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In costuming Bree, Adair uses a lot of structured skirts and pants to show off Marcia Cross' great figure. Though many may think of Bree as a '50s housewife, she rarely dresses in period clothes. Instead Adair tries what she calls "tips" tot the '50s without making the outfits too stylized. "The secret with Bree," says Adair, "is that her clothes have to look like they're modern. We can tip to mid-century American style but we'll never dress her in a complete Jackie Kennedy suit." To achieve this look, Adair uses Tahari, Marc Jacobs and Anthropologie and pieces of vintage clothes that she recuts and restructures.
Marcia Cross herself says her personal style is nothing like Bree's. "I'm all about comfort," says Cross, who often slips into Terry cloth slippers between takes. "If it's not comfortable I don't wear it. I'm a flats person and a cargo pants girl whose hair is always in a pony-tail. Bree's the opposite. She's all about how it looks!"
Achieving the Bree look can be tiring-the most time consuming part of Cross' preperation is maintaining her flip-style haircut. "It's my fault," Cross says. "I picked the haircut." Though she thought the hairstyle was right for the character, she had no idea how time-consuming it would be to maintain it. "In future seasons," says Cross, "I would like to see her punched up a little bit, looking a little more Ralph Lauren, as she gets wiser to the ways of the world. It would be nice to see her hair and style change."
"I had this feeling of her being stuck in time," says Cross, "and there was something about that hairstyle that recalled a different era, like Smith College in the '50s. Her haircut, values, ideas have not evolved over time."
