The costumes Negar Ali designed for ‘Nobody Wants This,’ a new Netflix series set in LA, were thoughtfully curated to make the show’s characters fit seamlessly into life in Southern California. At the end of spring the Jacaranda trees in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles explode into bloom. For a month or so, clouds of purple blossoms float low in the June sky. There are more than 30,000 of these trees in Los Angeles. They are an institution, just like the thin eucalyptus forests that rise with the roads twisting through the canyons, or the cantilevered hillside homes, ubiquitous in SoCal ever since Buck Stahl hired Pierre Koenig to build a house.
I was talking about all of this with costume designer Negar Ali. She met with me to discuss her latest project, designing wardrobes for the characters in Netflix’s new romantic comedy series Nobody Wants This. “We wanted to make sure it felt authentic to LA,” Ali explained to me. Institutions, I learned, were an important consideration on the production end of the show. Instead of creating characters to inhabit a world built, Ali and her team made fictional characters who could be seamlessly inserted into the real world. “We made sure to include local LA designers,” Ali told me, “it helped us to be specific to the place.”
Without giving anything away, Nobody Wants This is a romantic comedy about the very beginning of an interfaith relationship. Set in southern California’s San Fernando Valley, the story revolves around Joanne (Kristen Bell, flawless) and Noah (Adam Brody, adorable). Soon, Joanne’s sister Morgan (Justine Lupe, lovely; you will remember her from Succession) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Timothy Simons, brilliant; Veep), become friends. Soon, things begin happening and characters develop. Created and written by Erin Foster, the story was loosely inspired by her own experiences dating a Jewish man and later converting her own religion and marrying him. Though Joanne’s and Foster’s lives diverge basically from the start, it is clear from the opening scene that the subject is personal.
When we meet Joanne and Morgan, we learn that they co-host and produce an up-and-coming podcast about life as a single lady in LA, which is finally beginning to get some traction, interest from a corporate entity is growing. “Even in that very first podcast scene,” Ali told me, “Joanne is wearing a pair of Jesse Kamm army-green pants, she’s an LA designer. The gray sweatsuit when Joanne is trying to help the dog, it's from a brand called Hey Gang. There’s a scene where Morgan's on the phone with Joanne and she has a Casa Vega t-shirt on.” Using as many Los Angeles designers as she could, Ali built wardrobes for a wide range of characters from the devoutly religious to the cheekily self-proclaimed shiksas. They all feel like real people. Audiences will know that any of the characters they see on screen would obviously have these exact clothes in their closets at home.
“Joanne for us was a really exciting character to design,” Ali told me. “She's a multifaceted woman. She lives out loud, she’s fearless and very conscious of the way that she presents herself to the world. We knew that we could have a lot of fun with her.” Because the character is so interested in fashion, this show offered an unusual opportunity.
“In costume design,” Ali explained, “we don't usually approach projects thinking about trends in fashion. But in this case, Joanne and Morgan are fashion girls, and that was really exciting for me to think about.” Joanne cares about how she looks, she enjoys clothing and feeling good in an outfit she really likes. She likes drawing attention, but she is not flashy or loud. She wears beautiful pieces. And if she feels vulnerable, Joanne will choose an outfit that she loves and wear it like armor. “Things that typically wouldn't make sense,” Ali told me, “Joanne pulls them off because she has this inherent sense of who she is and how she wants to present the world.”
Our leading lady likes layers of woven chains. Every piece feels personal, probably because of how purposefully Ali approaches the task of flushing out her character’s wardrobes. “Everything has been designed in the frame,” she told me. “Nothing is by accident, everything is intentional.” If you watch the jewelry, you’ll see Joanne wearing her favorite pieces over and over, of course styled to go with whatever else she is wearing. One is a necklace with a charm of the initial ‘J,’ made by LA jewelry designer Adina Reyter. “We wanted Joanne to have this personal stack of jewelry,” Ali explained, “All the women I know, have jewelry that they like to wear every single day. They have this thing that feels really personal to them. It's collected. We wanted Joanne to have pieces that she wore throughout the whole season.”
