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“We’d Have These Practical Conversations About How Sex Would Be Achieved in These Costumes”: Costume Designer Holly Waddington On the Historical Rule-Breaking of Her Work in Poor Things
Poor Things (Photo Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures) A feminine coming-of-age film by way of Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gorgeously designed Poor Things follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an unhappy and suicidal woman brought back to life by the enigmatic scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and then embarking on a feminist journey of equality and sexual liberation. Bella’s voracious appetite for all the colors of life and sex (as well as Lanthimos’ signature maximalist touches) infuses Poor Things with boundless exuberance, matched by costume designer Holly Waddington’s extraordinary work—both late-19th-century, and fiercely modern and rule-breaking.
“I realized that I would need the clothes to really move with her, not just describe her,” Waddington recently told Filmmaker. “She changes from being a young child to being a fully formed person. So you need to tell the story of this development with other collaborators, like Shona Heath and James Price, the two production designers.”
Below, Waddington discusses how she charted Bella’s journey by both embracing the script and defying the era’s heavily corseted silhouettes, collaborating with Stone and Lanthimos and all those powerful sleeves.
Filmmaker: Bella’s development goes through various stages and spans different cities. I imagine you had to break down your design into phases accordingly at the start.
Waddington: Yes, we call it a costume plot. One of the first things we do as costume designers is take the script, break it down into all of the scenes and the characters, and through this meticulous breakdown identify what is needed for each character. The plot for Bella was elaborate, so I created a huge book, and I had each part almost as a chapter. At the beginning of the process, I thought I’d maybe recycle clothes. But it quickly became clear that that would not be the case—because, for example, the kinds of underwear that she wore as a child at the beginning of the film would no longer be suitable once she got to Lisbon and Paris. I realized that I needed quite a big wardrobe.
Filmmaker: Her first phase, which occurs in the black-and-white section, when she is like this Victorian-era baby, seems deceptively simple in its costuming. But there is a lot of intricate work there, somewhere between juvenile and mature.
Waddington: It was important to Yorgos that it wasn’t overtly baby clothes—for him, that was just too obvious; he wanted something more subtle. So I was working with shapes that were both a bit childlike but also quite grownup. The logic was that we would dress her in grownup clothes, but they would dissemble. We wouldn’t see them as complete outfits with the bodice and the skirt and the underpinnings or the shoes. So she may have been dressed in the morning by her housemaid, but within a couple of hours into the day, she would’ve shed bits of costumes, ended up with a huge blouse and a pair of knickers, or a bustle and knickers and an apron. We put her in looks that were never completed. It was playful. Also the fabrics that I was choosing were all materials to do with childhood, like seersucker. That’s the kind of fabric that is often used in vintage children’s clothes. And [we did] quilting, too.
Filmmaker: That’s all such a contrast to the blue gown we see her in at the start of the film when she’s standing at the bridge. How did you land on that introductory look for her?
Waddington: I didn’t know that that would be the opening of the film. It was really not scripted like that. So that was a big surprise when I went to see Poor Things for the first time. And that was the opening dress—it was a real revelation to me.
Filmmaker: That blue is very reminiscent of the shade of blue in Lady Macbeth, which you also worked on. You seem to have an affinity for that beautiful, captivating blue.
Waddington: I hadn’t really thought of Lady Macbeth to be honest, but it is a very similar blue, though much more intense and brighter here. For me, there’s a complexity to that shade of blue. There’s a melancholy to it. And it’s quite an uneasy blue, unlike a lot of the colors that Bella wears that are easy, dreamy, joyful… This is a really intense, serious blue that I spent a lot of time trying to achieve. This project was all in Budapest. So I had a local person that I had never worked with before who was fantastic at dying.
And the shape of that dress is based on a reference that I saw in a Victorian 1890s fashion magazine. It looked a little bit to me like a suit of armor, the articulate folds on the sleeves looked a bit like metal. I felt that that was appropriate because she was very unhappily married to this military guy. And also she was heavily pregnant. There is real unease to this sort of severe dress. And she’s wearing a maternity corset—just the idea that people would wear a corset whilst pregnant seemed absurd to me. And it’s the only time that we see Bella Baxter in a corset. She doesn’t ever wear a corset — that was a decision that we made really early on.
Filmmaker: To pick up on the armor-like sleeves, I loved that you carried that idea over many of Bella’s looks.
Waddington: The big sleeves came from exploring the 1890s. The film is scripted as being in the set in the 1880s. But the sleeves are not that big in the 1880s. They’re very slim and skinny. And Yorgos really liked these big sleeves—he’s a very instinctive man, and he just said, “These are really interesting, let’s embrace these big sleeves,” which I thought was a very bold choice. You don’t see many of these in costume houses. Conceptually they work because they’re very empowering, like air-filled bellows to [ignite] fire. There’s something very interesting about that connection. Bella takes up a lot of space with those sleeves.
Filmmaker: And how did you come up with her ship wardrobe, which purposely feels a bit of a hodgepodge of youthful and adult, like a transition into the person she would become.
Waddington: She no longer has the maid and is left to her own devices. In Lisbon, she’s like a five-year-old dressing up in her mother’s wardrobe. And then by the time she gets to the ship, she’s a little bit older. So she’s kind of just throwing these looks together, they’re not really proper. She’s wearing this dressing gown in the middle of the day when all these other women in the background are all wearing proper Victorian dresses. Victorians were very keen on these things that filled in the space around the neck area—a modesty piece, they called them. I quite liked the idea that she just wore hers as a thing in its own right. It’s almost like a little crop top. And so she wears that with these little tap pants—we call them french knickers. Because of the nature of the film, I wasn’t having to be too slavish to the period. So we were loosely in the 1890s, but very tongue-in-cheek.
