In the second episode of the fourth season of “Ted Lasso,” the Richmond Greyhounds soccer team find themselves without kits, or uniforms, for their first friendly, or exhibition, match of the season. Hijinks ensue, and the Greyhounds manage to scrounge up some kits, all decked out in sequins and feathers haphazardly thrown together in the nick of time. Why wouldn’t a well-established sports team have uniforms for a new season?

Let’s back up for a minute. The first three seasons of Apple TV’s most popular show, which follows co-creator Jason Sudeikis’ titular fish-out-of-water sports coach, centered on the male Richmond soccer team as they navigated football, life (or, as Danny Rojas would say, “football is life”), and an inept coach with a heart of gold. We were under the impression that 2023’s third season was its final, but in an entertainment landscape where IP and nostalgia for a simpler time (if you can call peak pandemic 2020 a simpler time) reign supreme, “Ted Lasso” has been brought back for a fourth season, this time focusing on the newly minted Lady Greyhounds and their struggles for legitimacy as a female sports team. Just as the first season tapped into a feeling of emotional vulnerability during a time of intense global anxiety, season four captures the popularity of women’s sports in recent years.

So this season women’s costuming is front and center. There, is of course, the team’s bedazzled kits, which in-show were made by male team coach Roy Kent’s (Brett Goldstein) niece, avid Lady Greyhounds fan and budding feminist Phoebe (Elodie Blomfield) and her friends. In real life, the show’s longtime costume designer Jacky Levy says her wardrobe department had a lot of fun making them by hand. “Nearly everybody on the [costume] team stuck things on those t-shirts; there’d always be one of them sitting there doing one of the t-shirts,” Levy says. “We bought a whole lot of red and blue t-shirts, cut them up, and sewed them back together again—badly!”

Costuming is also amplified by the evolving wardrobes of the show’s style doyennes, team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) and former glamour model turned marketing executive Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). Keeley has been on quite a personal and fashion journey over the past few seasons as she tried to balance her own “quirky” taste, as Levy calls it, and the expectations of professional women. “She has a sense of wanting to look maybe more professional, there’s only so far she will go,” Levy says. “It’s completely her version of what looks professional. She’d never be beaten into looking conservatively dressed.”

Thus we get bare midriffs, sequin skirt suits, cut-outs and bedazzled accessories, such as the Agent Provocateur sparkly tie paired with a black cut-out Dion Lee blazer for Keeley’s presentation at the Greyhounds stakeholder event in episode three, or the pink cut-out Alexander McQueen blazer—a last-minute addition which Levy says she found the night before filming began on that episode—and accompanying pink miniskirt with butterfly adornments by AREA which Keeley wears to a businesswomen’s summit. 

It’s there that she meets Zelda Southport (Tracey Ullman), a veteran team owner who has somehow gotten to where she is by giving zero effs, which has endeared her to football’s boys’ club. Inspired by rock stars like The Pretenders’ Chrissy Hynde, Zelda challenges the decorum Rebecca has been taught to conduct herself with in order to make her way up the ranks, all while ruffling as few feathers as possible. Though Rebecca subtly pushes boundaries in her own way with her figure-hugging suiting and preference for feminine fabrics like silk and lace, but as her clash with Lady Greyhounds assistant coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) over fourth-wave feminism reflects, that’s now viewed as more conservative by the current generation. 

This costuming mirrors the girl crush-triangle Keeley finds herself in, between her mentorship by Rebecca and her newfound idolatry for Zelda: Keeley has been learning to subtly temper her high-street style by surrounding herself with Rebecca’s pencil skirts, but in Zelda’s rock star chic wardrobe, Keeley sees reinforcement that she doesn’t have to change the way she looks to wield power as an executive. 

Levy used a lot of structural Japanese designs and edgy pieces by Ann Demeulemeester and Jean Paul Gaultier for Zelda, which scratched the high-fashion itch that Levy had to temper when it came to the Lady Greyhounds. We all know female athletes are paid a fraction of what male teams are, so Levy “couldn’t put them in expensive designer outfits; I had to keep it quite real,” tapping into the individual characters with their own individual looks by going back to basics. In a way, it’s like she’s going back to the beginning of “Ted Lasso” again, which she’s been with since its inception. “You don’t normally get a complete cast change in the middle of a series,” she says. “It’s been very satisfying to create characters from the start again.”