🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

BEEF’s Amy Lau may fight dirty, but her battle dress is never less than immaculate.

Portrayed by Ali Wong, Amy represents one half of the feud at the center of Lee Sung Jin’s drama series. After a furious road-rage incident between Amy and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), the pair becomes mutually obsessed with getting the satisfaction of victory — though what constitutes winning becomes less and less clear as their tactics grow increasingly risky. 

Her all-consuming beef notwithstanding, Amy seems to have a picture-perfect life: She’s got a sweet, handsome husband (Joseph Lee); an adorable daughter (Remy Holt); a chic, modern home — and a career that’s about to launch her into a whole new tax bracket upon the sale of her plant store to a national chain owned by an eccentric billionaire (Maria Bello). And she absolutely dresses the part, with a thoughtful wardrobe that conceals “the cracks beneath the surface,” costume designer Helen Huang tells Tudum. 

“It’s about these people having an existential crisis,” Huang says. “But with Amy, she has a very curated facade. So we wanted it to feel curated, we wanted to have good taste, we wanted to be very Instagram-worthy.”

Andrew Cooper/Netflix

In devising Amy’s personal style, Huang looked at different flower shops and the way the proprietors dressed. She also considered various colorful palettes, but “when I did an all-white spread, I was like, ‘I think this is it,’” she recalls. “Because she does such terrible, horrible things throughout the show; I really wanted her to do [them] in clothes that you can’t get dirty.” 

With her palette locked in, Huang next considered silhouette. She credits Wong with being a great collaborator who understood the vision for Amy’s unique style. “Ali is not afraid of putting on silhouettes that are bigger, or conceptual or arty,” says Huang, who recalls working with actors and studios who specifically asked for fitted, “flattering” clothes on-screen, regardless of the character’s personality. “It was a dream to work with [Wong], because that’s been my own personal sort of crusade — to have women dress with a point of view. I really wanted Amy to have a very, very strong aesthetic identity.” 

Huang established that identity in part with quirky details like the vintage white knit bucket hat Amy wears in her first appearance. “I felt like her opening outfit needed a punctuation mark to finish it off,” the designer says, adding that Amy is “a very studied person” when it comes to her carefully curated appearance, “so the hat just made the outfit more self-conscious.” Lee also specifically liked “surreal elements in the clothing,” which the piece provides with its dramatically upturned brim. 

A final key element of Amy’s stylistic character is her distinctive octagonal glasses, worn throughout the series. Wong herself wears glasses and, Huang says, “there was a lot of back and forth” about potentially putting her in contacts in an effort to distance the character from the actor’s familiar look. After trying a wide array of pairs, however, Huang and Wong landed on some by Dita, which have a rounder shape and thinner frames than Wong’s usual angular style. “They’re very soft for her character,” Huang notes, “and they’re sort of very wide-eyed, in a way, that also kind of butts against how she is internally.” 

Andrew Cooper/Netflix

An early look that expresses Amy’s artful point of view is the evening dress she wears to a mushroom dinner (but not the fun kind, after all) at Bello’s character’s imposing mansion. Huang wanted Amy to feel “softer” than her “brutalist” surroundings for the scene, and chose a singular printed dress by Lemaire with a high neck, low back and long, rope-like straps.

Huang found the dress at the boutique Mohawk, in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. “We shopped online a lot, but we didn’t want her to look like she had a dress that was bought from not a boutique,” Huang says. “She is a person who buys labels, but the clothes never have labels — one of those people.” In addition to “a lot of vintage tees and sweats,” Amy’s wardrobe included pieces from Staud, Maison Margiela, Lauren Manoogian, Agolde, Acne Studios, Cos and Alémais, among others.   

There’s a strong emphasis on class consciousness throughout the series, and Amy feels pressure to mix well with Bello’s character Jordan and her ilk. Huang was particularly sensitive to this while dressing Wong. In the mushroom dinner scene, Huang says, “She’s presenting herself as something of interest [for] Jordan, [who] might want to buy her company. The perspective of that garment was to choose something that was very subtle in that Amy way, but extremely special.” 

Along with the Lemaire dress, Huang identifies the gray Norma Kamali ensemble Amy wears to a gallery show as another of her favorite looks in the series. Angular on the top half and voluminous at the bottom, the outfit is of a piece with Amy’s “unfiltered” identity. And though Jordan’s interest in a coveted art piece creates tension between Amy and her husband, George, in the scene, they both look perfect. (George’s wardrobe in the series includes pieces from Acne Studios, Camper, John Elliott, Officine Générale, Alexander McQueen and Stüssy, among others.)

“I know these couples,” says Huang, citing her familiarity with tony neighborhoods on the east side of LA. “They’re very specific about what they wear, what their kids wear” — which is why Amy’s little daughter June is also always impeccably dressed, in a “very curated kid-clothes aesthetic.” 

One moment of stylistic departure for Amy comes near the midpoint of the series, when she speaks on a panel in Las Vegas after getting a dramatic haircut and color. Creator Lee Sung Jin “did want her to feel powerful,” Huang says. “We were trying to find all sorts of ways to show that without going the traditional giving-her-a-Theory-suit route.”

Huang opted instead for an outfit by Proenza Schouler, consisting of a black high-necked top and matching fringed skirt, for the pivotal sequence. In addition to being “very striking and very graphic” against Amy’s newly blonde hair, the color choice is a change from the pale neutrals that characterize much of her wardrobe before this moment. Huang took care, however, to ensure that the silhouette and spirit of the outfit remain true to Amy’s aesthetic identity. 

“I don’t really like the idea of women changing how they feel and then they change their look, and the look is totally different and divorced from how they looked before,” the designer says, referring to the movie and TV makeover cliché. “It takes people years to really find out who they are stylistically, and I just feel like, to abandon that just because she’s having a crisis is very odd. So we tried to keep it as similar as possible to her identity, just shifting colors and doing little tweaks.” 

The final piece in Amy’s style evolution appears in the climactic last two episodes, when her and Danny’s twisty counter-vendettas come to their shared conclusion. Amy wears the same outfit almost throughout both entire episodes, so the whole team “wanted something impactful,” Huang recalls. “That was very hard,” in part because of budget restrictions: The dynamic sequence sees the normally squeaky-clean Amy getting some dirt on her clothes, so production required many multiples for Wong to wear in various stages of griminess.

Huang “kept ordering in things” only to find that most “didn’t feel special enough when you look closely.” It was Wong who suggested she look at Tory Burch, where Huang was pleased to find a blouse with a tie at the neck. Lee had “asked for a garment that she could have multiple uses [for], [with] different pieces she could take off like an onion,” Huang says, and the shirt’s collar was detachable, so Amy could remove it and use it however she desired.

Cementing the decision was the color. Huang had considered a bold shade for Amy in the finale, but a return to her original palette — though with the added visual interest of the tie and the colored stitching — felt appropriate. “We were like, ‘Maybe it’s time to go back to that white,’” she recalls. “But it also feels a little bit sadder than her more confident beginning outfit, even though it’s [basically] the same. So it was like a mirror, except it was tweaked a little bit for the ending.”

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong Have Major BEEF in This ClipIt all starts with a little road rage.

Stream BEEF now.