So yes, by the time she’s on the boat, the costumes are haphazard. They’re kind of what she’s pulled out of her trunk. There isn’t any sartorial correctness to them. Sometimes they look like a bit of a mess.
Filmmaker: Is it sometimes tough to set aside beauty or historical accuracy to prioritize the story needs?
Waddington: It’s hard to do that, particularly if you’re trained in historical clothes. I have worked as a historical costumer for a long time, and I really know how it should look. I think the hardest thing for me was to get rid of the corset for her. Because really the period is determined by the corset. The corset is the thing that creates its silhouette. So if you take that away, there is no infrastructure. But in a way, it’s through doing that that gives it its own flavor and qualities. When I first saw the film, I thought, “Oh, she looks really 1970s without the corset”—it is the combination of this long hair and then these long skirts and the Victoriana.
Filmmaker: Sexual awakening is a big part of Bella’s journey. How did you address that in the costumes?
Waddington: There’s a sensuality to the fabrics that I was choosing. And there’s a sheerness to them. Often, they’re very easy to wear. I would have these conversations with Yorgos where he would just ask me in a very matter of fact way, “How is she going to fuck in this outfit?” So we’d have these practical conversations about how sex would be achieved in these costumes. But more than that, I think it was about the costumes just having a freedom to them: liberated and not very complex.
Filmmaker: And that leads me to Paris, where Bella works in a brothel.
Waddington: I didn’t want those costumes to feel cliched. Whilst I really like the look of a Victorian brothel—and it’s a very particular look—I felt like I’ve seen it lots of times, and I worked harder to find something that was less obvious than that. And because we were not dealing with [accuracy] and there wasn’t the need to describe exactly what a Victorian brothel looked like, I could be playful. So I was continuing this idea of not corseting the women apart from Mrs. Swiney, because she’s of a different generation. The other thing that I did was, I wanted to embrace their bodies. I wanted their breasts to be out and to be sort of framed. So they all had these bodices that we made out of this material that I’d found early on in the job that was being sold quite cheaply. It was a massive bolt of very highly textured floral wool that had latex poured over. And I made each of the women a bodice with huge sleeves. I was trying to work against what is obviously sexy. Like really, really thick nylon knickers that were like little shorts, laced up through the crotch so you could really see the pubic hair, working against things that were supposed to [be] attractive. I was very pleased with them when I saw them all together. There’s this kind of softness to them.
Filmmaker: What was it like for you to work in black and white for a portion of the film?
Waddington: I hadn’t worked in black and white before, and we didn’t actually know that we were going to work in black and white. Yorgos didn’t tell us about this until about two weeks before we started filming. I had designed it all for color. What he had asked us was to do a lot of texture. So we managed in black and white because there was often a lot of texture in the choices that I’d made. It wasn’t great for the men’s costumes because I was working quite tonally with different shades of the same colors. It was just a bit of a shock, and I just had to make the best of it. And I just sort of ran around remaking things at the last second using high-contrast fabric.
Filmmaker: What was your collaboration like with Emma Stone? How hands on is she with her costumes?
Waddington: She was very embracing of everything, not at all blocking. She’s very much someone who wants to know what your ideas are. And she’s a very quick person, Emma. And mostly concerned to know how something was going to work for the character. The other thing to say about her is that she’s not vain. It didn’t matter to her how she looked in things, which I thought was really interesting. She would just say, “Can you just tell me why I’m wearing what I going to be wearing for this scene?” And I would tell her, and she’d go, “Oh yeah, I really like that idea.” It was never from the point of view of, “Am I going to look amazing in this?” She just ran with everything.
And then we had quite hilarious moments in fittings. For example, that black jacket that she wears as a student, we made that as a whole suit. But in the fitting room, we put the jacket on with the boots and bare legs and she just looked at me and said she would just wear it like this. And so that’s how we ended up doing that. And with the wedding dress, I had this veil, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I just couldn’t really see that Bella would even bother with a veil. And so I took it to her just about 10 minutes before she was going to go [on set]: “What should we do with this?” And she went, “I think she would just do this” and kind of like wrapped it around her head and tied it in a knot. So she’s collaborative.
Filmmaker: And we didn’t even get to talk about the amazing menswear in the film yet. What was plotting the male characters’ journeys like, particularly Mark Ruffalo’s haughty Duncan?
Waddington: In terms of the costume plots of men, I didn’t have to do so many different stages with them. But what I was trying to achieve was to create very distinct qualities. They all have their own ways of trying to possess Bella.
Baxter has these boiler suits that I’m very happy with. The idea is that he’s this incredibly radical, progressive man. His work is really out there. And he would have these clothes that were very utilitarian, practical, but also exquisite. So he has a set of three all-in-one siren suits, which were inspired by Winston Churchill, who had these World War II boiler suits made out of raspberry velvet pinstripe that he would wear in the evenings with a pair of smoking slippers and a smoking jacket. And the idea was, when he left the house he would just be in a normal Victorian dress because he would not want to be conspicuous because of his disfigurement.
And Duncan was based on satirical drawings of the period. So these very establishment men, very upper class, very self-important, often had this pompous body language, like pumped out chests and slightly curvaceous bottoms. It’s a really arrogant posture that was very fashionable and sexy at the time. So we were playing with that more than anything. In the fittings, we made him a chest pad and gave him pants with very round buttocks added on. We even made him a phallus to wear in his pants. He asked for that. We made him a calf padding. We corseted him to try and give him this silhouette that fell straight out of one of those satirical drawings As the camera tests evolved, those shapes were a little extreme, so we had to calm it all down. But all those ingredients were there.
Filmmaker: Do you know how many original designs you created for this movie?
Waddington: A crazy number. And I remember just thinking, wow. Every day, I was drawing. Just designing, designing, designing. It was like a marathon, looking back.
