Lifelong besties aren’t always easy to come by. If you’re lucky enough to have a friendship that spans decades, that relationship almost always comes with one unavoidable truth: You’ve seen each other through countless style evolutions — for better or worse, and every eyebrow width in between. That’s part of the beauty of Kate (played by Roan Curtis and Sarah Chalke) and Tully’s (played by Ali Skovbye and Katherine Heigl) years-long friendship in Firefly Lane: The pair have an unbreakable bond (yes, even despite some major blowups along the way), but they also have a seemingly infinite amount of hair, outfit and makeup choices between them — massive eyeglasses, permed hair, Madonna fits and so, so much more.
Kate and Tully’s story starts in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and they remain friends throughout the ’80s and its endless bottles of hairspray, all the way through the ’90s and early aughts. From a production standpoint, telling a story that covers this much time (and with each character played by two different actors) is no easy feat — but for the Firefly Lane costume, hair and makeup team, it was all about being as collaborative as possible (and remembering what fashion was like in their own formative years). Below, the experts and the actors discuss what it was like to create a friendship from fashion, Fawcett wings and a favorite blue eye shadow.
“We started by going on a road trip,” says Firefly Lane costume designer Allisa Swanson. “We drove into the interior of British Columbia and hit every thrift store we could find. We stayed local to Vancouver when we rented costumes — there was a costume shop called Sunday’s Best that unfortunately didn’t come out of COVID very well and decided to close shop. We went in and bought as much stock as we could from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. We also created more costumes this season — both for [Katherine Heigl] and Sarah [Chalke]. We had a cutter and stitcher dedicated to just ’70s wear.”
“Kate always kind of reminded me of Princess Diana, especially back in the early days when she was still Lady Di,” Swanson says. “Tully was kind of a mix. We had some Brooke Shields [as inspiration]. We had a bunch of models from the ’80s because that was when the supermodel took off. We referenced a lot of Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford as well as Brooke Shields.”
“This season starts in the ’80s, and it was wigs every single time,” says Firefly Lane hairstylist Sarah Koppes. “I did a lot of research on the different styles, and we also went with the costumes. We did some true ’80s wigs with the big bangs and the big hair. I think my favorite ’80s wig was one where I got to put Tully’s hair into a banana clip, which was a blast and a true ’80s hairstyle. We also got to do a fun little look in the ’90s and give Tully a JLo vibe with the big curls.”
“My Dorothy Hamill wig is my favorite,” says Curtis. “It was the most fun for me this season, to be a woman of many wigs. I’ve had the same hair my whole life, and getting to have a bowl cut, a Diana-esque bob and then a flippy, Farrah Fawcett kind of thing was really fun for me.”
“There were a few times where I wasn’t wearing it,” Skovbye says. “And I was like, ‘I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel like Tully. Something’s wrong.’ It’s amazing. It’s so fun… Some nights I would just leave it on and not take it off and go out about my life with the blue eye shadow.
“I remember some of the ’70s and quite a bit of the ’80s. We watched movies and did research for Firefly Lane that way,” Swanson says. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, all of the John Hughes movies. It’s what was hip and what people were actually wearing. I’d also look at any real photos [from those eras]. The ’80s is a really interesting decade, because it changed so much from the beginning to the middle to the end. It’s almost like three decades in one.”
“I love the ’80s,” says Heigl. “I have a huge ’80s dress-up drawer in my house that predates Firefly Lane. I brought a few of the items to the wardrobe fitting. But specific looks, obviously Madonna. The number of times I dressed up as Madonna as a kid and now I had a team of professionals that were dressing me up as Madonna, that was a highlight.”
“I remember being about 5, and my sister was about eight years older than me,” says Firefly Lane makeup artist Tanya Howard. “I would just sit there and watch her do her makeup, and I wanted to be her so badly. I studied the looks back then — and then of course in the ’80s, I couldn’t get my hair any bigger, and had purple and pink eye shadow and frosty lips.”
“Keeping the eyebrows true to decade was one thing we had a little bit of difficulty with,” says Howard. “Especially in the ’90s, because the style was very thin. But we were going back and forth between the ’90s and the ’70s during filming, and we couldn’t just be tweezing or trying to block them out because that ends up looking weird.”
