Finding the right costumes is vital to make a film sing; but rarely are costumes so key to character as they are in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things, a riff on the Frankenstein story. The work of Holly Waddington, who has just won this year’s Oscar for best costume design, they are fundamental to the surreal world in which the film is set, as well as being essential to the characterisation of the protagonist, Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone – who won the best actress Oscar for the role.
This article contains spoilers for the plot of Poor Things
Rarely in film do characters go through such a gamut of looks. But then, rarely do characters travel from grown woman to toddler to grown woman again all in two hours and 21 minutes. The costumes match Bella, played with abandon by Emma Stone, step for step, beating a frenetic path from infant to fully grown via babydoll dresses, joyful, frothy ruffles, enormous sleeves and forgotten or discarded trousers, before moving into sensible, protective coats and more serious medical-student monochrome.
“Her style is a reflection of where she’s at in her development,” Waddington tells BBC Culture of what she has called “Bella style”, an aesthetic that has also won her a Bafta. “That was what was driving the looks.” The result has been called “Age of Innocence meets surrealism meets couture”, or Victorian steampunk, and provides a visual narrative through which to understand Bella’s character.
Let’s start at the end. When Bella, a woman who has arrived back at adulthood, concludes her character arc, she sits contentedly in the freshly unshackled world she has finally been able to craft for herself. It is a darkly utopian scene. She wants to be a doctor and is reading a medical text. Her abusive ex-husband has had the brain of a goat transplanted into his body, and he is grazing and occasionally bleating on the lawn.
She is wearing a knitted cream rollneck and culottes the colour of tobacco. It is an outfit befitting of this brave new world in which she now sits, studying and drinking gin. Grownup and understated, but still with some flair in the sleeve – Bella Baxter, even fully-fledged, is not going to wear an unremarkable sleeve. It could not be further from the outfits that have gone before – gone are the frills of Bella’s earlier costumes, gone are the frothy fabrics, gone are the pastels – and speaks volumes about the journey that Bella goes on throughout the film.
