'1883' Costume Designer Janie Bryant on Bringing “Epic” Western Looks to the Paramount+ Drama

“I was with my team on probably the first or second day of shooting. It was all hands on deck and we were throwing fake dirt on the actors because I was like, ‘It has to be dirtier’ — and we were already up to our elbows in fake dirt and distressing the material,” says Janie Bryant. “And I turned to my team and said, ‘I didn’t think that I was ever going to be back here again. But here we are.’” The veteran costume designer relates in her Tennessee drawl, and sounding a little like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone rejoining the Mafia family, that she’s in a place she endearingly calls “Western-ville.” And she’s all in, outfitting a literal cast of thousands for Taylor Sheridan’s sprawling drama 1883, which premiered this week on Paramount+ as the prequel to the streamer’s hit drama Yellowstone, and is getting the biggest numbers for a cable debut since 2015. Bryant, who garnered an Emmy for her costumes on the HBO series Deadwood, has been in these parts before. But in the interim, she became practically a household name herself as the era-defining mastermind of Mad Men’s cosmopolitan ‘60s fashions, and not incidentally also…
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