blue chore jacket that’s such a quintessential LA thing, the LA Dodgers hat,” Flannery said. “Then there’s that cute femme thing, that Reservoir, that Silver Lake girlie, that Maya is.”

Taking a lot of inspiration from the first season of “Sex and the City,” which Flannery thinks does clear, archetypal costuming so well, the “I Love LA” costume department envisioned a store where each of the characters would maybe go to a different section, but would all shop together. “We all rub off on each other,” Flannery said. “So, I really wanted to give each character their own autonomy — Truth’s character very much leans into that Nepo-Calabasas-Wealthy-Erewhon [look, whereas] Jordan is a grab and go. Like, stylists make good money, but they’re not gonna be able to afford all this shit. So we see designer pieces he takes from Ayo’s character mixed with cheaper things — you do start to merge into this friend group thing.”

Some of the friend group thing runs through complementary colors and geometric patterns that play off each other in the ensemble’s clothing choices. But some of it does come from Flannery’s own taste, and the eye she has for how to push contemporary clothes to be a little bit more (pun intended) out of this world.

“To me, when I look at my work, I’m always trying to get sci-fi in there. Somebody give me a goddamn sci-fi movie or TV show, because if you don’t, you’re going to get sci-fi anyway,” Flannery joked. “My shopper, when she was working with me for the first time and trying to [understand me] as a designer, said, ‘It’s just shapes. You’re always gravitating towards sci-fi shit.’”

‘I Love LA’ Kenny Laubbacher/HBO

Whether it’s Tallulah’s endless spins on keyhole tops or Charlie’s alien-pink jacket in contrast to the dearly departed Lukas’s (Froy Gutierrez) sports tee, that little bit of extra shape marks the characters out as deeply cool, each in their own way, but also on each other’s level. Flannery and her team do some sneaky worldbuilding with their costume choices, too.

“From the beginning to the end of the season, you do see a transition, specifically in Maya. Her style does start to evolve into this more edgy, almost more like Tallulah’s look, and Tallulah is becoming a bit like Maya,” Flannery said.

Specifically, Flannery mentioned a scene in an upcoming episode where the best friends/manager and client are wearing things that speak to the ways they might be the angels and/or demons on each other’s shoulders. “I think that Maya starts to pivot and she starts to become this, like, Saturn Return, she’s gonna blow her fucking life up,” Flannery said. “It’s fun and interesting to be able to create a world like that through costume designing.”

*“I Love LA” is streaming on HBO Max. *