The Netflix series’ co-costume designer Laura Frecon, whose credits include Mad Men and Kong: Skull Island, believes fashion and image was essential to Delvey’s effectiveness in duping individuals and institutions alike. “How Anna did what she did is beyond me,” she told me on a call, “but I don’t think it would have worked if she hadn’t looked the part through her clothes, her jewellery, her glasses. She needed to sell that story and say, I am wealthy. I am a German heiress.”
Frecon, who worked with co-costume designer Lyn Paolo (TV shows Little Fires Everywhere, Scandal) aimed to recreate many of Anna and the other characters’ looks exactly, which required detective work. “We started by going to Anna’s Instagram,” she recalled, “We would look at the pictures and say, ‘who is that person next to her?’ and of course they were all tagged so then I would go down that person’s Instagram and then that person’s Instagram, and we just dove deep into who they were.”
Frecon and Paolo also aimed to match the clothes Delvey wore for her 2019 trial. (Of course there’s an Instagram account called @annadelveycourtlooks, because anything that’s anything gets its own account now: Call it a virtual blue plaque.)
Her courtroom-as-catwalk ensembles included her signature baby-doll dresses in black, swiss-dot cream cotton and snake print; a black pencil dress, and black trousers with a beige jumper, mainly accessorised with an oddly Victorian black ribbon choker and heavy black Celine glasses.
