How Zac Posen and Feud recreated New York City's best party ever

Warning: This article contains minor spoilers from Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans episode 3, "Masquerade 1966."

What was it like inside Truman Capote's Black and White Ball? As with all the best parties, you just had to be there.

On the evening of Nov. 28, 1966, the eccentric author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood gathered all of his equally fabulous friends of New York high society for a lavish masquerade ball at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. Those in attendance ranged from celebrities like Candice Bergen and Mia Farrow, to artists like Andy Warhol and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, to those from the Hill like First Lady of the United States Lady Bird Johnson.

And, yes, Capote's Swans were also present, those wealthy socialites he so named for their unattainable style, poise, and elegance.

"You could compare the ball to the Met Gala, but as much as I appreciate the Met Gala for what it does and how it raises dough, it doesn't have the organic spontaneous elegance of the Black and White Ball," says Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans showrunner Jon Robin Baitz, whose team was tasked with recreating the iconic event for the episode titled "Masquerade 1966".

"The Black and White Ball was an event filled with improvisatory moments, and the Met Gala is entirely for public perception," he adds. "It is only about the way you look. The ball was about, you got invited to the room where it all happened, to steal a phrase from Hamilton."

The episode, which was written by Baitz and directed by Gus Van Sant, shifted format completely to dramatize events around the planning and execution of the soirée. The hour is told largely in black and white itself and framed around found footage of a supposedly scrapped Maysles Brothers documentary on Capote. (Albert and David Maysles actually interviewed the real Capote for a documentary short titled With Love From Truman.)

"Every story needs a spine, and somehow the Maysles Brothers being there filming became the negative — as in a film negative — for it," Baitz tells EW. "We decided to approach it through filmography, as it were, through news footage. There's so much footage and photographs of the Black and White Ball to look at you'd have to be bankrupt as a writer to not pick up the scent and the energy of what those scenes were like."

Van Sant, who's an executive producer on Feud season 2 with Baitz and Ryan Murphy, enlisted the aide of his fashion designer friend Zac Posen, who closed his namesake label in 2019 and has since refocused his time crafting one-of-a-kind pieces, as well as dabbling in costume work for the ballet and indie film.

Posen remembers speaking with Murphy and the show's costume designer, Lou Eyrich, while visiting a recreated set of New York's famed Kenneth Hair Salon. Calista Flockhart was filming a scene there at the time as one of Capote's Swan, Lee Radziwill.

"We came up with this idea that the whole ball itself was a beautiful, evil aquatic pond with different birds," Posen says. "Then I read the script and I learned which ladies from history are in the show, which ladies out of history are added to the show. I love history and had all the books. I had my OCD moment and then thought, we're making storytelling in real respect to Oscar Wilde or Cecil Beaton or great imagineers. We're telling our own version of history here based on a historical event."

"I then went into the frenzy of material shopping," Posen adds. Working with an assistant out of his father's painting studio in the Spring Street loft where he grew up — a "sacred space" in which he says he hadn't created anything in more than 20 years — the designer set to work gathering deadstock fabrics in the Garment District to match sequins, payettes, flower molds, and more.

Meanwhile, the research continued, from books, to Joe Eula and Kenneth Paul Block fashion illustrations, to an Amy Fine Collins piece written for Vanity Fair about the Black and White Ball.

"Ryan said, 'I think this is not necessarily history. I need this elevated. This has to meet the expectation of an audience today,'" Posen says of the feedback he received. "He said, 'I want reveals.' At that point, I said, 'That's the first time in my career I've ever been told more or tone up.' It was just such a great moment, and it became like Method costume making."

Naomi Watts' Babe Paley look, for example, was originally a fur jacket before they decided to go even bigger by creating a swan-like winged coat. (Yes, that had a reveal.) Posen had less historical references for what the real "Swan" Slim Keith wore to the ball, so he took the liberty of designing a jumpsuit for Diane Lane. For Molly Ringwald's character, the real Joanne Carson was too sick to attend the event, but Posen found the dress she would've worn on sale online. It was "that level of in-depth research," he says.

"I was happy to watch him let his freak flag fly," Baitz playfully remarks of Posen's work in the episode.

"He has an encyclopedic sense of the zeitgeist through the years," the showrunner continues. "Designers are intellectuals, whether you're talking about Karl Lagerfeld or Marc Jacobs, certainly Vivienne Westwood. They're making conceptual art, and what [Posen] did was conceptual art. If you saw those pieces just as inventions of an imagination inspired by the Black and White Ball, they could sit alone in the Met costume department or, for that matter, as constructions in the Whitney. It's the very best of Zac. There are people that you just feel the radiance coming from: his intelligence, his sophistication, his love of women. The best part of making something like this is to be around people who can inspire you to do better yourself. That's my Zac quote."

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