Dress in the Original “Twin Peaks”
How do you design a costume for a world out of time? It’s a question sci-fi and fantasy costume designers have been answering since 1902, when what is commonly considered the first sci-fi film, Le Voyage Dans le Lune, was released. In it, the characters dress in clothes that would be considered outlandish were it not a fantasy — Greco-Roman dresses, fish-inspired suits like something you would see in Atlantis. Since then, popular media has built a canon around certain forms of sci-fi and fantasy dress, with much of it influenced by descriptions in the novels that originated the genres, and all of it compounding on one another. Dress in Star Wars brought in the space-cowboy concept, which can be seen in more modern contemporaries like Joss Whedon’s television show Firefly. Sci-fi has an aesthetic bible of shiny robots, space suits of all sorts, western- and East Asian-inspired garb to provide a sense of foreign place. Fantasy films like Lord of the Rings and The Princess Bride almost always borrow their clothing from Medieval-to-Renaissance styles, complete with corsetted dresses for women and jodhpurs for men.
But how do you design a wardrobe for a world that needs to appear modern and not completely out of time, but significantly and distinctly disconnected from it? Patricia Norris, Academy-Award winning costume designer for a number of American classics such as Scarface, Silent Movie, and eventually Twelve Years a Slave (her final project) had to determine the answer to that question for David Lynch in his pilot of Twin Peaks. Although Norris won a Primetime Emmy in Outstanding Costume Design for a Series off of it, it was Sara Miller who carried the torch of costume design through the entirety of the show’s two seasons from 1990–1991. Her work on the show, following and expanding on Norris’s blueprint, helped make the world of Twin Peaks one of the most iconic television-series aesthetics of all time.
Miller — who was the lone person in the costume department on set, save for the first 8 episodes where she was joined by Nancy Konrardy — successfully depicted a small-town feel while making it heavily apparent that the town of Twin Peaks, Washington, was unlike any other. Furthermore, by heavily encoding the way the characters, (in particular Sherilynn Fenn’s Audrey Horne, Lara Flynn Boyle’s Donna Hayward, and Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer,) dressed throughout the series, she managed to depict character development through a gradation of retro and modern styles. David Lynch is absolutely notorious for imbuing everything in his work from costume to furniture with symbolism, and Miller was able to carry out and add to Lynch’s vision in a way that would be credited as “iconic” for decades to come.
Laura Palmer
Perhaps the most omnipresent character, albeit the one who shows up in corporeal form the least, Laura Palmer is the perfect, popular high school girl, whose bad side and secret life are only revealed after she is found “dead, wrapped in plastic” by Pete Martell on the shores of Twin Peaks. That is how we first see Palmer, and the only way we see her in the present day: deceased, naked except for the fact that she is wrapped in clear, bloody plastic tarp contoured around her body with masking tape. Her face and lips are blue, with something sparkly around her slicked-back blonde hairline, but her expression appears very, serenely, dead. This image of her, the first we see, is in direct contrast to the photograph of her from her homecoming dance that appears and reappears throughout the series — in it, she’s smiling, wearing an updo with a neatly embedded tiara. A white, strapless sweetheart neckline just barely peeks out above the bottom of the frame. From the little we see of the dress, it seems to be in keeping with the style of the day. Laura Palmer was, after all the “ideal” at her early ’90s high school.
We see Palmer twice more: In a video of a picnic obtained by the police department, and in the Red Room (the extradimensional waiting room between the Black and White Lodges) that Agent Dale Cooper eventually visits in a dream. In the video, which we later find out was taken by her (consistently-styled) biker paramour James Hurley, she’s with her best friend Donna, and unmistakably dressed like a “cooler” inverse version of her. Donna’s grey, flat, just below the knee skirt is ill-fitting, particularly when paired with her grey, cream, wine, and pine-colored argyle cardigan and matching pine shirt underneath. Laura’s pine, wine, and grey schoolgirl-pleated skirt fits well over her grey tights, her equally grey mock-neck sweater layered perfectly with a plain pine cardigan. The two girls are dressed in very similar outfits with the exact same color palette, but Laura pulls hers off, as it appears very on-trend in a grungy way — Donna doesn’t. Instead she looks genuinely behind the times, like she threw on a mixture of her father and mother’s 1970s clothing. This further cements Laura’s place as the queen bee, with Donna below her.
