The Who What Wear Podcast: Frankenstein Costume Designer Kate Hawley on Mia Goth’s Ephemeral Looks, del Toro’s Color-Coding, and the Tiffany & Co. Archives

0:10Welcome to the Who What Wear podcast, your direct line to the designers, stylists, beauty experts, editors, and tastemakers who are shaping the ever-evolving world of fashion. I'm Who What Wear Editor-in-Chief, Kat Collings, and today on the podcast, our senior fashion and social editor, Tara Gonzalez, is joined by costume designer, Kate Hawley. Kate's most recent work can be seen in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The movie, led by Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi, will be streaming on Netflix in just two days. Today, Kate tells us what it was like to team up with del Toro again after working with him for years to bring his vision to life.

0:48She unpacks the symbolism of standout pieces like Victor's blood-red leather gloves and Elizabeth's multi-layered Victorian wedding dress, as well as how the changing color palette of the film tells the story of metamorphosis within each character. Plus, she shares the historical references she used when working on the period piece and how she paid homage to past interpretations of Frankenstein. It's all coming up on Who What Wear.

1:21Thank you so much for joining me, Kate. I saw Frankenstein two days ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. It was absolutely incredible, and I've been bragging to all my friends who haven't seen it yet. So obviously, Frankenstein was directed by Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro, who you've worked with extensively. So I'd kind of love to hear a little bit about how did you guys first get connected? Oh, yeah. Well, we're going back a little while now. It's amazing how that creeps up. But he was in New Zealand and he was having meetings with Peter Jackson about The Hobbit.

1:53And Peter had me sort of scuttled in the corridor somewhere. I was sort of like Miss Havisham working there on another project. And there was sort of the pad of bare feet. Peter walked in and behind him was Guillermo. And they just stood around and chatted and we were talking about work. And Guillermo looked at my bookshelf. He'd basically just looked at all my books and I had this wonderful collection of horrors. I had Caravaggio, Goya, and I had Joel Peter Witkin. I was going through that tremendously Gothic period of my life. And he just said, we can communicate. We understand each other. We have the same books.

2:24We can work together. And that was the biggest takeaway from that. And then, of course, I collapsed in a corner and went, oh my God, I've just met my hero. But it was about communication and understanding language. And I think the thing that binds all of us with Guillermo as collaborators, is sharing that common language and building on that. And also, I think it goes deeper than just my bookshelf. I was brought up in the world of theatre and opera and that ability to cross over different disciplines, working from theatre and film. Guillermo's a man of understanding and literature and the arts.

2:54He has more knowledge than anyone I know in all those areas. He's a voracious reader and a voracious lover of movie history. And then when you got the call to work on this project, what was your initial reaction? Was there anything that you were particularly excited about tackling and then also nervous about tackling. Beyond excited to be considered for what was a really special passion project that's been, you know, from his infancy, really. And then with that becomes the very daunting pressure and weight on your shoulders. I think all of us feel like we've all talked about there's this sort of weight in that, well, I do my best work for him that allows us to reach what he has in his head and his vision.

3:35So there's a burden with that, but there's a joy that comes with that. And I think that's the whole process. A lot of pain, a lot of grief, and a lot of joy. All in equal measure, you're feeling like everything all at once. I find the process very personal, you know, and he envelops us in his vision from the very beginning. He's there every step of the way, but also there's that willing to try and push and discover something. And ironically, you're working on a Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein's pursuing that muse in himself. So in a way, it's an allegory for how we all work and trying to find those elements and definitely for Guillermo and he's present in every character that's written in that.

4:11I'm a huge lover of gothic literature and of course the book and then to see how he's interpreting and taking those themes and keeping those very much present and alive but reimagining it through his own eyes it was like catnip and you know it's a very exciting thing. And then when you're approaching obviously a period piece what is the research process for you like where do you kind of start pulling the references and adding them to the mood board as you're putting together all of these costumes? Well, it's a many-pronged process. And although the vision that Guillermo has and where we're going is very linear, within that, I will play quite organically with things.

