What the Costume Emmy Winners Say About Fearless Aesthetics

From 1960s Palm Beach chic to dystopian retro-futurism or a madcap style suitable only for Alan Cumming, winning costume designers at this weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys proved sartorial excellence can be achieved in unlimited forms.

Across five categories, the six design teams that took home 2026 Emmy Awards indeed proved that there’s no guaranteed formula for capturing a best costume win. The wide-ranging spectrum of this year’s winners starts with the country club quiet luxury Olga Mill envisions for Netflix’s Beef, while the polar opposite of that aesthetic is surely the wild theatrics Steven Lee and his team conjures for the extravagant character costumes seen on Fox’s The Masked Singer.

The latter’s design crew shared this year’s honor for outstanding costumes for variety, nonfiction or reality programming with The Traitors (as one of four juried awards at the Creative Arts Emmys, this costume category is often split between multiple winners). Given the fan frenzy over host Alan Cumming’s costumes — which this season has ranged from over-the-top kilts to a head-to-toe black look inspired by a coffin — this season-four victory by costume designers Sam Spector and Riki Finlay was perhaps the least surprising win among the six trophies captured this weekend by the wildly popular Peacock series.

“The coffin [look] has become iconic — Jonathan Bennett wore it on the GLAAD Media Awards to host [in March],” Spector said during a backstage interview following Saturday’s Emmy win. “I custom-made that and is one of my favorites so far. Then there was the [Black Banquet cape], with tons of pearls, really heavy and really fun. Every season keeps getting more and more ridiculous; for the next one, coming out next week, we were supposed to tone it down, and we did not. Alan was like, ‘This is what you call toned down?’ But [Riki and I] can’t control ourselves.” The Traitors will vie for its final nomination, for outstanding reality competition program — a category the series won in both 2024 and 2025 — at the 2026 Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday, September 14.

Costumes that transcend a film or TV show to become a standalone conversation didn’t always happen like their current frequency, though it’s notable that popularity doesn’t always translate to an Emmy. Mad Men, with five nominations and zero wins for costume designer Janie Bryant, is a perfect example. But thanks to TikTok, launched the year after Mad Men ended its run in 2015, and other social-media platforms that place a high value on entertainment visuals, creating style that spawns clicks and conversation increasingly feels like an integral element in a show’s success. (Bryant did take home an Emmy for outstanding costumes for HBO’s Deadwood in 2005.)

That focus on creating viral moments via style likewise can be seen in other 2026 winners, starting with Palm Royale’s Alix Friedberg and her co-costume designer, Leigh Bell, who together with their team won outstanding period costumes Sunday evening. The Apple TV+’s show has spawned a wealth of attention for its retro-meets-colorful-meets-camp designs for stars Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, Carol Burnett and others. “There’s a gala or a ball in almost every episode,” Friedberg explained to Vogue in 2024 about the show’s maximalist vibe. “We go from gowns to lunch to tennis to fittings at the boutique on Worth Avenue — there’s so much fashion and so many different levels to it.”

Two radically different takes on futurism, meanwhile, earned a pair of wins from Emmy voters. Designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier and her team channeled an undeniable whimsy to create Elle Fanning’s Barbarella-esque costumes for her role as a rising OnlyFans star in Margo’s Got Money Troubles — the Apple TV+ series that wrapped its first season in May and co-stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman and Greg Kinnear took home the trophy for outstanding contemporary costumes. For the post-apocalyptic world of Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout, costume designer Dayna Pink and her team channeled an aesthetic that was markedly darker, chief among the reasons they were rewarded with the Emmy for outstanding fantasy/sci-fi costumes Sunday night.

At a panel discussion featuring several Fallout creatives in August, Pink discussed the myriad challenges of conjuring a wide range of looks for the show’s dystopian world. Then again, she could have been speaking for any costume designer on any series when she summed up how she approaches being a creative amid the current entertainment landscape: “It’s no fun if you’re not afraid.”