In the other appearances Laura makes, in the Red Room, she wears a fitted black velvet dress with a plunging v neckline and relatively demure slit up the side of her leg. In the center of dress, at the bottom of the neckline, sits a golden, bejeweled brooch, the significance of which is still unknown. This dress is timeless, reminiscent of a film noir femme fatale, and could be said to be Laura in her “ultimate” form, which makes sense as it’s her last form, the form she theoretically will stay in forever. In it, she looks like an adult (although she is still only supposed to be 17,) and the dress truly transcends era — it would have been equally viable in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s for the role it played.
Donna Hayward
Donna Hayward, Laura’s aforementioned best friend, enters the series looking particularly frumpy. She’s meant to be the nerdy, quiet girl, the one who listened to Laura’s secrets but never had any of her own. She first appears wearing tan leather slouchy boots and a tan and black tartan classic flat collared shirt, with an ankle-length, baggy crimson skirt and loose duotone salmon and burgundy cardigan. She’s not wearing any jewelry. This contrasts the sultry and put together Audrey Horne, whom we are introduced to a second later as the two share neighboring lockers. As mentioned before, the one time Hayward is seen with Laura, she’s clearly depicted as being similar but inferior.
Once she becomes aware of Laura’s death, Donna’s style begins to change along with her character’s personality. She gets involved with James Hurley, Laura’s lover mentioned earlier, and they begin to try to solve the mystery of Laura’s death together. While we watch Hayward learn she didn’t know much about her best friend, we also watch the initially-frumpy teen try to become her.
This is exacerbated by the arrival of Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s cousin (also portrayed by Sheryl Lee) from the big city of Missoula, Montana into Twin Peaks for Laura’s funeral. Maddy is older than Laura, but the two were close growing up, and are identical save for Maddy’s brown hair. Maddy falls in with James and Donna, and her connection with James and similarity in appearance to Laura is a threat to Donna’s newfound identity. Because she feels as though she is being beaten out by Maddy for the affections of James due to Maddy’s similarities to Laura (she continually catches them in compromising positions,) she doubles down on adopting the traits of her deceased best friend, even picking up smoking. After Maddy is found murdered, James leaves, although Donna remains faithful to him and eventually saves him from death. It’s later revealed that Donna is the illegitimate daughter of Ben Horne, Audrey Horne’s father, and her identity crisis seems to stop there. Although Donna can’t be called nerdy anymore, she no longer wishes to be the “bad girl.”
Audrey Horne
The first time we get a good look at Audrey Horne, who some would consider the female protagonist of the series as well as Laura Palmer’s foil, she is slipping off black and white saddle shoes and putting on red patent leather pumps, smoking inside her locker. Her skirt, a brown, pleated, knee-length gridded number, fits her perfectly — as well as the tight baby-pink mock-neck sweater and diamond earrings she’s wearing. Her curly black hair, cut above her ears in a poodle cut, black eyeliner, red lipstick, and saddle shoes (although she is changing out of them) give her the classic look of a 1950’s sex symbol — she maintains this look throughout the series. But with her school outfit included, she looks more like a fashion icon of the 1970s than she does an early-1990s department store owner’s daughter, which is what she is supposed to be. Notably, she’s not “grunge” like many of her classmates; the way that she wears the clothes that would on other people be considered grunge is in the “classic” style they were worn in originally.
When Audrey Horne first meets Dale Cooper, the male protagonist, she’s in a white button-down sweater with black tree branches decorating it, tucked into a black knee-length pencil skirt. The outfit in its totality is very reminiscent of Jackie O, style icon of the 1960s. In this scene, Audrey bites her lip often, and asks “do you like my ring?” as a way of flirting when she sits down with Cooper, a nod to her knowledge of how she dresses. He’s significantly older than she is — ultimately the reason they can’t be together, as they become love interests — but she portrays herself as older, not just here (where it serves her) but throughout the series. She bounces between mid-century schoolgirl and mid-century working girl, and is almost always wearing red lipstick and jet-black eyeliner.
