Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story created a controversial splash when it debuted on Netflix last year. This is a season that turns our perception of an infamous crime inward, as it gives a voice to those we may not have heard the first time around. Beginning in 1989 and spilling into the early 1990’s, Monsters‘ constume design, by Emmy nominee Paula Bradley, is not just impeccably crafted but it also points to privilege, power, and wealth.
Bradley thinks the ’80s get a bad reputation. We are at a time where the decade has been partied over, mocked, and tributed, but the dismissiveness needs to stop. This was a decade that took risks–just think about how nice it would be to stand at your closet and not consult your phone or look online. You could leave the house with your own identity worn proudly on your body.
“I think it’s really sad that the ’80s have turned into a meme and how it translated down through the mall, the bad hair yearbooks, because the ’80s had an incredible amount of swagger,” Bradley says. “You had to have it. At the country club and in London, we used to call them Hooray Henrys, and there was all the Wall Street greed, and, at the same time, there were so many people countering that. It was the first time that we were heavily exposed, in a public way, to Japanese design and interiors and architecture. It was mind-blowing, especially after we went through the punk in the ’70s. I think it was the last curious decade.”
I mentioned to Bradley how much I wish men would be less self-conscious when they dressed. If you think about the characters in Monsters, the Menendez brothers are still young, and they are beginning to lean into their own styles.
“The way that they’re dressed for the ’80s is the only way of dressing for the ’80s,” she says. “You immediately know that they’re conservative, and that they’re American. And they’re wealthy. It’s not the only fashion that was around, but I think it trickled. That fell away in the ’90s, I think, when you still had rock, grunge, and hip hop. It was the last decade wher eyou could wake up in the morning and think, ‘I want to cosplay a rich person today.’ There was more identifiable styles of the way that your clothing say more than just, ‘I bought this at a store.’
Even though we think of Lyle and Erik Menendez as a pair or refer to them as the Menendez Brothers, they were reaching a point in their lives where they made their own mark with their wardrobes. Cooper Koch’s Erik wears a lot of tennis-adjacent gear with whites and blues, whereas Nicholas Alexander Chavez’s Lyle is seen in more patterns and open shirts. Both young men wear a lot of sweaters, and I even wondered if Bradley’s choice to place Erik in a lot of blue throughout the season hinted at his emotional state.
“Since it’s Ryan Murphy, none of this is out of a vacuum or is it independent though,” Bradley says. “Ryan speaks visually, and he has an incredible clear visual when he wants to show something specific. There was a lot of talk about red, white, and blue, because the family sits down together a lot. In terms of the family’s color palette, it was not busy, but we needed to make sure it also married well with the furniture in their house. We talked a lot with Matthew Flood Ferguson, the production designer, about what colors were going to be in a scene, so it wouldn’t clash. One of my favorite things is the sweater that Erik wears when he goes off to Oziel’s office, because it has that tiny hint of red in it. That sweater is something vintage that we found.”
Ari Graynor’s Leslie Abrahamson works tirelessly to help the brothers evade jailtime, and leaning into that is a curious mixture of how a character presents themselves with silhouette and color. Most of the time, Leslie is wearing the boldest shade of fabric in the room. She commands your attention, but there is a softness to her, especially when we see her at home.
“As far as what she wore in court, color-wise, she really did wear a lot of what we costumed Ari in,” she says. “She wore a lot of white in court, and she wore bubblegum pink at one point. Jess [Wiexler], who plays Jill Lansing, was very minimal, but Leslie was saying, ‘I am here.’ We tailored them a little differently for TV. The red suit she wears is a vintage San Laurent, which might be a little more upscale, but Leslie has money. To show Leslie at home, we were lucky, because Ari is very petite. A lot of these vintage, ’80s pieces have small waists and bigger shoulders, and she could fit into a lot very beautifully. Now that I think about it, the contrast in the colors to show the difference between her home life and her in court wasn’t an overtly conscious decision. It just felt right.”
Costumes can come from a lot of places, especially when working on a show where the time period seems right near our fingertips. Sometimes we have this image of dozens of people with their heads down over their sewing machines as they create everything, but Monsters features a mixture of built, found, and vintage pieces. Bradley even explains how you can find a piece if you look in the right direction.
“This was such a huge mix, and we are lucky that we live in Los Angeles since so much of it is geared towards here,” Bradley says. “Our resources are dwindling. We did over 4,000 background for just one episode. Jeanine McKirnan did a fantastic job of dressing everyone, and we have these amazing rental studios in Los Angeles that still have racks and racks of suits. The hard part is casual clothing, because people wear them, wash them, and the colors don’t survive. We tapped some dealers who deal with dead stock, which is stocks of clothes that have never been worn. We have a French pair in Pennsylvania that have warehouses that buy everything when stores go out of business. There are collectors. This is all because of the film industry that these people exist. I worry that it’s getting tougher and tougher, though, because they could all disappear.
We built a lot of Ari Graynor’s suits for Leslie. Lyle wears a black, silk robe with a hot pink speedo, and that was something that Ryan was specific about. We had to build the robe, because most silk robes don’t hit below the knee, and it needed to be longer so it flies behind him when he walks.”
There are many pieces that I want to take for myself. In that scene between the brothers and Oziel, the red zipper on Erik’s sweater reminded me of one small trickle of blood. I love Jose Menendez’s Christmas cardigan, and the sweater that Judalon Smyth wears at the end of episode one (that blue and white–to die for) is something that Bradley and I might spar over.
“I would’ve stolen Leslie Grossman’s entire wardrobe,” she says with no hesitation.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming now on Netflix.
