‘I Love Lucy’s Most Famous Costume Has an Even More Famous Home
In modern TV times, we don’t tend to question why, say, single mothers and broke college students seem to have unlimited closet space and budgets for neverending streams of new outfits. It may set up unrealistic expectations of being a “no-repeater,” but we understand that this is part of the fantasy of television in the same way that we don’t give networks (too) hard of a time for waitresses and chefs having spacious Manhattan apartments or schlubby idiots having supermodel wives.
Back in the day, however, things were a lot leaner. Props were borrowed from other productions, sets got new occupants, and of course, characters wore the same outfits over and over. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what normal people do, and people on TV looked a lot more normal in general back then. It was okay to have crow’s feet, bald spots and the occasional cheeseburger. It was okay to rewear clothes, too.
On I Love Lucy, an already expensive TV show for the time, costumers had to be particularly budget-conscious. Fortunately, it was in-character for Lucy Ricardo, as a working-class housewife, to don a rotating collection of printed shirt-dresses for her zany adventures. In fact, the same black-and-white checkered dress appeared in three of I Love Lucy’s most famous episodes.
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Lucille Ball first wore it for the Season One episode “Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” the one where she slurs through a pitch for a product that should have a much simpler name for the amount of alcohol that’s in it, but she wore it again in the episodes “Job Switching,” aka the chocolate factory episode, and “Lucy Wants New Furniture,” in which she tries to save money by making her own clothes. This was apparently sheer coincidence, but maybe we can add branding-related clairvoyance to Ball’s list of talents.
Whatever the case, the dress became so closely associated with Ball and her alter ego that it ended up in the home of one very famous collector. In a 2017 feature on the home of actress Laura Dern, best known as Jurassic Park’s Dr. Ellie Sattler, Architectural Digest revealed that the dress hangs in Dern’s closet right alongside her billowing white linen pants or whatever else rich white women wear. Apparently not black and white checkered shirtdresses. She really should wear it more.
Dern is something of a connoisseur of classic TV, also owning a collection of branded lunchboxes that she seems genuinely enthusiastic about but people also keep giving her, kind of like how your family found out you like owls and now your house is 75 percent owl merch. Most significantly, she has a T-rex figure from the set of Jurassic Park just, like, sitting next to her fireplace, which gets a single photo and sentence of description from Architectural Digest.
An entire profile just on that artifact, please.