4:45And part of me is the historical geek, for sure. My assistant Alex and I did a timeline going back from The Count of Otranto. So great works and literature were part of that timeline, what was happening culturally. And when Guillermo decided to set it within the Crimean period, so 1850s, which is different from the Age of Enlightenment where the novel's set. There's a whole lot happening within the Industrial Revolution. There's great progress being made on the medical front in the Crimean War with Florence Nightingale and all the surgeries and new techniques that were being adapted. So Guillermo was very clear to me that he wanted this world not to be weighed down by that Dickensian, you know, world that we're more familiar with.

5:21And then part of the challenge was how to sort of take the Gothic language of the early age, that more romantic period, and fit it in this beginning of an industrial world, this other world. And we sort of play and I start building an environment in the workroom that Guillermo comes in as part of and also my crew so that he shares his vision with me, I share it with my crew and so forth and so on between departments. And we build up a huge body of work that we start with color palettes, distilling those colors. There's an atmosphere of melancholy memories and that's within what the creature says, how Victor views his mother and Elizabeth, the organic quality of nature.

5:56All of that started getting woven into my characters, I don't draw a finished costume drawing from the beginning. I start from the inside out. Sometimes I start with a textile first. The same with organic materials. We had bones, we had malachite. We sort of build the world around us and you distill from that and then you start to see the patterns. And going back to the answer about historical reference, the fact that he set it against the Crimean War gave me a silhouette. In historical reality, the silhouette changes a lot between 1840 and 1860. But we're in the dream of this period. This is his fever dream.

6:27This is his dream of memories. It's Victor's reality and it's the creature's reality. We're not talking about a historical documentary. So it allows me to take those elements and qualities and try and explore that thematically through color and pattern and texture. Amazing. Well, I'd love to talk a little bit about the nitty gritty of the specific costumes. There's a lot of nitty gritty. There's a lot of nitty gritty. So maybe we can go through some of the characters and we can start with Mia Goth's costumes because they're just so stunning and beautiful. And obviously she plays both Elizabeth and Victor's mother.

6:57So maybe we can start with the mom. We have that beautiful red organza gown. And then she has that sheer veil that's glowing in the wind, which was such a stunning moment. And I'd love to hear a little bit about the decision of red and the sheer veiling as well. Well, the color coding is Guillermo leads all of that with his structure. And he asked for a plume of blood. Guillermo works in a circular way with imagery, with storytelling and narrative and repetition. So as he was developing all of this, there's a lot of languages about circles. So it's in the windows of the architecture, it's in the mirrors that we see, and then the reflection, and then the Medusa itself.

7:35And what you see at the beginning, Claire is the heart of it, and we're looking at her through Victor's eyes, and she's memory. Her face is clouded in a veil, which also helps us put us in that feeling, in that environment. when we see that image of the red it's then repeated the hand of blood on the back of young Victor when she's falling into labor we get the imprint of her hand and that echoes itself in the red gloves that Victor wears as we see him as a grown man and then that imagery is repeated again we see Mia as Elizabeth and Claire the mother are many versions of women she's Madonna she's the mother she's a woman in her own right she keeps changing this imagery and Guillermo always wanted those characters to be ephemeral and as they're seen through Victor's eyes.

8:16So they're just slices of memory, really. And those are all the qualities that Guillermo wanted to bring. And that red is the continuity all the through. And red is very carefully chosen. He's got specific tones of red that he uses. And Elizabeth, the red that she wears on the interior of her circular bonnet is repeated in the circular effigy of the death mask of Claire. So nothing's just by accident. All of the decision-making is there with intent. And we finished that whole storytelling at the end with Elizabeth as the bride dying and the red seeping through the blood red of chawl and white.

8:48And that takes us back to the beginning. So that's how we worked with the red. And it was so stunning right from the beginning too. And I feel like something that I also noticed was when we first see Victor's mother, and she's obviously in the red, and then all the women that are working at the estate in the house are all white. And they also had veils or their faces were covered. and at the wedding as well. So then I'd love to hear about that decision to have these people in the background still painting such a specific scene. And maybe it has to do a little bit with what you were saying about.

