Hacks Costume Designer Kathleen Felix-Hager Gave Deborah Great Resortwear—Too Bad She's Incapable of Relaxation
Can one be miserable in both a caftan and a turban? Workaholic Deborah Vance finds a way.
[Editor’s note: Some spoilers below for the Season 4 finale of Hacks.]
In one of the many life-imitating-art moments in Season 4 of Hacks, we see Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) standing in front of a full-length mirror, wearing two different dangling earrings to judge which looks better with her blue dress. Those big earrings are as much a part of Deborah’s look as her updo—and they can be as difficult to decide upon IRL as they are in Deborah’s Late Night dressing room.
“Jean doesn't have pierced ears, so they're all clips,” Emmy-winning costume designer Kathleen Felix-Hager says. “So it's a kind of a process to find them. I do a lot of vintage shopping, and we'll find beautiful earrings and convert them to clips because there's just not that many available.” And after four seasons, “We have a lovely collection of earrings for her.”
Hacks has undergone many shifts in its four seasons—from Deborah Vance as a washed-up Vegas act to a Netflix sensation to now the queen of late night TV—but Season 4 pulls all the threads together, costume-wise, as both Deborah and Ava’s (Hannah Einbinder) clothes begin to evolve (and devolve) to indicate their new levels of success.
“Deborah’s first late-night show was a pantsuit, a little different silhouette than we've seen from her before,” Felix-Hager says. “But [Jean] and I talked about moving it more into dresses, so that was fun to explore the colorful world of all those dresses. And then at the end [of Episode 9], when she's in that black dress with the gold fringe, at that moment she's embracing her femininity and her power. So when she makes the decision [to end the show], it's a little bit more heartbreaking. We liked the idea of her starting out in pants and then ending up in that really sexy, feminine dress. So we knew that's where we would end up. But the in-between was fun too.”
That costume story is paralleled with Ava’s, which finds her moving even further from the uncertainty of Season 1 to embracing her power as head writer. “We see her tentatively, begrudgingly stepping into adulthood in this season,” Felix-Hager says. “And certainly her clothes are a big part of that. She's got some money now, so she's investing in some pieces. She's ditched that brown leather backpack she's had for four seasons, and she has a Louis Vuitton tote now. Subtle changes, and she looks a little bit more grown up.”
Those subtle changes seem momentous in Episode 10, when both Ava and Deborah revert to their pre-Late Night selves to devastating results. Lured by the promise of a free vacation in Hawaii, Ava wakes up from her pill-induced plane nap to discover they’ve landed in Singapore—and Deborah has found a loophole that will allow her to perform. She’ll perform in English, and a translator will repeat her jokes to the audience.
“First of all, filming in Singapore was the most amazing experience,” Felix-Hager says. “I just wanted to make the most of both Deborah and Ava in sort of vacation mode. She has this crazy show that she's doing but not doing. And all those costumes were very much a throwback to Deborah Vance Season 1. When she's on stage, she's just given up. She’s not trying anything new. She thinks she’s still doing what she loves, but it's not authentic to who she really is. So we really wanted to represent that in what she was wearing onstage in Singapore. But all her vacation wear—she's in the pool in a caftan. She's got turbans. And then to see Deborah's slow unraveling and meltdown in Singapore, where she's drinking too much, she's partying too much. One of my favorite scenes of the whole show is her dancing drunk on the roof. I could have watched a whole hour of that, to tell you the truth.”
Kathleen Felix-Hager earned an Emmy Award and a CDG Award for her work on Hacks. Her other credits include Veep, Judging Amy, and the upcoming The Paper. Her go-to at craft services? “I'm a salty girl, so normally if I do crafty, I'll grab a little bag of pretzel twists and I'll put some cashews or almonds in it, because then I feel like it's like a little protein and a little salty crunch.” All episodes of Hacks Season 4 are now streaming.