Costume designer Negar Ali-Kline knew not only that she wanted to work on Nobody Wants This — she downright needed to. “I immediately felt that I had to do this. It really resonated with me. I grew up in LA, I felt like the world was very familiar to me,” she says of the Erin Foster–created comedy, an unconventional romance that sees agnostic podcast host Joanne (Kristen Bell) fall for laid-back rabbi Noah (Adam Brody). What immediately leaped off the page was the outspoken heroine at the series’ center. “One of the things [Foster] said about Joanne was she’s not the girl that wakes up with mascara running down her face,” says Ali-Kline. “She’s very intentional in the way that she presents herself, she has very high emotional intelligence in the way that she interacts with her environments, and she can use her style, as we all do, as a tool to say what she wants to say without having to say it.”
Whether it’s a vintage chinchilla fur coat worn to a dinner party turned meet-cute, or a bold Alex Perry strapless dress bat mitzvah look, the always-on-trend Joanne isn’t afraid to make her presence known, even if, as the audience, we detect her vulnerability under the surface. With Joanne’s first surprise visit to Noah’s place of work — a grand gesture she makes after abandoning a bad date with a dead-end suitor –– Ali-Kline wanted her to make a real sartorial statement: “We always knew that she had to be in a color that would just pop. She was going to be this fish out of water in that temple scene, and so it was very specific that she was in red so he could spot her out in the congregation.”
When it came to finding the right look for the hip rabbi, Brody’s own insights and preparation for the role helped inform Ali-Kline’s approach. He saw his character as someone who approached his vocation as an academic or historian would, “and that changed my perspective and the framework. Everything he wears is really worn in, with a nice patina,” she says, also citing Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate as a reference for Noah. “He wears really beautiful leather boots that he’s had for a very long time. We don’t use any synthetic fabrics with him — everything is wool and cotton and linen.”
The distinctly LA project also allowed the Angeleno to spotlight her city, incorporating homegrown designers and brands like Reformation, Jesse Kamm, Hey Gang, and Anine Bing into the characters’ wardrobes. “We wanted to show that LA. has lots of style, and it’s so multifaceted. The style on the east side [of Los Angeles] is quite different from the style on the west side and we wanted to show a little bit of it all,” says Ali-Kline. According to her, a piece worn by Joanne’s sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) in Episode 7 that pays homage to a Valley-based restaurant garnered an unexpectedly passionate response from viewers. “I can’t tell you how much interest I got in that Casa Vega T-shirt. We had no idea that it would [be so popular]. Casa Vega has even reached out like, ‘We can’t even stock those T-shirts anymore, so many people have called in.’ ”
A version of this story appears in Queue Issue 20.