Audrey Horne carries on with this style of dress — tight sweaters, 1950s and 1960s inspired skirts, often saddle shoes but occasionally heels — for the duration of the series. The exception to this rule is when she applies to work at One Eyed Jack’s, a brothel and casino (owned by her father and uncle) just across the border in Canada. To impress the madame who runs the place and selects the girls to work there, Blackie O’Reilly, Horne drastically changes up her style. For this occasion, she opts for a sleeveless, plain black, knee-length bodycon dress with a grecian-style plunge neckline. This dress serves two purposes. It makes her look sexy, as someone auditioning for a brothel should look. However, it also takes away her signature Audrey Horne style, making her further indistinguishable to O’Reilly, who has never seen her before but may know how to spot Audrey Horne out-of-disguise, as Audrey’s father does have dealings with O’Reilly. This dress, much like Laura’s, is in keeping with noir-style femme fatale clothing. It should be noted, however, that Audrey is donning this dress at her audition for the brothel that Laura worked at prior to her death. While this dress is a manifestation of Audrey trying to start living a life of “mystery and international intrigue,” as she puts it, Laura’s femme fatale-style dress comes after all of the mystery in her life has taken place. This juxtaposition is a constant one between Audrey and Laura: the innocent girl who wants a mysterious and troublemaking life and portrays herself as a rebel, vs. the mysterious, troublemaking, and rebellious Laura Palmer, who successfully portrayed herself publicly as innocent until she was murdered. “We weren’t friends,” Audrey once tells Agent Cooper about Laura, “But I understood her better than the rest.”
Other Townspeople
The three leading women of Twin Peaks, are, of course, not the only people through whom style is used to portray uniqueness in character. The uniforms at the Double R Diner, where Laura Palmer once worked alongside Shelly Johnson and owner Norma Jennings, are classic blue and white 1940s-style waitress uniforms, equipped with pinafore and all. This is outdated for a small-town diner, as these are usually casual establishments — even in the early 1990s. The outfits, however, are used to portray the relative public innocence of the three women who worked at the diner: Shelly, who is abused at home by her husband Leo and cheats on him with Laura’s “official” boyfriend Bobby; Laura; and Norma, who is the high school sweetheart and illicit lover of “Big Ed” Hurley, and whose “homicidal and jealous husband, who is doing 3–5 for manslaughter” returns from jail about halfway through the series.
The men of Twin Peaks have less variation and symbolism in their outfits. Agent Dale Cooper wears a suit daily, sometimes with a camel-colored trench coat, with the exception of when he wears a Tuxedo upon his visit to One-Eyed Jack’s. Sheriff Harry Truman can usually be found in his sheriff’s outfit, sometimes with a flannel over, with the same exception as Agent Cooper for One-Eyed Jack’s. Ben Horne and Leland Palmer (Laura’s father) wear suits. The two “bad boys” of the series, Bobby Briggs and James Hurley, both wear leather jackets — Bobby’s is a letterman jacket from the football team. James, the biker wears a motorcycle jacket. The people who work at the sheriff’s station wear their law-enforcement uniforms. All of the other notable men wear the same general outfits of button-down work shirt or flannel and jeans depending on the day. It’s a small town in Washington in the early ’90s, and it looks like one.
Conclusion
The distinctive color palette of Twin Peaks, which is generally filled with the earthy, warm, and rustic tones one would expect of a town in the middle of the forest in Northern Washington, is almost solely interrupted to make a point about some character. This can be credited to David Lynch, as he had his hands in every part of the project. As stated earlier, he is notoriously specific, and as director and producer, he created the town of Twin Peaks. However, it should as much be credited to Patricia Norris and then Sara Miller, who were able to interpret David Lynch’s vision and then expand it into wardrobes for each character. As time went on in the series, the people changed, and Sara Miller took their emotional and psychological changes and interpreted them in costume. What is amazing about this, however, is that the costuming that took place over two seasons, particularly that of Audrey Horne, has had a lasting influence on the generations since.
The costuming also created, in part, the sense that Twin Peaks was a town somewhere outside our own world, one where anything mystical could happen. As the series progresses and the supernatural becomes more integrated, the story remains believable to the extent it can be. This is because, from the get-go, through costume, Twin Peaks is set apart from the rest of the world in the early 90s. It doesn’t experience the progression of time, of fashion, in the same way the rest of the world does. It doesn’t deign to. The integration of styles from the 1940s-1990s individualizes each person and their narrative, playing on both tropes we’ve seen before and new ones to create a strong sense of place. But the viewer is left with the sense that place isn’t in Washington, at least not really. It’s somewhere else — somewhere steeped in magic our world can’t access. The town of Twin Peaks.
