‘Beef’ Season Two Costume Designer on the ‘Fantasy’ of Montecito Style

The inner machinations of a Montecito country club were a completely different world than what costume designer Olga Mill was used to. But as the backdrop for Season Two of “Beef,” the setting served as “the perfect place to look at class and the tension that’s there,” Mill said in an exclusive interview with WWD.

The costume designer spoke about the quiet luxury brands and style inspiration that helped craft the Emmy Award-winning anthology series’ latest season, starring Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac as Lindsay and Josh, a seemingly affluent couple blackmailed by conflicted and aspirational Ashley and Austin, played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton.

Mill took an anthropological approach to crafting the visual language of “Beef” Season Two. “I started to notice that East Coast country clubs have a very specific aesthetic — it’s more academic, it has its own color palette, there’s something collegiate about it,” Mill said. “And then I had a preconceived idea of country clubs that felt very southern. That are really pastel and saccharin-y and colorful, wardrobe-wise.”

The country club in “Beef” Season Two, where Isaac’s Josh serves as general manager and characters Ashley and Austin work, includes those pastel tones — pinks and blues, along with muted greens. “The aesthetic is reaching for a much more relaxed pastoral vibe that then led me to a ‘Marie Antoinette in a shepherd’s garden.’ It really felt like there was a through-line between Montecito and that kind of concept of playing house but in the country.”

Mill’s concept also extended to the staff, curating a collection of forest green pieces with khakis and tennis skirts that nodded to the country club ecosystem. “I think there’s something about that world that wants to feel like, yes this is staff, but we’re all friends here,” Mill said, adding that characters on staff had to feel like “a nonproblematic family. They’re not going to have any or want anything from you but you also don’t have to feel like you’re paying for them,” Mill said. “That’s the fantasy you’re buying into.”

With that inspiration in mind, Mill crafted a wardrobe for club members that channels “how casual and seemingly relaxed” people could be, a type of quiet luxury that’s also featured with interior designer Lindsay and Josh. “They’re in this world but they’re not really of it,” Mill said of the leading characters at the center of Season Two’s conflict.

“They’re kind of master assimilators, is how we thought of it. Lindsay knows how to hang with a group of these women that are club members and visually fit in. Same thing with Josh.” The luxury of shooting on location in Montecito meant Mill had access to brands like Heidi Merrick, Jenni Kayne and Agua Bendita, among others, to curate these characters’ closets.

Mimicry was a key message Mill wanted to send audiences regarding the characters’ interior worlds personified through their clothes. But when it came to a contrasting wardrobe of aspirational couple Austin and Ashley, played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny, the conflict between Gen Z and Millennial dressing was key. “I kind of wanted to go deeper than your Millennial, Gen Z tropes — crew socks versus ankle socks, skinny jeans versus wide-leg jeans,” Mill said.

What Austin and Ashley’s costumes ultimately boiled down to was a type of “optimization. It’s artisanal but it’s specific,” Mill said. “It’s like the California wealth aesthetic of casual versus a Gen Z prioritization of authenticity and turning their back on consumerism.”

For Spaeny’s Ashley, though, aspirational dressing and that mimicry displayed by Mulligan and Isaac’s characters is enhanced with the 26-year-old country club employee’s wardrobe changes as her character evolves through the season.

From her country club uniform and her basic black T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, hair down Gen Z attire, to business casual wardrobe and more signifiers of status, “Ashley is a character who we talked about being quite ungrounded,” Mill said. “What does somebody like that dress like? And it made be like, oh well they’re so influenced by the people around them.”

These decisions aren’t “just random acts of clothing,” Mill said. “The clothing choices are in conversation with the script. Obviously the script is always guiding it, but there’s room to [play].”

Having worked on projects set contemporaneously, Mill often found the affluent Montecito setting “more challenging” than any period drama. “Everybody does have a much stronger relationship with clothing,” Mill said. “Any kind of world or character you’re trying to decode and figure out, there’s an idea that if it’s contemporary it’s all inherently at your fingertips. I don’t mean the physical objects but what to do with it — we all get dressed, we move through the world, we interact with clothes, we judge each other by what we’re wearing.”

Judgement, aesthetic choices and the politics of presentation all crop up with Mill’s costume design in “Beef” Season Two, now on Netflix.