The Creative Shift : Show Aesthetic Breakdown of the Severance Color Palette
If you are like me, you have been glued to your seat every Friday for the past month. I wanted to contribute some random thoughts and details I have noticed purely on the details of Severance you may have missed throughout the series. My intent is to find an audience with the release of episode 5 that are as interested as the behind the scenes and fun facts about Lumon and why it looks the way it does.
Apple TV+’s Sever/ance is a masterclass in world-building, using meticulous production design to create an unsettling yet immersive atmosphere. The show’s visual language feels eerily familiar, drawing from corporate nostalgia while crafting a world that exists just outside reality.
Building Style: The Brutalist Enigma of Lumon
The Lumon Industries headquarters is a monolithic structure, evoking elements of Brutalist architecture mixed with the sterility of mid-century modern corporate design. The building’s exterior, filmed at Bell Labs in New Jersey (a mid-century architectural landmark), embodies an imposing, windowless presence—isolating and austere. Its vast, stark interiors further reinforce the unsettling tone, with long, labyrinthine hallways and inexplicably empty spaces that feel oppressive yet hypnotic.
The office spaces themselves embrace a retro-futuristic aesthetic, blending 1970s corporate minimalism with an uncanny sense of timelessness. White, modular desks in endless, carpeted green voids give the feeling of both expansion and confinement, emphasizing the surreal detachment from the outside world. The cubicle-free layout further strips individuality, reducing workers to mere cogs in a well-organized yet strangely barren machine.
Colour Palette: Muted Yet Vibrant Dissonance of the Lumon Colors
The severance costume design and color scheme is intentionally controlled—cool, muted pastels and earthy tones juxtapose against the stark white and fluorescent lighting of the office spaces. Lumon’s world exists in a vacuum where colors feel simultaneously vintage and futuristic, evoking a sense of unease.
Not only do the colour palette’s used in Lumon play into the offkilter energy of Severance, the brand standards that Lumon sticks to is a lesson in corporate identity in its purest form.
• Offices: Deep greens and sterile whites dominate, reflecting a corporate sterility reminiscent of 1970s office spaces.
• Wardrobe: Dusty blues, mustard yellows, and muted oranges suggest an era trapped between the 1960s and 1980s.
• Personal Life (Outside Lumon): Warmer, more natural tones subtly contrast the corporate void, yet still maintain a subdued, almost washed-out quality.
The use of bold but muted colors in key moments—such as the unsettling, vibrant break room posters—further distorts reality, reinforcing the psychological control Lumon exerts.
Wardrobe: The Mid-Century Corporate Limbo
Costume design in Severance plays a crucial role in its timeless, disorienting feel. The attire is unmistakably corporate, but it avoids anchoring itself to a specific era. The influence of 1960s and 1970s office wear is apparent:
• Men’s Wardrobe: Slim-cut suits, knit ties, and muted earth-tone dress shirts echo IBM’s heyday, but with an eerie lack of modern tailoring.
• Women’s Wardrobe: Modest blouses, A-line skirts, and practical yet slightly outdated silhouettes reflect a workforce frozen in time.
Everything is just off enough to feel unsettling—no contemporary brands, no noticeable trends, just an eerily homogenous corporate uniformity. The lack of personalization further reflects Lumon’s overarching control, reducing employees to interchangeable parts of the machine.
Set Design: An Office Without Time
The world of Severance is deeply immersive, with an obsessive attention to corporate nostalgia. Details like old CRT monitors, dot-matrix printers, and rotary telephones reinforce the sensation that Lumon is cut off from modern reality. However, these elements aren’t simply relics of the past—many feel strangely futuristic, adding to the show’s dystopian undertones.
Even mundane office items—mug designs, filing cabinets, outdated vending machines—are chosen deliberately to create a sense of displaced time. This uncanny mix of retro and futuristic aesthetics mirrors the show’s central theme: a world where identity and memory are controlled, and the past is rewritten at will.
Final Thoughts: The Aesthetic as Psychological Control
The brilliance of Severance’s design lies in its ability to trap the viewer within its corporate hellscape. The cold, calculated environment, paired with the deliberate anachronism of its wardrobe and set pieces, makes the audience feel just as severed as the characters. By leaning into retro corporate nostalgia, the show creates a world that is both eerily familiar and deeply unsettling—a vision of corporate dystopia meticulously crafted and poignant, down to the last muted shade of green.
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