Carrie Coon’s Costume Corner: "Close Enough To Touch"

Another week, another opportunity to marvel at Kasia Walicka Maimone’s costume design work on The Gilded Age. This column covers exclusively Carrie Coon’s costumes in her role as the beautiful and socially ambitious nouveau riche matron Bertha Russell. Not that the other costumes aren’t fascinating and worthy of conversation, but Bertha’s gowns are more adventurous, more exuberant, more statement-making, more everything.

In “Close Enough To Touch,” Bertha is very busy coordinating with her household staff to ensure that everything goes smoothly for the dinner she’s hosting to open her first full season in Newport, aka When Bertha Poached The Duke, aka the social coup of the summer. Perhaps as a consequence of her work as a superior hostess being front-and-center, Carrie Coon wears exactly three costumes in this episode, and one is a rerun.

This is Bertha’s week. It seems like every week is Bertha’s week, even when she feels her heart and trust have been trampled upon by George; even when Gladys is flailing around trying to be a big grown-up girl who chooses her own gowns; even when Larry is getting day-drunk because his mother has put the (entirely justified) fear of Bertha into his erstwhile ladylove Mrs. Blane; even when it takes her a few more chess moves than she’d like to put Mrs. Winterton’s nose so completely out of joint that even a gifted plastic surgeon of the future would think twice about trying to straighten it. Such is the power of her combined will and intelligence! But I’m here to tell you that of the many weeks that have been Bertha’s week thus far; this one is the Most Bertha’s Week that it’s possible for a week to be (title subject to change; we do have three more episodes to come this season, after all).