CNN
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Tammy Faye Bakker. Thierry Mugler. Leigh Bowery.
These three figures come from extremely different worlds — televangelism, couture fashion and drag performance art, respectively — and yet all of them inform the singularly bizarre and flamboyant style on “The Righteous Gemstones,” a raucous satire of Southern megachurch bigwigs that ends its four-season run on Sunday. (The show is a property of HBO, which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)
The titular Gemstones, three wealthy adult siblings who’ve inherited their parents’ booming megachurch and TV operation in South Carolina, are “always on stage,” said costume designer Christina Flannery in a phone call with CNN. Perpetually playing dress-up, they wear sequins, silks and shoulder pads — and sometimes capes, to leave a room with a flourish. Even their more casual moments at home are opportunities to flaunt their flashy wardrobes.
Take the image above. On their family property, eldest son Jesse (Danny McBride) is wearing a full leather suit in the Southern heat. Kelvin (Adam DeVine), the youngest, is bedazzled from head to toe. And eccentric middle child Judy (Edi Patterson) is wearing a power-clashing skirt suit straight out of the 1980s.
Their gaudy getups are the manifestations of what children imagine fancy adults wear (and the Gemstone siblings are exceptionally juvenile). With deep pockets and thousands of eager worshippers hanging on their every word each Sunday, what does their church garb look like?
“Absolutely more and more sequins,” Flannery said.
Though it reserves affection for its (very) flawed characters, “The Righteous Gemstones” giddily skewers the Southern megachurch. With packed rows of congregants, an evangelical bent and technology that wouldn’t feel out of place at a stadium concert, the Gemstones’ megachurch isn’t far off from the real thing. See: The pastors and performers who have flown above parishioners for special events, much like the Gemstone siblings using jet packs to propel themselves across their audience during the finale of a telethon.
Before the siblings’ takeover, Gemstone patriarch Eli (played by John Goodman) and wife Aimee Lee (Jennifer Nettles) anchored the family’s church until her death. It’s a nod to real husband-wife duos like Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye and televangelist Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria, the latter of whom still lead around 45,000 congregants per week at Lakewood Church in Texas.
Some of the most well-known US megachurches, though, are in the country’s most liberal cities. Zoe Church and the scandal-plagued Hillsong have marketed Christianity to a younger, hipper set of parishioners (including celebrities like Justin Bieber), partly through the charisma of the “hypepriest,” the term coined by GQ in 2017 that describes the clergymen who don streetwear in the pulpit and encourage a more casual churchgoing environment.
“Gemstones” pokes fun at hypepriests, too, Flannery said, especially through Kelvin and his bestie-turned-boyfriend Keefe (Tony Cavalero). The pair also takes style notes from Siegfried and Roy, the magician duo who performed alongside tigers in Vegas for years, Flannery notes, through the emerald-green co-ords they wear to Prism, their LGBTQ-friendly ministry.
Similarly, nearly all of Flannery’s inspirations for the Gemstones’ style are known for their flamboyant dress. Bakker (who went by Messner after remarrying in 1993) was a televangelist who favored exaggerated silhouettes and voluminous hair like Judy. And in the third season, the Gemstones’ showman uncle, “Baby” Billy Freeman (Walton Goggins), wears an oyster-shell ensemble that emulates Mugler’s theatrical pink silk-lined “Birth of Venus” clamshell dress, a nod to Botticelli’s 15th-century painting of the same name. Mugler’s work has become a sartorial touchstone for drag performers, too, for its open-armed embrace of camp.
The world of drag, especially, has provided ample if unlikely inspiration for Flannery’s work on “Gemstones,” she said. Drag-inspired performance artist Leigh Bowery, whose surrealist gender-bending styles challenged conventional standards of beauty, and Yvie Oddly of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” made outfits that Flannery considers “walking piece(s) of art.”
Drag and the world of Southern televangelism share little overlap in practice, but aesthetically, both are predicated on the exaggerated performance of gender.
“They’re so influenced by each other,” Flannery said of the crossover.
Bakker, in particular, was emulated by drag queens in the South during her ‘80s heyday for her heavy makeup and gaudy dress. Her appearance “reinforced the concept of gender as performance, thereby unintentionally intersecting with the crux of drag,” wrote religion scholar Denis Bekkering in 2015.
Though their politics are somewhat opaque, the Gemstone women operate within highly conservative evangelical networks. They also wear what could be considered “Republican makeup,” the TikTok moniker for the heavy cosmetics preferred by high-profile conservative women like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump campaign adviser Kimberly Ann Guilfoyle and former RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
Inae Oh, a senior editor at Mother Jones, called the phenomenon “perceived hotness as a power play” in the Vox podcast “Today, Explained” in April. The beauty ideals favored by some Republican women helps reinforce traditional gender norms while asserting their power in a way that feels palatable to a conservative institution, she explained.
“’You don’t have to be threatened by this woman of power because she is also what a ‘real’ woman looks like,’” Oh said.
Amber Gemstone (Cassidy Freeman), Jesse’s wife, fits that mold. She’s rarely seen onscreen without a full face of makeup and styled hair and typically dons dresses that are form-fitting yet demure, and almost always with heels. Her style telegraphs her position of power in the family, as her husband’s supportive (and sharper) half.
Judy is also rarely seen dressed down, but her skirt suits and perm lend her a more awkward air. Her style is stuck in the 1980s, inspired by her late mother’s church ensembles. There’s power in her last name — she was born a Gemstone; Amber married into it, a point of contention since they met — but she lacks the traditional beauty expected of a powerful Southern woman, and for that, she’s regularly discounted by others in her orbit.
“It’s like pageantry,” Flannery said of her interpretation of what Judy’s idea of femininity looks like, adding that “Toddlers & Tiaras” inspired some of her more juvenile looks.
There may never be another series that lets her take as wild swings as she has on “Gemstones,” Flannery reflected — the opportunity to dress Goggins as an old man in gold and purple lamé, or Patterson in a nautical skirt-suit with matching sailor hat. But she’ll carry that “crazy, sparkly, weird sh*t” with her in future projects, she said, letting the zany miracles of the Gemstones live on.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of Joel Osteen’s wife.
