Costume Designer Jeriana San Juan Unfolds ‘The Plot Against America’ Fashions Ahead Of The Finale

After five weeks of mounting tension, HBO’s adaptation of The Plot Against America will come to a close tonight with its sixth and final episode.

Created by Ed Burns and David Simon, the miniseries (based on the 2004 novel of the same name by Philip Roth) presents an alternate timeline of historical events where pilot Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the presidential election of 1940. Exercising his famously xenophobic and isolationist political ideologies, Lindbergh blames the Jews for the conflict in Europe and allies the United States with Hitler’s Germany.

All of the president’s drastic shifts in policy lead to a growing movement against America’s Jewish population, something the audience witnesses through the eyes of the Levins, a small Jewish family from Newark, New Jersey.

To help ring in the last episode, I asked the miniseries’ costume designer, Jeriana San Juan (The Sinner), to break down the clothing worn by all seven of the main characters: Herman Levin (Morgan Spector); Bess Levin (Zoe Kazan); Philip Levin (Azhy Robertson); Sandy Levin (Caleb Malis); Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro); Evelyn Finkel (Winona Ryder); and Alvin Levin (Anthony Boyle).

For over a month, we’ve welcomed them into our homes each week, so it’s time to see what their outfits say about their personalities.

Drawing on Norman Rockwell, Helen Levitt, and the American Jewish Historical Society for inspiration, Jeriana strove for a great deal of authenticity when designing the project’s different fashions. The show’s story may be set in a parallel dimension somewhere within the multiverse but its style of dress is firmly rooted in our own reality.

Josh Weiss: Let’s start with Herman since he is head of the Levin household. What went into dressing him?

Jeriana San Juan: Morgan himself is a very fit guy, he’s strapped and fit to be a superhero character if he wanted to play a character in a Marvel movie. We really had to kind of cheat certain things with helping fill him out a bit and helping clothes hang off his body, so he looked a little bit softer and a little less strapping. 

We worked together on how he could support the clothes by holding his posture a little bit saggier. I used a beautiful pair of vintage Brogues on him; shoes that I would imagine Herman would have gotten polished hundreds of times; that are worse for the wear, but are continuing to be maintained very well. That, to me, was the keystone into finding his character.

I offered to buy him a new pair and [wear] them down, but when we found a really old vintage pair, they were slightly uncomfortable and his feet were very close to the ground and he actually really loved that because he felt more like Herman living in those shoes.

JW: Then we have Bess, who is Herman’s partner in crime so-to-speak. How did you want to dress her as the strong co-leader of the Levin family?

JSJ: Bess wears a house dress through the majority of the story and in this house dress, I really wanted to reflect both that warm and sunny Norman Rockwell palette. I wanted her to really feel and reflect all of those notions of mom and that she was sweet and still had a great figure. [Zoe] has these beautiful and powerful blue eyes that she was gonna do so much expression through. In making her house dress, I was very careful to custom dye the fabric the right shade of yellow and then we went back in and I painted little blue and yellow flowers into her house dress. 

Then I took some smocking, and this is based on an actual antique 1940s house dress that we found … and had it custom done in the same color as her eyes. So that when you look at her character, these blue little notions in the embroidery really draw you back towards her eyes.

JW: The character of Philip is based on Roth himself, and it’s through him that we come to understand parts of this terrifying new reality. In what way did you capture Phillip’s innocence through his costumes?

JSJ: It was really important for me to present him as a quintessentially American young boy; that I tie a lot of sentimentality around him visually, so that people really felt for this young character and connected to him.

There’s a book that’s about the photography that Norman Rockwell did in his studio in order to dress people, stage people to photograph them and then later illustrate them into his book … I went to those original photographs that Normal Rockwell painted from and there were images in there of some boys in these very thin ringer collars that were kind of stretched out and thin little stripes and T-shirts.

I took from those things directly and had some vintage striped T-shirts knitted up for Philip and created some baseball caps that were straight out of Saturday Evening Post covers.

I used some cute little sneakers on him that we didn’t beat up and I made some trousers for him that felt like wool trousers that came straight out of a Helen Levitt photography book, which had a great photo of a young boy playing marbles on the street. In that photograph, the boy has a pair of wool pleated trousers on that were clearly his older brother’s and handed down.

