Art & Crafts is Ankler Media’s series that goes behind the scenes with the artisans who create the film and TV we love. This conversation is sponsored by Paramount+.
Taylor Sheridan was so sure that costume designer Emma Potter would find a creative spark in his new drama series The Madison that he didn’t so much as ask her to be part of the Paramount+ show; he insisted.
After Potter finished work in Texas on another of Sheridan’s Paramount+ series, Landman, she returned home to California and had about a month of free time. Then, Sheridan called.
“You’re gonna love the costumes on The Madison,” Sheridan told her. “And I was like, ‘Yes, I am’,” Potter says. “‘Okay, tell me more.’”
It was during that “incredibly inspiring conversation,” Potter adds, that Sheridan explained in detail his vision for the emotional drama about Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer), the matriarch of a rich New York family who is forced to temporarily relocate to Montana after the death of her husband, Preston (played by Kurt Russell).
“Taylor talked about the female leads within the story and how important they were to him, and how costumes and clothing were going to play a part in this story,” Potter says. His energy and excitement for the project were contagious, she adds, as was “the idea of working with Michelle Pfeiffer to really use costumes to track emotional transition of what’s going on in her journey.”
Created and written by Sheridan — with all six episodes directed by his longtime collaborator, Christina Alexandra Voros (Yellowstone) — The Madison is unlike anything the prolific writer behind Yellowstone and its spinoffs (Dutton Ranch, 1883, 1923 and Marshals) has done before. Rather than adding a crime element to its narrative, The Madison is a family drama about overcoming grief. The series focuses on Stacy and her adult children, Abigail and Paige (Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman, respectively), as they piece back together their lives following the sudden death of Preston, who is killed in a plane crash with his brother, Paul (Matthew Fox), in the show’s first episode. (Russell appears throughout the season in flashbacks to conversations with Pfeiffer’s Stacy.)
“We talked about the idea that Michelle was gonna stay in a very neutral palette with a lot of navy in it as well, and not really lean into black for her,” says Potter of how Stacy manifested her grief through wardrobe choices. Potter — who earned an Emmy nomination for her work on Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty and has also worked on Perry Mason and True Detective — forged a close collaboration with Pfeiffer throughout. “We were going to feel her journey the most within the clothes.”
Potter did plenty of research for The Madison to flesh out its two worlds — the New York upper-class realm where Stacy and her family are based when the show starts, and the down-to-earth locales of Montana where they wind up. She studied Manhattan fashion photography on Instagram and tried to source popular brands — and then did the same for Montana, working with companies like Simms (known for its fishing clothes and apparel) and Filson (which provided Preston’s fleece-lined utility shacket that Stacy takes as her own).
“When she got to Montana and was starting to interact with the space that her husband had left behind, there was a note in there about putting on his jacket,” Potter says. “I just really connected with that journey because it was such a tactile experience with clothing.”
Due to scheduling, Russell wasn’t available to shoot season one of The Madison with the rest of the cast — his scenes were filmed with the show’s second season, set to debut next year. That meant Potter had to fit Preston’s jacket on Pfeiffer first and hope that Russell would respond to the choice. (He did.)
“For me, it was listening to what guidance Taylor had provided — either in conversation or within the script — and then imagining how it would translate into Preston’s wardrobe,” she says about finding the right jacket for both Preston and Stacy. “We were building this closet of pieces for him, and we found the perfect jacket.”
All episodes of The Madison are streaming on Paramount+.
