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Over the course of a 50-year career that spans movies, TV shows and plays, costume designer Jennifer von Mayrhauser has outfitted everyone from Meryl Streep to Julia Roberts; Timothée Chalamet to Daniel Day-Lewis; Winona Ryder to Keanu Reeves (to name just a few), and built up an eclectic body of work across genres and decades.

 

Von Mayrhauser, who most recently designed costumes for a traveling production of the Broadway show The Hills of California (and also happens to be the mother of Woman’s World digital director, Julia Dennison), sat down with us to discuss working on films like Mystic Pizza and shows like Law & Order and share fun behind-the-scenes memories.

Dressing Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts before they were stars

Jennifer von Mayrhauser got her start designing costumes for theatrical productions in New York and then did a number of TV movies for PBS, including the 1978 adaptation of the Wendy Wasserstein play Uncommon Women and Others, which featured none other than Meryl Streep when she was still an up-and-coming actress. “She was truly one of the most poised people I’ve ever met in my life, and that was just the way she was made, so it didn’t surprise me at all to see her become a huge star,” von Mayrhauser says.

In the ’80s, von Mayrhauser began designing for mainstream films, and the 1988 coming-of-age classic Mystic Pizza was her debut theatrical feature. Mystic Pizza is best known as the film that introduced Julia Roberts to the world, and the designer recalls, “She was cast just a day or so before we started shooting, and she was introduced to me as ‘Eric Roberts’ sister.’”

“Julia was great to work with,” von Mayrhauser continues. “She was just finding who she was and was a bit all over the place, but I loved that about her.” She shares a sweet story that captures Roberts’ signature charm: “We were shooting on location in Mystic, Connecticut, and we were all staying in the same hotel. She was across the hall from me, and at the time, my daughters would come visit on the weekends. I was a working mother, and I would’ve just gotten my younger daughter to go to sleep after a long day, and then Julia would come knock on the door and they’d run up and down the halls together, both screaming with joy. She was very playful.”

The story behind Julia Roberts’ dresses in ‘Mystic Pizza’

In Mystic Pizza, Roberts alternates between her casual pizza parlor uniform and fun ’80s frocks, including a glamorous black cocktail dress topped with an oversized white bow. “There was originally going to be a scene where she goes out on a date and something spills all over the front of her dress, so we actually made four of those dresses,” von Mayrhauser remembers. “My assistant and I were in the hotel in Mystic, making these big white bows so that when the sauce spilled on her, it would show. We were up all night before it was going to film, and we had to use a little sewing kit from the hotel. We didn’t have the biggest budget.”

Designing ‘Law & Order’: 18 years, 350 episodes and countless outfits

Von Mayrhauser became the costume designer for Law & Order in its third season and she stayed with the show for nearly two decades, costuming over 300 episodes from 1992 to 2010. “One time, I actually went to a job interview and the director said to me, ‘There’s a major misprint in your IMDb. It says you’ve done 350 episodes of Law & Order. How is that even possible?’ So I had to tell him it wasn’t a mistake, and I’d actually done that many,” she says with a laugh.

“Television is very fast, but I like that. It’s fun to think on your feet and create a character really quickly,” the designer says, noting that episodes of the long-running procedural were turned around in just over a week. “When I was doing Law & Order, even though we were on a tight schedule, I always took time in the fitting room to create who the person was,” she adds. “When I went back to do theater right after Law & Order, I felt like the show helped me think faster and focus on what was important, so that was really interesting.”

It was lined with alpaca to help him stay warm

 

“I worked with [Law & Order creator] Dick Wolf again recently, and he said that he thought the way that I designed the clothes for the show was part of the reason why it has run for so long, because it doesn’t look too dated,” von Mayrhauser says proudly. “It was interesting of him to say, because I wasn’t conscious of that. When I do something that’s contemporary, I want the audience not to think about the costumes and to just think that they’re seeing who the characters really are.”

How Jerry Orbach’s legendary overcoat came to be

Given Law & Order’s intense production schedule, von Mayrhauser never had much time to build costumes from scratch, but she did have the opportunity to custom-make a coat for Jerry Orbach, who starred as Detective Lennie Briscoe from 1991 until his passing in 2004. “One of the interesting challenges of doing Law & Order in New York was that the winter got very cold, and the actors were outside a lot,” she says. “We built a beautiful overcoat for Jerry, and it was lined with alpaca to help him stay warm.” She also shares that at one point, the actor told her that his mother, who was in her 80s at the time, always wanted to see him wearing blue.

Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s costume design philosophy

“I love working with actors, and I think my work looks better if there’s a collaboration between me and the actor,” says von Mayrhauser. “Having conversations about the character and getting a sense of how the actor’s going to play them is one of the most rewarding parts of what I do. Those conversations make my work better, and hopefully, it also makes their work better.”

 

Dispelling the myth of Daniel Day-Lewis’ on-set personality

Von Mayhauser is also happy to dispel clichés around actors: “I worked with Daniel Day-Lewis on The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which is one of my favorite films I’ve done. There’s this myth about him that he’s so totally in character that you can’t talk to him. He takes his characters very seriously, and once we figured out his costumes way ahead of time, he started to wear them,” in method-actor form, she recalls, but crucially, they were still able to maintain a dialogue, and the designer even says that she related to his all-in approach.

After many years in the entertainment industry, von Mayrhauser still feels as excited as ever about her work. “It’s such a joyful thing to be a costume designer,” she enthuses. “I feel very blessed that I’m able to work on so many different projects,” and whether she’s costuming a play set in the past, a TV show or movie set in the present or something else entirely, her dedication always comes through.