9:15It added like a dreamy. Yeah, and memories. Memories aren't always clear. And I would say all of us have a childhood memory, hopefully of being embraced or folded into a parent's arms and taken back up to bed or from the car. And all you hear is the sort of muffled sound. You don't see the face of your parent, but you hear that comforting sound through walls being carried and that. So the mother is more abstracted in that way. And because he, going back to the conversation of colour, he wanted very strong saturated colours. But again, part of that challenge was they're saturated colours, but how do we fit those into the Gothic world?

9:48How do we give them the melancholy and depth of tone as opposed to just being bright and flat? You know, weaving into this story as we were going, I'd visited the Tiffany archives. Guillermo talked about Elizabeth representing Beatles and nature and the ephemeral qualities. and looking at the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and the scarab glass, there's iridescence used in that. When I looked back at the wings of giant beetles that we had as part of our collection and reference books, you know, those patterns are enlarged. The patterns of the books that she opens with their Victorian marble patterns, echo cells.

10:21So blood cells, malachite, x-rays, all became part of the visual language of that. And we used greens, but we'd add purples to add depth or yellows when we were looking at Victor's wardrobe with the sort of nod to the 60s and Hammer horror films. That also interpreted itself into Elizabeth's world with more the Bieber-esque world of that London fashion thing. So we painted with colour to give depth, not using black. Black wasn't the colour that we used. And a huge part of it was Mia, what she brought to it. She has that amazing sort of timeless face. She looked like she could walk out of a Caravaggio painting and she could look like she walked out of a Bieber painting.

10:56And all of those things fused together, you know, all of that sort of neo-Victorian world, that all came together and distilled itself within the characters. And then to kind of talk about Elizabeth specifically, the first look that we kind of see her in, it's this bluish, greenish gown. She has the feather piece about her eyes that I was like, okay, I need to be wearing feathered pieces. I'm like, why not? This needs to be more popular in black tie attire. But it was just so beautiful. And I feel like it touches a little bit on, like you said, her ties to nature and like beetles and all of that.

11:27But I'd love to hear how did that come together? Which happened at the end, by the way, in Practicality. Oh, really? Yeah, it started with The Bride. I always do this. Because it's about picking the moments as you see characters, and then you put a pin in the wall, and then you find another moment. I never work from the beginning of the script to the end. It's finding the moments, and they tell you something. And through Victor's perspective, he sees her for the first time, and she's Madonna and Angel. And Mia brings that with her. She's an extraordinary presence. I was always worried we'd overwhelm her, but she shines through all of that.

11:59She's truly luminous. She's extraordinary. Yeah, and I love how it's not just about what they're wearing, but it's like portraying an emotion in the way that other people are seeing them. We're not just seeing her. It's like we're seeing her as Victor sees her and then obviously later as the monster sees her. Yeah, and there's that line between Madonna and erotic. We have that quite intimate moment between Victor and the creature where he's peeling off his gloves to show the connection. And then that's repeated of the creature pulling off her skin-colored gloves, which is hugely intimate in feeling.

12:28You know, all of that keeps repeating itself. You see that in the narrative of mirrors. Elizabeth's reflection in the mirror, the creature's reflection in the mirror, the Medusa reflecting that. All of this stuff is repeated with purpose throughout. And that's GMO's storytelling. And I feel like with Elizabeth, too, we kind of see a little bit of like the evolution of the color. Like at first we see her in that kind of bluish green dress. And then in the second scene that we see here, and she has the red umbrella and she has the yellow kind of scarf, which was really striking. And the way that all the colors that are so different, but then still like together were so gorgeous.

13:01I'd love to hear a little bit more about the color decisions. You know, it came back to the images of beetles, glass, iridescence, going back to Favreau glass and Louis Comfort Tiffany. But particularly the beetles, because she's ephemeral and represents all these fleeting images of woman, it was also about metamorphosis. The colors keep changing. In fact, one of the fabrics that we developed, which was based on blood cells, then became malachite, which we had around. And when you enlarge them, they take on beetle-like patterns. The color also needed to have pattern that wasn't typically Victorian nature coursing through.

