In "The Shards," you're pulled straight into 1981 Los Angeles, where a group of elite prep schoolers navigates puberty, sex, and an at-large serial killer against a soundtrack of era-perfect needle drops. Ryan Murphy's FX series, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's 2023 novel of the same name, loosely fictionalizes Ellis's own senior year of high school—and getting the beauty right meant capturing a moment that came just before the decade's most familiar signatures.

For makeup department head Kate Biscoe and hair department head Valerie Jackson, the show’s plentiful needle drops (Blondie, Duran Duran, Joan Jett) were key to tapping into the aesthetic as they transformed the show’s main cast, Igby Rigney, Kaia Gerber, Homer Gere, Graham Campbell, and Hayes Warner.  “We listened to a ‘Shards’ playlist in the trailer every day,” Biscoe tells The Set Set. 

Aside from the evocative music, Biscoe found researching the period one of the job's greatest pleasures. "When I design, I try to put in visual signifiers that have some sort of deeper meaning, indicative of what was going on during the time period socially and politically," she says. “Reagan was in his first year of office, ‘Xanadu,’ ‘Halloween II,’ ‘Body Heat,’ ‘Evil Dead’, and ‘Endless Love’ were popular movies, and monthly subscriptions of print magazines like Seventeen were a major influence.” Her own copy of "The Preppy Handbook" also helped, along with her older brother's yearbook from his own “posh” private school.

Meanwhile, Jackson calls her process "book-end research." "I research heavily both before and after the period I'm working in," she explains. "That helps me understand what was truly current in 1981 versus what was influenced by that period later." For her, that included watching a lot of shampoo commercials, studying magazines, and looking closely at the natural hair of young people from the period. “Films like ‘Roller Boogie’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ were particularly inspiring, especially the natural, lived-in looks of the high school characters,” she says, adding that she “was looking at texture, shape, movement, and, most importantly, what felt authentic to the moment.”

Rigney, who plays Bret, is secretly sleeping with his male classmates, like Ryan Vaughn (Daniel Dale), who rocks a New Romantics-esque coif, while dating mean girl Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner). Rigney's naturally curly hair needed little work beyond a blowout to land on the golden waves that frame his face. The sun-kissed look extends to his and his classmates’ complexions. “Everyone had to have a California tan to illustrate the lifestyle of students in early ’80s LA,” explains Biscoe. “There are pool parties every episode, therefore, we did lots of spraying... A lot of work went into making the students look natural and outdoorsy,” a holdover from the previous decade. Similarly, the genealogically-given tight blonde curls of Campbell who plays Thom Wright, the tainted golden boy dating reluctant queen bee Susan Reynolds (Gerber), desperately clinging to his spot in the social hierarchy, were gently diffused with a hairdryer. 

The obvious comparison may be made between Gerber’s Susan and her famous mother, supermodel Cindy Crawford. Jackson certainly drew inspiration for Susan’s fluffy curls from Crawford’s shampoo commercials.  “Cindy was a wonderful visual reference for Susan,” she says. “[I] knew that if I gave Kaia that same texture, volume, and movement, she could naturally evoke that feeling.” Jackson recreated them on Gerber using Babyliss hot sticks and other styling tools that were period-appropriate, as well as more modern inventions, such as the Edree Theia Aerosonic blow-dryer which was used alongside a round brush. Modern products, such as the Stephen Knoll Memory range, Color Wow, Oribe superfine hairspray, and Schwarzkopf, “were heroes for us throughout the season.”

“There was also a very fun and surreal day on set when Cindy came to visit Kaia,” Jackson continues. “She sat in our hair trailer while I styled her hair, and we all talked about hair in the ’80s. It was such a lovely experience and definitely one of those moments I’ll remember.” Conversely, as Crawford didn’t begin modelling until later in the decade, Biscoe eschewed Crawford as an addition to her moodboard and instead turned to an earlier supermodel, Gia Carangi, and the album cover of “Rio” by Duran Duran.

