Time & Perspective Quote by Donna Mills

The glamor here is almost a decoy; what Donna Mills is really describing is labor. “Seven or eight outfits” isn’t just a fun behind-the-scenes flex, it’s a quiet correction to the idea that acting is mostly vibes and camera charisma. She’s naming the hours of sourcing, fitting, coordinating, and negotiating taste with the realities of production. The line “It took a lot of time to get those together” lands like a small protest against an industry that treats women’s appearance as both mandatory and effortless.

When Mills says wardrobe is “very essential” to creating character, she’s staking out a method that’s tactile and strategic. Clothes aren’t decoration; they’re psychology you can see. A character’s silhouettes, colors, and textures communicate status, desire, control, insecurity - often before the script gives you a single clean line of exposition. Mills frames costume as an acting tool, the way another performer might talk about dialect work or physicality. That matters because wardrobe is frequently relegated to “the look,” a domain stereotyped as feminine and therefore undervalued, even as it drives how audiences read a woman on screen.

There’s also an era-specific wink. Mills came up in a television culture where outfits were part of the hook - glamour as weekly event, clothes as cliffhanger. She’s reminding you that the “iconic” image is built, piece by piece, by someone treating fabric like narrative.