13:35It's not controlled. We're in a world where nature becomes its own force. And when I looked at how Guillermo and Dan, our wonderful cinematographer, were framing everything, there's these wide shots. and then you sort of dive into the close-ups and you see that in the creation of the creature himself. There's the huge crucifixion and then we're right inside the creature. And it felt like we needed to magnify those elements of textures. And that's the same scale that you see on beetles and that they're actually quite large patterns. And so that textile that we actually developed and then had woven, we did it in different colorways.

14:06We get the citrine yellow and all of those. So she's constantly changing. She's constantly a fleeting image that sort of turns and you can't catch her. A lot like the muse. Victor makes this creature and then it's like, oh, it's over, it's gone. The blue dress that you talk about, one of the challenges in this was that Guillermo and Dan wanted to use a lot of single source lighting and a lot of candlelight. So on one hand, Guillermo is asking for very saturated colors and then you have these warm, hard tones of candlelight that kind of work the opposite way. Dan, very kindly and generously, we had a lot of camera tests, but there was a point where, hey, enough.

14:38So we set up a sort of lab in our workroom and we had an ongoing team working back and forth. I think that dress was actually shot towards the very end of the schedule, but we started the process early on because of how complex it was to read the blues. And actually that dress is made up of many different kinds of greys and blacks and different kinds of blues. And we build it through, I think there's about six or seven layers over 60 meters of fabric, and it's all x-rays. And they build on top of each other to create that depth and luminous quality that you see there. And the cell jacket that she wears with the marbling, that was inspired from the books that Elizabeth reads, William Paley's Theology of Nature, and you look at the bookends inside of a Victorian book and all those rich marble papers, they echo the cells.

15:21Once we had our language, we just found different ways to build upon things. The shawl that she wears in the market and in the church, that's a traditional Victorian pelerine, but we took fractal patterns and used it as an illustrative thing to create wings almost and used luminous thread. And that was knitted by this hugely talented knitter in London, Luria, who does a lot of film work. But it was a real challenge. And I'm mentioning it because to actually take a pictorial image and turn that into knitting is quite a technical challenge. And then often I've worked on things which are much simpler in that way and more about color, but the color was part of the pattern.

15:56You know, that's what made it sing. Incredible. And I would love to talk a little bit about her bridal look with all the fabric at the shoulders and the silver brooches and the chains, the red rosary kind of beaded necklace that she wears. And then obviously you have strapping around the arms that kind of... It's a lot going on, isn't it? Yeah, there's so much going on, but in the best way. And obviously the straps call to mind the image of the Bride of Frankenstein and also played into the glove motif that you had mentioned as well. I'd love to hear about the design process specifically for how you landed on this look.

16:27And how did you guys decide that this was going to be it? Well, it's always been aware of what your collaborators are doing. Every week I'll catch up with Dan or daily even and with Tamara in her world. And I saw what she was doing with Guillermo developing the cell for the creature, which was like a rib cage. When we see the creature pick up his first piece of clothing off the forest floor, it's a dead man's coat. He's wearing the memories and the imprint of a dead man essentially on him. It's like a flayed skin. And when we're in the second part of the story, we're seeing the creature's story and Elizabeth is seen through his eyes.

16:59So she starts to echo the creature in that world. And I work from the inside out. So this dress literally became a skeleton as an exoskeleton and, you know, played with traditional historical garments at the time. We looked at the Swiss ribbon bodice a little bit later, but we cheated. That became an external thing that echoed the rib cage and the bandages of the creature. If you open the dress up, there's about four layers. So it actually looks like a flayed skin in itself. And the final layer was a very fine organza that was absolutely a whole dress in itself with all the seams and darts and everything.

17:31Because again, we were echoing that sort of language of x-ray with the layers over the top but what it did was when Elizabeth bleeds and dies at the end when the blood comes through all those layers you actually see almost a body it's another kind of body on the slab I suppose and the heraldry those crests the jeweled pieces Tiffany made those in sterling silver there the Frankenstein family crest so all of that weight of a past the old world is still there and the crucifix itself was a very special thing. We had this amazing relationship with Tiffany's. They brought out the archives and each added to the storytelling and character work.

