Costume designer Mekel Bailey gave the costumes in Baby Reindeer some serious weight. The tragic comedy or thriller, whatever genre you want to place it into, had an air of melancholy and pain even apparent in the costumes. Maybe that sadness is most evident in the Baby Reindeer suit Donny (played by creator Richard Gadd) wears on stage.
For Bailey, though, the costume represented strength. Recently the costume designer spoke with editor-in-chief Jack Giroux about the costume and broke it down for Immersive Media:
It was meant to have many pockets in it, and it was meant to be very oversized. We played a lot with the shape. So, where it was the big shoulders, we went in and we went out and we went in and out. There was a lot of trying to understand what do we want this suit to say and how do we want to articulate that to the audience? So, then we lost the pockets. Then it was more about the shape of the shoulders.
So you’ll see it does slightly come out, and then it more kind of fitted around the body and then just making sure that the broken down a bit. When you look at it closely in certain episodes, you’ll see it is fraying at the cuffs, it’s broken down on the back, and there’s a bit of stain.
This suit is his safe place. He feels like a superman, because when he’s on stage as a comedian, that’s where he becomes his true self and he feels most free. When you take it off, then we reveal the true Donny.
Yeah, no offense, I remember when we first got that suit made, I was just like, this is going to be iconic. I remember certain days being on certain sets of locations, and I remember there was this scene where we were in Brixton shooting with the red and the green above the stores, and he was walking past with the suitcase, and I still got this picture on my phone. I was like, ‘Richard, stop. Lemme just take a picture of you.’ It was just amazing. So to see that suit, and then we played with the different color shirts underneath, so you got the pink, the yellow, the blue, and the green. All of those different colors depended on where he was at a state of himself as well.
Baby Reindeer is available to stream on Netflix.
