Costume designer Sarah Edwards knew the clothes for Severance had to be “timeless.” Not “timeless” in the way the fashion world often uses the term—to describe something classic and well-made, like a Cartier watch or a Burberry trench coat. Instead, Edwards means void of time itself.
In Severance, the Ben Stiller-created show about employees at a mysterious biotech corporation called Lumon Industries who surgically “sever” their minds with a microchip to ensure that they remember nothing about their top-secret work, time is not really something characters experience. At their company headquarters, there are no calendars on the walls, newspaper headlines to read, computers with internet, or even windows to tell them the weather; and when the microchip is activated, their outside identity and beliefs are all wiped.
So what would someone wear if they had no idea what was currently in style? And—to add another layer—what would someone wear if a company didn’t want them to know what was currently in style? “When we started in season one, there was a lot of talk about where we were in time and place, and Ben felt that we were in no time, no place,” says Edwards. “That’s a very difficult thing to costume.”