18:06The beetle necklace that she wears is an obvious one. This was one that actually they made for us. So I worked with the jewelers and gemologist and Christopher Young at Tiffany's. And we literally took one of the crosses from the archive and then we used the scarab work. There's a wonderful woman called Meta Overbeck who'd been working with Louis Comfort Tiffany and she'd done this little medallion with the scarab. and it was a way of keeping the continuity of language. Elizabeth's intense study and belief in natural theology. So we took the themes of nature and religion and it all ends up in that crucifix and she wears it a lot through the film, but I think you see it more clearly at the end as a bride.

18:41And so it's all of Guillermo's themes and storytelling woven into one really. And then how did the idea to kind of have it clearly like reference the bride of Frankenstein, like with that kind of wrapping, how did that come about? Was that because of, once again, And it's like you're seeing her through the creature's eyes. And at that point, he's like begging for companions. Absolutely. It's his bride. And all those bandages that we worked with at the beginning, all the stuff that you see in the first stage of the creature is echoed in Elizabeth's world. It was totally a homage to Frankenstein's bride.

19:10This is Guillermo. He worships Mary Shelley and he worships James Whale. You know, at the beginning, we were looking at loads of Victorian brides and Guillermo goes, I hate that. You know, as he does. And you go, oh yeah, we need to do a special bride. So it was one of the first drawings that we did and iterations. And it's also about what Jordan brings with makeup and Mike brings with prosthetics. What Cleona brought with hair, that long, wonderful red hair that Elizabeth wears and Tim Nolan working with Oscar. You know, it's all part of the storytelling and character development. And the overall picture isn't complete until all those elements are together.

19:42So all of those people will be present in fittings as we got through it because the character is not complete until that happens. Yeah. Yeah. It's like this huge collaboration with so many different departments and so many members of the team. As you mentioned, her beautiful long red hair, there's a couple moments where it felt like it was such an integral part of the look. When you're working with the hair department for those kind of moments where the hair feels like just as much a part of the look as the beautiful costuming that she's wearing as well. How do you guys work together on that? Oh, it's well-deserved.

20:09When they get the moments of long hair, it's well-deserved because I tortured Cleona with bonnets. Bonnet gate was a hideous thing. I mean, I love a good bonnet and I love the way it frames and creates the image but she has to with her department adapt and do many versions of hair here's the wig with the bonnet here's the wig without the bonnet you know it's there's never something simple of just shove it up under there or you know it's nothing simple about it all again it's sort of working together on it you know and Cleona would come to every fitting and patiently sit there through the fittings to see where it was going you know and there were the moments that Guillermo pulled of Mia with the long hair They're amazing moments.

20:44They're stronger even because of that. You know, her as the bride and wearing the nightdress and that. They're powerful moments. So again, it requires a lot of patience and understanding what every department needs to do to meet their tasks on top of all the other things that they're doing. But it was really great having everyone in those fittings. And sometimes it gets outrageous. Sometimes it's like this carnival. And it really taught me to sort of get over yourself and just embrace it. You know, because then magic happens. Mia was like Jacob. they were discovering how to move in these sort of foreign garments.

21:14And I remember her sinking to the ground and playing with her beetle and Guillermo was typing and working on the script. So at that moment, it became about them working together. And I'm an observer and I need to observe and watch what happens in those moments and to try and support that. It's not just me going, you're wearing this at all. And so often in this world now with pacing and time, an actor comes in, they have a day or two and you're throwing them into clothes and onto set. when you can have moments in the luxury to grow this image together through director actor and the department then work truly has a chance to sort of work as a whole and I think for me that's what I see with all the departments when I see the film that we're all doing the same thing and that's why it's so cohesive yeah you just mentioned like Jacob Lordi's character of the monster I'd love to kind of talk a little bit about his looks as well obviously when he first see him and he first is awoken.

22:06He has no real clothing. And the design of the body was so important and incredible, just truly incredible. Mike's one of a kind. But I'd love to, obviously the wrappings is all that he has. And then later on, he kind of layers on more things. As you said, he picks up the dead soldier's coat. So I'd love to hear for you in terms of the design process, where obviously the body is initially so important and then it kind of evolves as other things do as well. How did you kind of go about designing his looks. I was very lucky to be there when Guillermo and Mike were working on a very early stage a year before we even started prep for the film.