Catherine O’Hara’s Schitt’s Creek character Moira Rose may not have given much of herself as a matriarch at the start of the series, but as a self-invented style icon, she gave and gave and gave—canonizing herself, one wig at a time, as the Mother Teresa of TV Looks. O’Hara has said that Moira’s sartorial confidence, exacting style, and omnipresent sense of occasion was inspired by Daphne Guinness, the theatrically costumed heiress and McQueen muse. Having been transplanted into the grim town of Schitt’s Creek, Moira uses hair, makeup, and clothing as armor—willing herself, wardrobe first, into a more glamorous reality.
“That’s just what Moira does,” said O’Hara. “She dresses up for any occasion and will never let go of who she was, who she really is, and who she needs to be again.”
Under the stewardship of series co-creator Dan Levy (who shopped for the character year-round), O’Hara collaborated with costume designer Debra Hanson, costume assistant Darci Cheyne, hair stylist Ana Sorys, and makeup artist Lucky Bromhead, drawing on influences as far-ranging as religious leaders and Sopranos mobsters. The results sometimes veered into the absurd, sure, but they were true to Moira and the actor’s 24/7 sense of stage presence.
“What Moira takes seriously, we all take very seriously,” said Soros. “It was never a joke.”
Ahead, the Emmy-nominated collaborators walk Vanity Fair through the five looks O’Hara considers to be Moira’s best.
MOIRA GOES TO AMISH COUNTRY
In season two’s “Finding David,” David runs away from Schitt’s Creek and takes refuge on an Amish family’s farm. The Rose family borrows Stevie’s car to save him…and the family heirloom bag he took with him.
“This was…one of the first times the Roses drove somewhere, so, of course, Moira dresses up for that,” said O’Hara. “You don’t know who you might encounter.”
The textured black dress was Lanvin for H&M, which Hansen found on eBay. The fishnet stockings were so bizarrely patterned that Bromhead followed O’Hara around with an umbrella while filming for fear that the actor would get a strange tan. The fingerless leather gloves were Chanel. The “ridiculously high” heels were “the last thing you should wear if you need to walk on a country road,” recalled O’Hara. “Every time I got out of the car, I’d say, ‘Johnny, please.’ [Eugene Levy], being the gentleman he is, would always offer his arm.”
Moira’s lip color was MAC’s Dubonnet—darker than her usual Ruby Woo. Explained Bromhead, “It’s important to put on a good daytime red when you’re looking for your son and the bag that you are more worried about than your son.”
But the pièce de résistance was the hat—a Little Girl design which Hanson elevated by calling upon her milliner background. She added black feathers, trim, and a piece of jewelry. “It still wasn’t enough. It was eccentric but it doesn’t have the ‘a special milliner did this for her’ look,” said Hanson. “I found a bunch of old feathers with long horns, so I stuck them in it in an odd way.”
Hanson said that whenever the creative team struck the right Moira note—glamorous but a little eccentric—they knew immediately. “There was no hesitation, there was no ‘Oh, can you find something better?’ We had a kind of visceral response to the clothes.”
MOIRA’S CROWENING
In season five’s premiere “The Crowening,” Moira is in Bosnia filming the movie that she is banking on to revive her career.
“It was pretty clearly stated that The Crowening was a very low-budget movie, so we imagined Moira putting this together herself,” said O’Hara. The costume, rooted in a basic white lab coat, is meant to show Moira’s character halfway through her transition into a mutant crow. Hanson and her assistant sewed feathers onto the lab coat and even had a harness built to support a tail.
The team sprang for a prosthetic beak, commissioned from Mark Wotton. “There was a lot of discussion about the size of the beak,” said O’Hara. “I know from work that I did with SCTV years ago that, as soon as you change your nose, you really change your face. So we agreed on a small beak so that she is still recognizable.”
“We kind of blocked out Catherine’s brows, and made her eyes more rounded—like a round, black crow’s eye,” said Bromhead. “Then we put these like, long, long talon-like nails on her…to give her crow-like fingers as she flaps her arms.”
