The Black and White Ball in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (2024)

I’ve been struggling to write this post for weeks. I think this is one of those cases where I am too close to the actual history and therefore, I had some expectations for episode 3 of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (2024), which deals with Truman Capote’s famous (or is it infamous?) Black and White Ball that took place on November 28, 1966.

It’s never really a good thing when I start out with expectations, especially if one of those expectations is that a show will conform to some semblance of historical accuracy. I struggled a lot with the central conceit that this show is framed around, i.e., “lost footage” of a scrapped documentary that the Maysles brothers were filming that centers on Capote and his preparations for the Black and White Ball. Strike one, that never happened. The second thing that I had a hard time getting past was that it’s all shot in black and white film, which of course the Maysles brothers worked in, but it just felt a little too too on the nose for the subject matter. Black and white film? Black and White Ball? Get it?

But the main thing I struggled with was how over the top cunty Capote was to his friends. By all accounts (and I’ve read quite a bit of biographical material in preparation for watching this show, which might have been my first mistake — never let accuracy get in the way of telling a good story, as Truman himself would likely agree), Truman was still firmly in his sweetheart phase in the New York social scene in 1966. He was starting to get too big for his britches (the Ball itself IS a perfect example of his burgeoning delusions of grandeur) but by and large, he was still the Swans’ darling.

Even naming a relatively minor socialite in New York circles to the coveted guest of honor spot, Katharine Graham (who by no means was a minor figure in general; she inherited a little paper called The Washington Post upon her husband’s death and was the driving force behind many of that publication’s greatest hits in the 1960s and 1970s), didn’t really dampen his popularity with New York’s richest and most influential women. So, when he systematically humiliates Ann Woodward (who wasn’t actually at the ball in real life) for crashing the party, it felt wildly out of character for the true Truman, who was more comfortable with using gossip and rumor to cut a bitch than straight up making a scene in the middle of the biggest social event of the year. Then he goes and gets hammered and does basically the same thing to Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald) and his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy (Joe Mantello).

This is all to say that, while I conceptually understand what director Gus Van Sant is doing here, it’s A LOT to swallow in a single hour-long episode and made it hard for me to focus on the costumes because I kept getting tripped up with mushy timelines and just the epic shittiness of our protagonist. Which is a shame because this is the one episode out of all of them that should be nothing but fabulous costume content … And it is pretty fabulous.

Fashion designer Zac Posen was brought in to design the gowns for the attendees and to great acclaim. Take your pick between Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, W, Town and Country Magazine, Elle, and Vogue — all have done features on Posen’s designs for this episode. The designs are a mix of copies from the actual event to completely made-up to amp up the drama, but they all fit seamlessly into the opulent milieux Capote had pulled together. Posen has always been a bit of a throwback to the 1960s in terms of his personal aesthetics, known for his crisply tailored gowns during a time in the early- and mid-2000s when everyone was embracing a relaxed silhouette, so he’s a good fit for an episode like this.

Most of what the Swans are wearing during the ball isn’t based on what they actually wore, but a more heightened reimagining of what they could have worn. It all fits well within the historical parameters, however.

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Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald) wasn’t actually at the Ball (she apparently was sick that night and had to cancel), but apparently Zac Posen found the dress she would have worn for sale online. There’s no mention of whether the dress he designed for Molly in the episode was based on that original dress, or not, however. I do love it, though. It’s probably the most Zac Posen-y of all the dresses in this episode.

You can watch this short video about Zac Posen’s process of designing the gowns in this show: