“The undergarments are god-awful,” Wendy Phillips says about the 1940s bras and girdles she squeezes into each week as widowed mother Anne Metcalf on ABC’s prime time soap opera Homefront, set just after the end of World War II. “I have new respect for the inventor of panty hose.”
Because wardrobe used unsold stock from an Ohio clothing store that went out of business, Phillips’s foundation garments are not preworn. That’s not true for most of the period clothes used on Homefront, which is providing a blueprint for postwar styles that are becoming mainstream again: longer skirts, shirtwaist dresses, seamed stockings, snoods, and – for men – fedoras.
“We’re nitpickers,” says women’s costumer Lyn Paolo, who culls outfits from vintage-clothing stores. Even the costumes made expressly for the show originated almost half a century ago. The men’s double-breasted suits are constructed from bolts of woolen fabric from the ’40s that men’s costumer Chic Gennarelli found in Warner Bros. studio’s tailoring departement.
The actors are so enamored of their outfits that there have been reports of extras walking away with an item or two. Kyle Chandler, 26, who plays Metcalf’s bartender-ballplayer son, Jeff, is a fan of his characters tank top undershirts. “I’ve started wearing them under my own clothes,” he says. Phillips, 40, has also incorporated a ’40s mode into her own wardrobe. Now, she says, “I feel almost naked without a complete, accessorized look and red lipstick.”
One nod to the Reebok generation is to forgo platform shoes for the women. “We used platforms in the pilot and two of the actresses (Jessica Steen and Giuliana Santini) sprained their ankles,” says Paolo.
Obviously, they don’t make ankles like they used to.