AMC’s Mad Men returned on 25 March 2012 with a two-hour premiere, “A Little Kiss”, and the clothes did as much talking as the script. The fifth season opens on Memorial Day 1966 and runs into the spring of 1967. That puts Madison Avenue exactly where the sixties stopped being an extension of the fifties.
Luxos wrote about the premiere at the time, and the note the magazine kept was a wardrobe one: Don Draper’s retro apartment as a set for the season’s style, and Megan Draper’s performance of “Zou Bisou Bisou” in a pleated black mini dress with bell-bottom sleeves. The piece then ran a slideshow of the trends the season was reviving, captioned vintage clothing, Prada spring/summer 2012 and Fendi spring/summer 2012.
The person responsible for the look is Janie Bryant, who dressed Mad Men for its whole run from 2007 to 2015 and had already won the Emmy for outstanding costumes in 2005, for Deadwood. She was nominated four times for Mad Men.
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What makes the show a shopping guide rather than a costume drama is that Bryant kept turning the research into things you could buy. She designed a limited-edition Mad Men suit with Brooks Brothers, a Back to Work line with Banana Republic, and foundation garments with Maidenform. That last one is the unglamorous part of the silhouette, and the part that makes a sixties dress hang correctly.
The influence ran upwards too. Michael Kors, Prada and Vera Wang have all named her work as a key influence on the return of vintage-inspired pieces to contemporary collections. That is why a Prada or Fendi look from spring 2012 sat comfortably next to a still from the show.
The practical lesson is the underwear, not the outerwear. Buy the suit with the higher rise and the narrower lapel, have it taken in at the waist rather than the shoulder, and for the dresses start underneath. The sixties silhouette is engineered from the inside out, and everything on the outside is downstream of that.
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