As 'The Bear' Ends, Costume Designer Courtney Wheeler Reflects On Dressing TV's Most Stylish Chef

"The Bear” has returned for its fifth and final season, bringing one of television’s most acclaimed series to a close. Since premiering in 2022, the show has followed Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) as he returns to Chicago to keep his family’s sandwich shop alive, eventually pushing the restaurant and everyone inside it toward something far more ambitious. With fully realized characters and storylines built around food, family, grief, and work, the series has become one of FX’s defining prestige shows.

It is also a menswear show. Like “Mad Men” and “Peaky Blinders,” “The Bear” hit a cultural nerve with a wide swath of men who, in some way, want to be Carmy (or at least look as cool as White in a simple white tee). Over the seasons, the wardrobe has gained a life outside the show, with pieces like the Merz b Schwanen 215 loopwheeled T-shirt and the wool Gael jacket by Danish brand NN.07 becoming sold-out items as fans try to emulate the look of a stressed-out Chicago chef on his last nerve.

Much of that success comes down to costume designer Courtney Wheeler, who has worked on the show since the first season. Over the last four years, Wheeler has used her eye for detail and deep understanding of the characters’ personal growth to build wardrobes that feel specific to their individual stories, while helping move the plot forward in subtle, sometimes imperceptible ways. 

The attention around Carmy’s clothes was no accident. From the pilot, wardrobe helped shape the characters before we knew very much about them. Take Carmy, for instance, whose vintage selvedge Levi’s—which he trades for meat in the pilot—gave the audience an understanding of his eye for quality and the life he had before returning to Chicago. Simple t-shirts, workwear pieces, and hype-worthy sneakers only underscore this idea, telling the audience so much about who Carmy is and has been, before we learned of his backstory.

For Wheeler, the pressures of Carmy’s work life – coupled with his personal tastes – helped to shape his wardrobe. “This is a creature of habit,” Wheeler says. “He obviously pays attention to what he puts on his body, how it’s worn, where he got it, what that quality is like. And so for him, he’s putting versions of that on his body every day, and he doesn’t want to think about it. He wants to know that it looks good, and there’s an ease in that.”

Of course, to flesh out a cast of characters as complex and varied as what we see on “The Bear,” Wheeler had a bit of guidance from Christopher Storer, the show’s creator and executive producer. With a penchant for fashion himself—he had his favorite designer, Thom Browne, design custom chef whites for Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) in season two—Storer drew the outlines of the characters, which Wheeler then filled in, with textures, preferred silhouettes, and colors for each individual character. “It is fun to talk to him about it, and to bounce ideas off, and to see how game he is,” Wheeler says of their collaborative approach.

Even so, Wheeler was surprised as anyone when the show became a cultural phenomenon. As the conversation around “The Bear” grew larger with each season, so did scrutiny of its characters’ wardrobes. “You have to kind of block out the noise,” she says. “Because once you start thinking about it, you’re going to overthink it.” Instead of falling into the trap of trying to please an increasingly watchful audience, Wheeler let the costuming evolve naturally. Case in point, Carmy’s original choice of footwear, a pair of Air Force 1s, was replaced with his now signature (and discontinued) all-white Nike Cortezes, which Wheeler says feel more fitting to the character. She took a similar approach to her decision to stick to Merz b. Schwanen for the character’s t-shirts, after trying a few different options in early seasons. These decisions were made through identifying and understanding who Carmy was as a person, not just a character on screen—a person who is making decisions about his wardrobe just as we do, getting tired of one piece, or going back to an old favorite again and again.

Wheeler noted this approach also applies to Carmy’s sister, Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott). For her early appearances on screen, she is trying to hold everyone together, and her wardrobe reflects that role through lighter colors and softer pieces. “When we first see her, she was trying to be such a caregiver,” Wheeler says. As Natalie takes on more authority, Wheeler moved her toward jewel tones and stronger work silhouettes. She still called back to textures Natalie loved, such as tweed and bouclé, but those pieces were used differently as the character changed. “We’re picking things from her earlier closets, and we’re like, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” Wheeler says. “For her work look, we really stopped pulling from there, because it felt like that’s not who she was anymore.”

This understanding of who these characters are—and how their wardrobe would naturally evolve over the years—is felt in season five. While Wheeler knew the show was ending, she did not want that sense of finality to dictate every choice. Rather than treating the final season as a chance to make the wardrobe bigger or more conclusive, the goal was to keep their identities consistent and as natural as possible. “You’re seeing them right now,” Wheeler says. “You’re seeing them in that moment, where they ended up. There might be hints of the past, and where they’ve been, and who they are now, but we didn’t let knowing it was the final season change who these characters are or how we’d see them for the last time on screen.”

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