Interview: From Discordant Ensembles to Condom Capes, ‘Poor Things’ Costume Designer Holly Waddington Talks About Bella Baxter’s Sartorial Expedition

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When small children are first given the freedom to dress themselves, their selections are always a bit jumbled. Whether they’re wearing off-season pieces or mixing styles that a sensible adult would never put together, the outfits they assemble make sense in their minds, and, in a way, that’s all that matters. Fashion is, after all,  one of our first forms of creative expression, describing our feelings, moods, and changing attitudes. This conceit, paired with complete creative freedom to stretch across the styles of various time periods, was the basis for costume designer Holly Waddington’s creative process for Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, Poor Things. 

The heroine of Poor Things and the centerpiece of Waddington’s flawless work is Bella Baxter (a tremendous Emma Stone), a 19th-century woman with the mind of a child who finds herself on a peculiar journey of self-discovery, gaining control of her brain and body along the way. The world of this film is wild and dazzling, complete with colorful adventures from London to Lisbon to Paris, each city with its own distinct creative flavor and unique clothing choices to reflect Bella’s ever-evolving mindset. Watching Bella change clothes and select her discordant daily looks is hilarious yet ultimately moving. 
Waddington (Lady Macbeth, The Great) had an innovative approach, combining reference points from Victorian England to ‘60s Paris and inspirations as far-reaching as French Beatniks and as close to home as her own children. She was the perfect costume designer to tackle Lanthimos’ beautiful and grotesque vision, turning social propriety inside out to share Bella’s changing inner world. I was excited to speak to Waddington about telling Bella’s story through costumes–from mismatched yellow and blue sets to a cape inspired by the look of a Victorian condom.

Sophia Ciminello: I loved the costumes in Poor Things. They really enrich the fabulous, layered world that we see on-screen. I would love to hear about your early ideas for bringing these looks to life. What was your creative process with Yorgos [Lanthimos] like?

Holly Waddington: Yeah, I came on board when Yorgos had already done quite a bit of work with the art department. Shona Heath and James Price had this huge body of work that they also actually didn’t show me. They kept it away from me, I think, intentionally because they wanted me to have my own creative process and my own response to the text. One defining thing about Yorgos is that he’s very nonprescriptive; he doesn’t tell you what he wants. It’s a very liberating thing for a designer because if somebody tells you exactly when the film is set, what it needs to look like, and exactly what the textures are, you don’t have anywhere to go with the creative process. It’s a very freeing way to work. He gives you a lot of scope to come up with your own thing. So, I wasn’t really having creative conversations in such detail at the beginning; I was working on my own with paint all over my table. I knew that the most challenging aspect of designing Poor Things would be to deal with this character arc, and I was given a lot of time to focus on Bella Baxter’s logic. You know, the clothes needed to tell such a story and move with her as she developed. So, I was working on that and then gathering a lot of source material that was very far-reaching, and then I would present it to Yorgos, and then he would work through what I had offered to him. We had that way of working together for quite a while before it really got going. 

Then, once he felt like it was going in a good direction, he let me see what the art department had been doing. That was like, “Oh, great!” because it was a really interesting choice of his not to present everything from the get-go. It was a very smart move of his, and it’s also very unusual. From then on, I worked very closely with Shona Heath, who was the lead on the concept work and whose studio was just around the corner from mine. So, I could meet with her very easily once the pandemic had eased off, and we could be in each other’s workspaces. 

SC: You touched on how the clothes needed to move with Bella as a character, and I’m interested in how you illustrated her evolution through her clothes. First, we see her in London in costumes with details that recall vintage baby clothes. What informed your design process for this initial phase of her character?

HW: I think I probably spent the most time thinking about this phase, this beginning phase. I think I had to crack that first, and I initially came up with lots of references to dolls and these Victorian outfits, and that’s what my mood boards were full of. I think it was a bit obvious to have her fully in baby clothes, and Yorgos didn’t want it to be too obvious. They are a bit like baby clothes, though, and the fabrics and textures are very childlike in their nature. She wears seer-sucker pajamas and little camisoles with frills that look a bit like those on the edge of a nappy. She wears this dressing gown that’s a bit like a big, lolloping, sort of quilted thing that’s very luxurious, but it’s really like a big eiderdown as a dressing gown. She also has a child’s pinafore slip that, you know, usually would be in white cotton with a broderie anglaise trim, but here it’s transposed into plastic, and the idea there was that it could sort of wipe clean. 