When it came to the shape of Moira’s crow head, O’Hara dropped an unexpected reference. “At one point, I asked Ana if she could give me a version of Little Stevie’s look on The Sopranos,” the actor said, referencing Steven Van Zandt’s slickly coiffed mobster. “His look was insane, like some kind of bird-like creature, but it was nothing compared to what Ana came up with.”
“I found this Loretta Lynn wig—very long, dark, and curly,” recalled Soros. “And I came up with cutting the hair so that it looked like feathers. For a more humorous widow’s peak, we added a bit of hair to the front […] and I just gelled it back because she wanted that kind of Sopranos style. When Catherine tried it on, she looked at herself and just started laughing. Every time she laughs when she puts a wig on, I know that I did my job.”
Said O’Hara, “What’s great about every look that Debra, Lucky, and Ana put together was, each was completely supportive of the character, Moira, and what she needed in that scene, or what she was going through emotionally,” said O’Hara. “It was never, ‘Let’s put a wild look together.’ In this scene, you see Moira with the director fighting for her life to try to make something good with this sad script. The director couldn’t care less. It’s so sad and vulnerable for Moira. For her, the job is not about vanity, it’s about the character and the allegory of prejudice.”
MOIRA’S SALLY BOWLES HOMAGE
In season five’s “Life Is a Cabaret” finale episode, Moira directs a small-town production of Cabaret*, only for her star, Stevie, to go missing. Thinking she’ll have to go on as Sally Bowles, Moira throws together her best Liza Minnelli–esque cabaret costume—only to be humiliated when Stevie returns.*
“I remember sitting in the makeup room, looking up Liza Minnelli photos from Cabaret,” said O’Hara, recalling her tribute to Minnelli’s iconic take on the character. “Moira’s really trying to survive in the moment. What’s great is that Moira’s not thinking, Let’s put a perfect Cabaret look together. It’s, What could Moira pull off in 10 minutes?”
“I’m wearing one of Moira’s bed vests: my sleeping vests, with a broach,” said O’Hara. “I didn’t realize until I looked at pictures that it was the first time I exposed my shoulders and arms in six years of doing the show, which made me feel all the more vulnerable.”
“When Catherine came in for her fitting, she had a black bra on,” said Hanson, explaining that they chose to keep the bra straps underneath the halter because it added to the last-minute look. The duo also figured that Moira—wanting her directorial debut to go perfectly—might have been prepared to go onstage had one of her negligee-clad dancers injured herself.
If there was one thing Moira definitely had on hand, O’Hara and Soros figured, it was the perfect wig—so Soros cut a black blunt wig so that it framed O’Hara’s face in a heart shape.
As for makeup, Bromhead explained, “I put a little beauty spot in the same place that Liza Minnelli wore hers. We put green nail polish on her, like how Sally Bowles wore it. Then we put these incredible eyelashes on, which were like spiders legs—each prong was probably almost two inches long.”
O’Hara said her favorite part of the scene was David and Patrick’s horrified reaction to the idea that Moira, in this last-minute wardrobe, might be going in as Sally Bowles. “Seeing that she might actually be playing Sally in the show that they worked so hard for, Daniel holds his face like a child watching his mother die,” O’Hara laughed. “It’s such an outrageous look. In a different way, it’s outrageous that she thought she could pull this off—she didn’t want to, but she had to.”
MOIRA’S RED CARPET MOMENT
In season six, Moira’s triumphant moment on the red carpet arrives via the “Crows Premiere”—when she gets to wear the gold designer gown she splurged on. Alas, the glamorous moment is ruined when a flock of crows attack the crowd.
Levy and Hanson had long discussions about what Moira should wear for her dream red carpet, coveting a rose-gold Pamella Roland gown embellished with beading and ostrich feathers. “We wanted it to be beautiful, and we wanted her to be vulnerable,” said Hanson. Explained O’Hara, “It’s so beautifully light—there’s kind of, to me, an embellished nakedness. It’s so different and unarmored compared to most of what Moira wears. Her armor went down. It was just, ‘Please love me and my movie.’ It’s so open in that way, and revealing.”
