Daniel Lawson, the brilliant costume designer, imbues Ms. Tascioni with color, and the clothes are full of more clues than her many totes could ever carry.
Elsbeth Tascioni, portrayed by the magical Carrie Preston, is a character who possesses an infinite capacity for wonder.
The world first met the quirky attorney years ago, way back when the first season of The Good Wife, the acclaimed political drama, began airing on CBS back in 2009. Created by husband and wife team Robert and Michelle King. The Good Wife grew into a whole universe, the first series becoming a sensation that spanned seven seasons and more than 150 episodes. There have been a near infinite number of brightly colored tote bags since then.
About 14 episodes from earlier series featured Ms. Tascioni, and in 2013, Preston won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the role. Elsbeth next appeared in the Covid-era spin-off, The Good Fight, which is brilliant, if you have not already binged it. Both shows focused on political and legal dramas in Chicago, and both were costumed by the exceptionally talented Daniel Lawson, who is still designing the wardrobe of the now-iconic character.
Finally, in February of 2024, after what felt to this writer like an infinite wait, the gods of television blessed us with a series dedicated to Elsbeth, and the first and second seasons of the series are available to stream on Paramount+.
On October 12, 2025, the Third Season of Elsbeth will premiere on CBS.
I was able to meet with costume designer Daniel Lawson last month to talk about his work on the show, and ask how exactly he manages to push so many apparel and accessory boundaries without turning the title character into a caricature. Though there are many wonderfully costumed productions these days, and thank God for prestige television, there is no one quite like Elsbeth Tascioni, and watching her take on New York is a joy. There are productions, and these three series by the King’s definitely count, where it is obvious that the cast and crew are having fun, that they love their work.
“We were definitely playing in The Good Wife and The Good Fight,” Lawson told me. “Chicago is certainly midwestern, but we had people like Diane Lockhart and Alicia Florich, and look, everybody was well dressed. We liked them to be. When we started the second season of Elsbeth, I asked Robert and Michelle if Elsbeth had been touched at all by New York. Does she up her ante at all? Does she take on any of the colors or textures that she sees? And the answer was, no, she does not. That she is steadfast, and I really love that.”
The new series opens as Tascioni is starting a new career in New York City. Following a consent decree by the United States Department of Justice, our perky, but not-exactly-typical, attorney relocates to oversee the NYPD following a series of suspicious arrests and heavy suspicion over possible police corruption. “We wanted, in Elsbeth, for New York to be this sleek, cool, interesting town, where everybody’s in sleek, cool colors,” Lawson told me.
“Blues, grays, metallics, we wanted Elsbeth to always be looking up at everybody, both figuratively and literally. Especially in the first season, we would have background actors around her who were super tall, or background actors playing cops who were super tall, so that she was always looking up.”
This is an elegant solution, a way to force perspective and make the audience see the world through Elsbeth’s eyes. Eyes which I must point out, are much more observant than anyone around her seems to comprehend. Tascioni is an exuberant person by nature, which many antagonists mistake for naivete.
Oh, but they are wrong. And as she goes about taking down bad guys, Tascioni gets to wear some truly beautiful clothes. It is so much fun to see interesting story ideas, and happy clothes on people who obviously know what they are doing and love their work is definitely not something we are used to.
“I think Elsbeth is very confident in her style and in the way she conducts herself and carries herself,” Lawson told me. “We wanted there to be a sense of wonder and awe on Elsbeth’s part, and this desire on her part to not be one of these New Yorkers, but to admire them. There’s definitely a midwestern quality, a good, wholesome honesty that comes with her to New York. And New York is perhaps a little more jaded, global and all knowing.”
During The Good Wife and The Good Fight, Lawson explained to me, “every season, our characters would undergo a change and certainly, maybe even within a season, you wouldn’t be able to discern it. But when you compared season one to season six, they looked so different. There had been a very well modulated change on the characters’ part, as far as their looks go, and certainly their characterizations.”
What is different about Elsbeth is her self awareness, her certainty, there is never a question that this woman knows who she is and what she likes.
“One thing we did,” Lawson said, “when we went from Elsbeth in Chicago to Elsbeth in New York, is that we kind of let her freak flag fly a little more. I think if Elsbeth has taken on any of New York, it’s that it is okay to be her authentic self, and to be completely who she is. I interpreted that into having more color and more texture and maybe more outlandish combinations of patterns.”
The crash and clash of colors and patterns on screen could easily become chaotic or overwhelming. But Lawson is a master of his craft and he knows exactly how far he can push something, he sees the line where personal style threatens to become camp. He plays with the boundaries, and it is so much fun to watch.