Noah, her love interest, Adam Brody, personifies the Cute Rabbi archetype throughout the season. Sweaters over button down shirts, shawl collars, lightweight blazers; its a look Ali worked with Brody to achieve. “Adam had a lot of input with his character, he saw Noah as a historian. [Brody] has this natural elegance, and his character is someone very much revered in his community.” Conscious that she was designing a religious figure, Ali worked with a rabbi from the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. “We were so careful in making sure that we got all the nuanced things right,” Ali told me. The rabbi was available to us for any questions. And he was incredible, so generous with his time. We really wanted to make sure that what we were depicting was authentic.”
This story often highlights the differences in perception that exist between two parties in possession of very different world views. “We decided,” Ali told me, “right in the research phase, that Joanne was going to be in these poppy, bright colors, pinks and reds and yellows. Noah and the Roklov family would be in these beautiful jewel tones to delineate between these two worlds.” At its heart, Nobody Wants This is a misnomer, because when the two worlds collide, the palettes accentuate the best parts of each other. In the first episode, Joanne impulsively decides to walk into a Shabbat (Sabbath) service. She’s in an all red outfit, a cropped cardigan and matching pants.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about that particular costume, Ali told me. “In that scene, she's meant to be a fish out of water, we wanted her to pop. [Joanne is] the ‘other’ in that moment. Very intentionally, we muted the background costumes so that she would be the only one really in this bright color so he can not only notice her in the congregation, also have it be moment where [Noah’s mother, the incredible Tovah Feldshuh] Bina sees her and Joanne is this lady in red. It's this moment, I think it was scripted.”
Morgan and Sasha, who the latter labels “the loser siblings,” develop a friendship of their own as the relationship between our main characters grows. For many of the other characters in this series, clothing and accessories have meaning. The connection that is possible between a person and their closet, it can be a wonderful thing. When you love clothes, sometimes you stay home instead of going out, just to play dress-up in your own closet. It’s easy to imagine Morgan and Joanne doing that together, they probably have done so a hundred times. All these little details build and together, the story does feel authentic.
Morgan is the taller sibling, as is her counterpart Sasha, Rabbi Noah’s brother. Loup was pregnant during some of the filming. I seriously did not know this until I asked Ali about the boxy garments. Which I will make a point of saying, looked gorgeous on Loups long, lean frame. As I have argued here many times before, what the characters are wearing matters. This is a great example of how good clothing and excellent costume design helps all of us suspend that disbelief.
Though I’d rather borrow from a different closet for myself, in many ways, what Sasha Roklov wore was my favorite wardrobe on screen. “We have to talk about Sasha,” Ali said, “Sasha was so much fun. [Simons] is such a comedic talent.” As his family’s loser sibling, Sasha is used to being overshadowed by his brother who always manages to do everything the way he was supposed to. Sasha would like to be taken seriously. “There’s a casualness that permeates menswear in LA, where men wear very expensive hoodies and very expensive sneakers.” The Roklov family is well-off, they wear beautiful clothing, but Sasha? “He’s very much influenced by streetwear. We thought that that fit his character.”
There is a dark red color, Roklov Red, Ali named it, which arcs a line connecting the members of this family. Sasha has a sweatsuit in this color, his parents wear it, later in the series his daughter Miriam has a dress made in the same tone. That story is too good to explain, it’s more fun to watch as it unfolds on screen. The clothing in this series does exactly what we want costumes to do; they bring characters to life, helping us to see them as real people.
“It might not be something we outright said,” Ali told me, “but clothing is such a perfect vessel for communication. We're all asking questions of ourselves. With Joanne, I think that we see that conflict in her choices, one of them being her wardrobe choices. She makes the decision that is right for her, and then she swings wide.”