Susan’s frenemy Debbie is oblivious to it all, asking such dumb blonde questions as whether her lip gloss makes her look fat. “For someone who looks in the mirror all the time, you really don’t look in the mirror, do you?” Susan incredulously asks Debbie during a heightened moment. But beneath her seemingly impenetrable surface, she has a heart of glass not unlike the Blondie song of the same name, whose frontwoman Debbie Harry’s platinum blonde mop Debbie namechecks as her hair goals in an early episode, tempered with Farrah Fawcett-like feathered layers, in a hangover from the 1970s. After all, “The Shards” is set in 1981, so there are fewer “mall bangs, excessive crimping, and exaggerated volume we often associate with the decade,” says Jackson. “My goal was to create authenticity rather than lean into the stereotypical version of ’80s hair.” 

Though there are outrageous looks for those who care to see them, specifically in Debbie’s dad Terry Schaffer (played by Wes Bentley), who is a predatory producer hitting on his daughter’s boyfriend under the guise of optioning the screenplay of his novel—and a Jheri curl mop “inspired by Lindsey Buckingham” of Fleetwood Mac that Jackson and her team achieved by perming Bentley’s hair. “Wes naturally has very straight hair, so we initially tested the look using hot sticks to see how the curls would work for the character,” she explains. “Ryan Murphy loved the result, and from there we decided to perm Wes’s hair so we could maintain the curl consistently throughout filming. It became such a strong part of the character’s visual identity.”

Meanwhile, Evan Rachel Wood as Debbie’s envious mom and Terry’s long-suffering wife who dreams of stardom of her own cuts an intimidating figure with a severely chopped bob with bangs to match, while Broadway producer Jordan Roth is transcendent as Terry’s quirky colleague Steven Reinhardt, whose androgynous look is inspired by the British musician David Sylvian and is Biscoe’s favorite beauty look of the season.

We can’t forget—and Vogue certainly won’t let us, if this month’s cover is any indication—that Crawford and Richard Gere, who set the tone for 1980s power suiting in “American Gigolo,” were married, so Richard’s son Homer Gere’s casting as mysterious newcomer Robert Mallory is curious. Robert throws the formerly comfortable quartet of Bret, Debbie, Susan and Thom into disarray, jostling with Thom for social supremacy while trying to steal his girl Susan, and consuming Bret’s thoughts of lust and armchair sleuthing. “Robert embodies all that is taboo,” Biscoe says. “Bret is in love with him, also wants to be him, but Bret’s terrified of Robert at the same time.” For that reason, Robert had to be somewhat of an enigma, with a moodboard evoking the paintings of artist Egon Schiele and the cover of David Bowie’s Heroes album, his voluminous ebony locks maintained with Osis Grip Mousse. 

While Debbie is able to get away with red lips and eyeliner to make her blue eyes pop because of her influential parents, “the look was more subdued and uniform than the bold colors people generally associate with the later period,” Biscoe says. Flip through any of her reference fashion magazines and you’ll find a lot of wines and burgundies, which Biscoe incorporated into Susan’s palette, emphasizing her natural coloring. “Women used blush as contour, but it was wide, back towards the hairline and carried on up onto the temple. It was called the Lazy-J. Brows were full and natural—and just simple mascara,” a look Biscoe says she’s keen to bring back. “No false eyelashes!”

Returning to the decadence of the ’80s was ultimately a bittersweet feeling for Biscoe, who “lived through the time period. My closest friends were coming to terms with their sexuality and had to keep it hidden in order to survive. Some of my friends made it out alive. Others didn’t.”

In this way, ‘The Shards’ is a foreshadowing of what was to come with the looming HIV/AIDS crisis as Bret tries to navigate his sexuality and identity under the spectre of the serial killer The Trawler, so named for the piscine signature left at the crime scene. “I really wanted to get this look right to pay homage to them, and honor them for being trailblazers for the acceptance of gay rights,” Biscoe says. “I’d like young people struggling with identity to see a message of hope within ‘The Shards.’”