“We wanted to always have her stand out,” Lawson explained, “not like a sore thumb, because that has a negative connotation. The writers have been putting in every so often people who are truly taken with her style, and then we have a few characters this season who remark on the way she looks, the way she dresses, and you know, so that just sort of reinforces her own sense of style and self. She definitely doesn’t lose herself. She comes around the corner and the first thing you see is the pattern, or the color or her hair, and it’s like that little piece of sand in your bathing suit that just annoys you. And the other thing, I think, New Yorkers being that sort of jaded, cool people that they are, find it annoying to have somebody always effervescent and positive.”
One of my favorite episodes of the second season takes place on Halloween, and we are treated to Lawson’s version of the Givenchy dress Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If you don’t already know, there’s a bit of controversy over that film’s costume designer, Edith Head, who sometimes took credit for work that wasn’t entirely her own. Given the nature of this show, Easter Egg alarms went off silently in my head.
“The script had sort of referenced a different outfit,” Lawson told me. “But when I presented this longer dress, with that iconic back, it felt like to me like what they were getting at, even though they had sort of described a different thing in the script. Then it turned out that the image that I had presented was what they wanted. It was that iconic look at the beginning of the movie, that incredibly iconic back to the dress.”
Another episode’s mystery involves space tourism, which meant Lawson had to figure out space suits for a cast of wealthy characters.
“We looked at a lot of Space X,” he explained. “We wanted to have the ‘cool’ factor. You know, those suits were designed by a costume designer,” he told me about the Space X suits, “and then they were retrofitted for space. So they went with the look first and function later, which I thought was very interesting. It’s fascinating that they used a costume designer.”
Obviously fit is always important, and with the casting of smaller roles sometimes happening last minute, Lawson knew he would have to figure it all out quickly. “We were trying to find ways to be able to get the look we wanted without spending billions of dollars to make each spacesuit, and some of them needed to be multiple because of doubles for the flying stuff. So we actually ended up landing on racing suits.”
As I have argued many times before, costumes are filled with clues, with information that just can’t be spelled out in dialogue. The multiple tote bags Elsbeth drags around are a great example of this.
“I usually do 3,” Lawson told me. “I like odd numbers, so it’s 2 on one arm and one on the other. I have been having such a good time looking for these bags. First of all, I love bags that are organic to our story. For example, in the first episode of this season we were at the opera, and there was a logo at the opera.”
“Then,” the designer continued, “the next time we see Elsbeth, she’s carrying a tote bag with the opera logo on it, like she got it at the gift shop. And she would. I do go to the souvenir stores in New York, especially in midtown, there are all these like giant souvenir stores, and I love getting the bags from there that say New York, or, you know, have taxicabs on them, or whatever. The other thing I try to do is try to balance. If there’s a bag that has lots of small patterns or whatever, then I’ll have a bag, maybe with a bigger pattern, and then I’ll have a more solid bag, so that they all balance each other out nicely.”
There are times when Tascioni uses her wardrobe as a distraction, “there are times where we do want those clownish moments. You know, like the mittens hanging off the coat, and she’s doing a lot of gesturing, and the mittens are flying around. She’s a smart cookie, he knows what she’s doing. It can be very mesmerizing, and sort of throws a person off a bit. If there’s a lot of action and a lot of things going on that being said I always walk the line of ‘is this ridiculous?’ I know it’s outlandish, and I know it’s exaggerated. But is it ridiculous or are we keeping it real in her world? That’s always the line we walk. You’ll notice Elsbeth doesn’t carry all of her bags when the crime is solved,” Lawson told me.
“She’s saying, this is how it happened. Her bags are her walking, filing cabinet, and she doesn’t need them. It’s solved, she doesn’t need the filing cabinet at that point.”
I promise, lovely reader, the costumes always have stories of their own to tell.
Before I leave any interview, I always like to leave a little space for the designer I am speaking to to tell me what they want known about their work. To Lawson, it was incredibly important to mention those he works with. “My team is so awesome,” he told me. “ I’d be dead without them, they’re really incredible. And you know why? Everybody cares so much about their craftsmanship. I always put together boards, if for no other reason than it’s a form of communication. So they’re seeing the character the way I’m seeing the character, and then I can then take that very specific information, and hand that off to my team and say, this is the shopping we need. This is what we need to build. We’re all working from the same research, the same inspiration, and I think that really helps us get us to the same goal.”
