‘Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist’ costume designer Ernesto Martinez on recreating 1970s Atlanta for the Peacock series

For “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” costume designer Ernesto Martinez, the reality of the fact-based story of an armed robbery in the aftermath of Muhammad Ali’s 1970 comeback fight in Atlanta was merely the starting point for his craftsmanship on the Peacock limited series.

“I had free range to design every character in a way that felt like Atlanta – but a very fashionable Atlanta with a lot of money and a lot of gangsters,” Martinez tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: TV Costume Designers panel. “So I went out of the box, and decided that each character should come from different places of the world and dress very unconventionally – dress how people would think they would dress in Atlanta in the 1970s.”

Created by Shaye Ogbonna and based on the 2020 podcast of the same name, “Fight Night” focuses on the brazen armed robbery that occurred during an afterparty following Ali’s fight that netted the perpetrators more than $1 million. Kevin Hart stars as Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams, a street hustler who hosts the infamous party and later must work with a local detective (played by Don Cheadle) to clear Williams’s name before mobster Frank Moten (Samuel L. Jackson) kills him. Oscar nominees Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard also costar in the series.

For Martinez, each character had an archetype he followed. “Samuel L Jackson, I based on the kind of banker who I thought would buy his clothes at Savile Row. I made every piece of his wardrobe, and I made it look like that: fine tailoring, beautiful coats and hats,” Martinez says.

“For Taraji, who plays Williams’s girlfriend, I based her on Josephine Baker – that type of character, how she would have been when she was younger. And I looked at some of her photos from the 1970s and she was pretty much the same, pretty risque,” Martinez adds.

“Kevin Hart’s character is based on another movie I saw that was based in the 70s. I did a lot of Shaft-type of looks for him,” Martinez says. “I thought that it would be something that his character would look up to.”

To accomplish this task, Martinez relied heavily on research, creating an extensive library of fashion from the era. What stood out is how adventurous the clothing choices were at the time, defying expectations of gender and sexuality in a way that feels almost foreign to today’s looks.

“The clothes sort of ran the whole gamut with these crazy fashion moments that you’ll never see again,” he says. “I don’t know how to describe it otherwise. They were really far out of the box of traditional fashion. You could call it glam rock. Straight men wore a lot of these stretch fabrics, one-piece fabrics, with their chest hair out. They took pride in that. And this was conventional straight men who were doing high fashion – the big hats, the whole pimp look. Think Dolomite. It was really something that they aspired to – that was the look. So I took inspiration from it and then did my own version of the clothes.”

“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” is streaming now on Peacock.