The expensive gown was so far outside of Hanson’s budget that Levy had to find a production loophole to afford it—convincing executives that the dress could be used in two episodes. For accessory inspiration, Hanson looked to “Spanish paintings of Madonnas.” The costume designer explained, “I wanted Moira to have this feeling that she’s so beautiful, there’s something just glowing about her…so I went onto Etsy, looked for headdresses, and sure enough there were these spiked headdresses made from zip ties…we needed something to give the look a slight edge to it.”
Soros similarly tuned into this soft, vulnerable aesthetic for Moira—electing to use O’Hara’s real hair rather than a wig: “We decided to do something that was very similar to Moira’s everyday look: more of a finger-wave framing her face.”
“The dress, hair, and makeup were so beautiful and soft,” said O’Hara, “that it actually turned that sad premiere, until the crows attacked, into something really lovely.” She laughed. “Every one of Moira’s looks juxtaposed with the actual reality of the town. The best part of that beautiful look to me was, after the premiere, when the Roses are back at the motel and the premiere has been a complete failure, you see them sitting on the bed in that sad, beige bedspread and she is wearing that dress.”
MOIRA GOES TO A WEDDING
In the series finale “Happy Ending,” Moira officiates David and Patrick’s wedding in a look that is both outrageous and, somehow, perfect.
“I don’t think Moira’s intention was to upstage the profound amount of emotion in that room—the power of David and Patrick’s relationship,” said O’Hara. “There’s a real reverence about it—even though, when the look was finally on me, looking in the mirror, it made me laugh, this kind of awe-inspired laugh.”
O’Hara previously told Vanity Fair that when she first heard Moira would be officiating, the inspiration for Moira’s wardrobe immediately came to her: “I just, in that moment, said, ‘Oh, I think I should look like the pope. What about a mitre that the pope wears?’”
Hanson found an ivory McQueen dress that resembled a bishop’s robe on The RealReal. “It was ecclesiastical-looking,” said Hanson. “It was flowing. It had the spiritual quality to it.” Hanson commissioned a milliner to make several sizes of a pope-style mitre and accessorized the actor with a gold body chain, gloves, and boots.
“I had this dream vision of really long hair that looked like it could exist in a Botticelli painting, like it could be some kind of religious-based painting,” Levy has said. “It felt timeless, but it also felt very her. And it was something that I don’t think we had ever seen before.” The wig ended up posing one of the biggest challenges of the series for Soros. O’Hara suggested a “hair doughnut”—a halo of blonde hair that would serve as the brim of the her mitre—and Soros spent many sleepless nights thinking until she was able to realize O’Hara’s vision.
“Everything that she was wearing was such a light color, and her hair was that ethereal blond,” said Bromhead. “So I thought, Let’s really punctuate her eye.” The heavy eyeliner also allowed for some physical comedy once Moira started crying. “I put a lot of a water-based eyeliner on so that the tears could run freely, and then it would be relatively easy to clean up between takes.”
Before that day of filming, the Schitt’s Creek cast and crew had a vague idea of what Moira’s officiant look would be. “But it wasn’t until Catherine walked on the set that everything became very clear,” Annie Murphy previously told Vanity Fair. “I remember everyone looked at her and kind of drew in a breath. Then there was a silence and then someone started a slow clap. The whole set was clapping. It was the only reaction we could possibly think of.”
Looking back on the series, O’Hara said that the creative team managed to make all of Moira’s costumes flattering. “As crazy as my looks were, they all, in a weird way, looked good.”
As for whether she has inherited any of Moira’s clothing confidence, O’Hara said, “I wish I had her nerve. Because it’s really so great to put that much effort into how you look every day, and in such a creative way. She’s walking art.”
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