Tessa Thompson said she began wearing red in the months before rehearsals for Hedda, a deliberate change for a role in a play set in the late 1980s: "In my personal wardrobe, I don't own a lot of red," she told Harper’s Bazaar’s podcast The Good Buy.
The interview, hosted by editors Leah Chernikoff and Lynette Nylander, centered on how Thompson thinks about clothes as tools for identity and performance. She described one piece she brought into a rehearsal room and onto a body: "I am wearing this little skirt suit from Vivienne Westwood Spring/Summer 1988 collection," Thompson said, adding that the suit was apparently owned by photographer Henny Garfunkel, who worked a lot with John Waters.
The detail is more than anecdote. Thompson said the Hedda costume designer made her a beautiful dress, and she adjusted her own palette so she could feel at home in it. She looked at a photograph of her mother from 1985 as part of that preparation and treated vintage, archival and thrifted pieces as reference points—threads that tie a character to a real era, and to people Thompson knows personally.
Thompson framed those choices alongside a childhood shaped by thrift shopping. "I grew up going to thrift stores with my parents out of necessity," she said, and then described how she later discovered "incredible things" there. The sources for her style range from family albums to pop figures: "One of my biggest inspirations, both for fashion and life in general, is Prince," she said, and she has long cited her mother and early TV favorites—she called herself a "massive Pee-wee Herman fan as a kid"—as touchstones.
Those influences feed a career that moves between independent films, blockbusters, Broadway and Marvel projects, and into the businesses behind stories: Thompson founded Viva Maude in 2021 to champion underrepresented voices and stories in entertainment. She has also worked with a set of high-fashion houses—Chanel, Balenciaga, Valentino, Vaquera and Diotima—that have placed clothes into the public frame of her career.
There is a tidy tension at the heart of her answers. Thompson said she is deeply intentional when it comes to clothes, and she insists fashion can invite connection. But she also uses garments strategically, with a care that keeps the garment from overwhelming the wearer. She put that distinction bluntly: "I wanted to be able to wear it, not it wear me." That sentence threaded the interview: the dress is a bridge to an audience and a historical moment, but it must not subsume the person occupying it.
The Vivienne Westwood suit, the new dress from the Hedda costume designer, the months of practising wearing red—all of it read as preparation in service of a performance that asks for both transformation and control. Thompson’s comments on The Good Buy make clear she treats fashion as material to shape an identity onstage while protecting the through-line of who she is offstage.
What comes next is concrete: Hedda. The play is the immediate reason for the wardrobe shifts Thompson described, and the choices she’s made—pulling from thrifted history, major designers and family photographs—signal the approach she will take when the lights go up. If the point of preparation is to move an audience, Thompson’s aim is plain: to wear the role, and to keep the role from wearing her.