They’re a little big at the waist, they’re worn very high, and they’re worn with what looks like a little dress belt. And the hem of them is hemmed up very high, so it looks like he’s actually outgrown them a bit. And there’s heavy stitching at the hem, which indicates they’re saving all of the length of the hem so at some point, if you should have a younger brother, it’d be passed down to him and then they’d live another life.

That’s something that I recreated to the tee for Philip. I put him in these pants that were definitely too short so you often see his socks and did some heavy stitching to take up the hem. 

JW: Philip’s older brother Sandy is the young artist and Lindbergh supporter. How did you want those qualities to be manifested in his costumes?

JSJ: The character is a harder one to find because he is an artist. And like all artists in all times, they follow the beat of their own drummer. You can’t really look at typical pictures of 1940s boys and find Sandy. For me, finding Sandy really came through finding photographs of artists when they were young, before they became famous. Even finding some images of young Pablo Picasso.

When I was looking at all those images, I was looking at a lot of young boys in denim, which I thought was an interesting take on what a young man would wear for the time when it was somewhat undignified to wear dirty old jeans or patched-up jeans outside of your house when you weren’t doing physical labor or yard work. 

I thought the fact that he would have this connection to an old pair of jeans felt very original and of an artist. And they had paint splatters all over them, as do his shoes, and charcoal rubbed into the elbows of his shirts, which every artist would know when you’re working with pencils as this character often is.

JW: Besides Lindbergh and his cronies, Rabbi Bengelsdorf is something of an antagonist in the story. What are his clothes all about?

JSJ: There were a few things that were important going into Bengelsdorf. One was that we wanted to establish that he was a leader in his community and that he was a leader at his synagogue. Therefore, he had to wear very sharply-tailored suits as a man who’s kind of mayoral in the way that he presents himself. He’s kind of a politician before he’s even actually involved in politics.

It was important to keep him manicured and well-dressed.

It was also important to tie his colors back to his southern roots, which was something, of course, in the novel … He wears a pale pink shirt, a boxed gray suit, [and a bow tie] the first time we meet him at the speaking engagement … The bow tie became a nice way to subtly tie that back to him having southern roots.

JW: Evelyn Finkel, Bess’s older sister and Bengelsdorf’s future wife, goes on quite a journey throughout the six episodes. Were her costumes based on the character’s transformation from single woman to political power player?

JSJ: The character of Evelyn is a tricky one because she’s living in a duality. She’s both a humble school teacher and also a single woman. She’s still living with her mother, she’s looking to be married. She’s dressing very much for the time; it was very suitable for a woman who’s still seeking a husband to wear makeup.

I looked at a lot of reference that was accurate to Judaica and anything that’s been written from any synagogue or Jewish institution at the time that was talking about women … both through the Jewish Historical Society and the Jewish Historical Center in New Jersey as well. 

There was … a woman’s guide to how they could present themselves, whether they were married or unmarried. This was for the Reform [sect of Judaism]. There was something interesting I had read about unmarried women; that even when they were sitting shiva for their deceased parents, they were allowed to wear makeup in order to continue to present themselves accordingly in finding a husband. 

That was an interesting thing that we actually used in the story, that she was still allowed to wear makeup when her mother passes away. She’s still presenting herself in a certain kind of way, knowing that she’s an upwardly mobile single woman.

We talked a lot about who her matinee idols would have been and how she might’ve fashioned herself after Barbara Stanwyck and being infatuated with those movies and reading magazines that were showing Betty Grable and all the female pin-ups of the time … I looked at some Barbara Stanwyck movies from the late 1930s, so that we could really use some of those little notions and blouses that she wore. She wore this beautiful blouse with embroidery on it that I recreated for a moment with [Evelyn] on the stoop when Sandy is drawing her.

JW: And finally, we have Alvin, who is always getting himself into trouble, whether it’s quitting a good-paying job or joining the war effort via Canada. Did you want him to be dressed like a rebel?

JSJ: For Alvin, there was a lot in keeping that 1940s leather jacket that he wears. It’s kind of beat up to death. I made that jacket for him in a perfect little cropped way, so that it just really brought out Anthony’s natural swagger.

Then we beat it up like crazy in order to make it look like he’d stolen the jacket off the back of barstool. All the notions with him were about celebrating the way that he fashions himself after Cagney.

Directed by Thomas Schlamme, the finale of The Plot Against America premieres on HBO tonight at 10pm EST.