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Fashion can help create an image, particularly if you’re trying to ascend the ranks of New York City’s jet-set crowd. For Anna Delvey, the subject of Shondaland’s new drama series Inventing Anna, designer items were a way to add a layer of authenticity to her con. To bring that concept into the show, creator Shonda Rhimes tapped her longtime costume designer Lyn Paolo, who previously worked on Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. Paolo describes her experience on Inventing Anna as a “revolving door of fashion,” which, if you’ve already binged (or re-binged) the series, is entirely true to form.
Bringing Anna, played by Julia Garner, to life visually involved heavy research, months of work, and an “insane” number of shoes that Paolo says she can’t even begin to count. Between curating all of the looks for the re-creations of Delvey’s Instagram posts to the costumes in the episodes themselves, Paolo designed more than 3,000 different outfits for Anna. Every replica Instagram shot you see in the series was a complete look in itself, which the team created at various photo shoots throughout the show’s production. The costumes are a combination of real-life inspiration and dramatization for the purpose of Rhimes’ story, which, while based on a true story, is a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Anna Delvey and her scamming of New York City high society.
“It’s a little bit of both,” Paolo says of the mix of real-life and elevated styles they created for Garner as she transformed into Delvey. “We did a huge photo shoot that was a deep dive into Anna’s social-media presence, so everything you see on Vivian’s wall in the baby’s room is an exact replica — as best as we could. There were some items that were no longer available, but we did the closest we could to create an exact representation of the real Anna. And her court appearances on the show were an exact match to what she wore. That was a lot of work because her [social media] had all been taken down, so we did the same thing the characters on the show do, which is follow the lines of communication between Anna and all these people in the story.”
She adds, “And of course, by then the fashion was about four years old, so there was lots of going online and finding the Alaïa dress, which she wore often [in court]. That one black Alaïa dress was her go-to dress. We found it, but in the wrong size and had to tailor it to fit Julia. It took a long time to find all those pieces.”
For the rest of the looks in the series, Paolo and her team “trolled” every possible website selling vintage clothes and even reached out to many of the designers themselves to secure pieces. The process of searching for all of the various bits, from dresses to coats to sunglasses to handbags, took several months. While Paolo wanted certain items, like Delvey’s signature big-frame Céline glasses, to mirror reality, she was also mindful that the Anna in Inventing Anna is a dramatized version of the real woman. In the series, Anna goes for high fashion with lots of designer pieces and is curated down to every accessory. Alongside the Céline glasses, Paolo brought in Gucci, Chanel, and Stella McCartney eyewear, even though Delvey herself might not have worn them.
“No disrespect to her whatsoever, but Anna Delvey’s fashion was not as elevated as our Anna,” Paolo reflects. “That was because, from a storytelling point of view, Shonda wanted the story to be about this young woman who showed up to get a loan in a baby-doll dress. Completely inappropriate, completely not how you should dress in that level of society. That was a big moment for us because we realized, ‘Okay, we have to elevate her from this point.’ I don’t think the real Anna had that. In our show, she starts off in these skimpy boho dresses, and then she realizes she has to up her fashion game to be part of an elevated world. When you go to a place, you have to present yourself the way you would like to be treated, and that’s what we tried to do with Anna after the baby-doll [dress] incident.”
From that turning point, Paolo embraced a mélange of designer looks for the on-screen Anna. “From then on, it was always about presenting this amazing look that was very curated,” she notes. “Not sticking to one designer, but combining designers and making sure she looked amazing in whatever room she was in.”
While Anna dons a rotating closet of designer duds as she schemes her way up the New York social ladder, the audience also meets the character later once she’s in prison. There, Anna retains her thick eyewear, but there’s only so much she can do with the gray jumpsuit — similar to the real-life Delvey, who was held at Rikers Island during her trial.
“We talked about it at length,” Paolo says of Anna’s prison garb. “We did start by tailoring it, and at one point we said, ‘How would Anna tailor the jumpsuits she is wearing?’ But then that seemed insane because she wouldn’t have that opportunity. So, whenever she is meeting with Vivian or whoever, everything she’s wearing is pressed. We would press it before we started filming because that was the one thing we could do.”
Delvey’s courtroom ensembles were among the most precise designs in the series. When Delvey appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court for her trial, she usually arrived in a different look each day. Thanks to an introduction by her pal Neff Davis, played by Alexis Floyd in the series, Delvey hired stylist Anastasia Walker, who put Delvey in everything from Michael Kors to Saint Laurent to Victoria Beckham — all of which was heavily discussed, written about, and documented on social media throughout the proceedings. Paolo felt it was important to painstakingly replicate each of these infamous looks.
“It was exactly what she wore,” the designer confirms. “Which is insane, isn’t it? That’s what she wore, and she refused to go into court until she had something to wear. I have to respect the chutzpah. It tells you so much about her. And I’m really conflicted about her, I have to say. I think if she had been a guy, she might have gotten away with it. I’m mesmerized by her, truly.”
Numerous articles have been written about Delvey’s fashion, interrogating the meaning behind her court looks or investigating whether she was actually stylish enough to fool people into thinking she was rich. It seems possible that Delvey was purchasing luxury items for the sake of them being luxurious rather than as an actual fashion choice. She also repeated items, like the Alaïa dress and her black leather jacket, frequently. For Delvey, clothes were a way to perpetuate her carefully cultivated image as an heiress — exactly the way costumes help tell a story on-screen.
“There are just so many story points in there: This young woman who starts out not looking like a fashionista and then becomes one,” Paolo says. “She was pretending to be something she wasn’t, ultimately — we all know that now — and there are so many different levels to that. I don’t think it was that glamorous in real life. I’m surprised she got away with it with just the one black Alaïa dress. We do an elevated version of that, a Shondaland version of that. Shonda writes these amazing stories about these amazing women who have an amazing fashion sense. We’re presenting our version of Anna, but there are so many Annas. The whole story is about how there are all these Annas. At each moment in the story, each Anna was different, and you can see that in her fashion choices.”
Emily Zemler is a freelance writer and journalist based in London. She regularly contributes to the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, PureWow, and TripSavvy, and is the author of two books. Follow her on Twitter @emilyzemler.
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