The other thing that was going on with that beginning part was that, in my mind, she’d been dressed by her maid, Mrs. Prim. She was probably fully dressed in these grown-up clothes, but by midmorning, she’d lost pieces of clothing. That was coming from observations of my own children. You know, often kids are wearing hardly anything, particularly when they’re at home. They tend to take things off and like being free and liberated. I certainly see that with my kids, so I wanted to capture that quality in her.

SC: Oh, that’s perfect. And then, when she heads to Lisbon with Duncan Wedderburn, I particularly loved your use of the blues and yellows. 

HW: Oh, yes, yes. 

SC: That little short frilly cape that she wears…it’s so complimentary to the production design. What did you want to convey about Bella in this portion of the film?

HW: The little shawl came about because I wanted it to feel like she’s left home, gone to Lisbon, and no longer has anyone to get her dressed in the morning. Now that she has to dress herself, it wouldn’t even occur to her to put a skirt on. She’d just step out in pants. I first thought she should wear these Victorian bloomers; they’re like knee-length knickers, but we were able to be quite playful with the shapes of the clothes because Yorgos gave me a lot of freedom to pick from different periods and merge them all together. And then with that yellow cape, the idea was that it probably belongs to an evening outfit, you know, the yellow evening outfit that she wears in the hotel, but she wears it with a petticoat and a little thing that is almost like a bib that the Victorians wore as a modesty piece to fill in the space of the decolletage. But she wears it on its own with an evening cape and a petticoat. So, I rearranged the wardrobe to find these looks, and in my mind, I thought of her being a five-year-old dressing up in a grown-up’s wardrobe. 

SC: That is funny and very spot-on. When little kids are first able to pick out an outfit, it’s always mismatched, or they’ll want to wear their Christmas dress in the summer–

HW: Yes, exactly!

SC: I love that you thought of it as a way for her to mix and match.

HW: Oh, that’s exactly how I was thinking of it. That look you described, with the yellow sleeves and the thing around the neck, is not a particularly beautiful look. It’s sort of a mess, but the whole point is that she thinks it looks great. There’s a sort of discordancy to it. 

SC: Exactly. And my favorite looks from the film might be from the section when Bella goes to the brothel in Paris. It’s so different from what you would expect to see from that setting and time period. 

HW: Oh, I’m so glad that you think so. I feel like we’re just so saturated with the imagery of sex and sex work and pornography, and there is always so much black and red. So, I thought it would be interesting to play around with the palette of skin tones because there’s a sort of beauty to them. It’s very soft and very sensual. The space that Shona and James created is exquisite, and it’s all peacock blue with a lit-up floor. I just wanted the colors to be of the body. We also didn’t use any corsets in there. We took away the corsets and made all of these bodices instead. There was this fabric that one of the buyers swatched, and it was a textured wool that had latex poured all over it. It’s just a very unusual thing. I just liked it and bought 30 meters of it. I just said, “Get that and put it in the van, and we’ll take it to Budapest!” Each of the women in the brothel had a piece of clothing made out of this fabric. They all had these huge-sleeved bodices; some came to the floor, some to the waist. The bodices all exposed the breasts and had lacing on them. They wore latex stockings–there were lots of plastic elements in the brothel. It’s a bit see-through and skin-like. 

SC: And that plastic-like, latex cape that she wears. It feels like a play on what she’s wearing earlier in the film, going from those ruffles to something that’s almost unappealing in color and texture by comparison. 

HW: That’s exactly right. The thinking is that Baxter and Mrs. Prim packed her trunk for her to go on this trip and would’ve packed an emergency anorak, like a Pac a Mac. I liked the idea of it being completely inappropriate for the weather when it’s snowy and freezing. The colors in Paris are quite subdued, and when we see her in it, it’s quite a mellow color. It also connects to the brothel because, for me, it looks like an early condom. If you’ve ever seen the original condoms, they’re made of rubber, basically. And this evokes that and the shape, too.

SC: Wow, right, the shape of her in that with her shoulders…

HW: Right. She looks sort of phallic and saintly, too, like an ecclesiastical priest or something. There’s a little bit of that. Often, you’re making these decisions quite quickly. You just hope you’re doing something right, and then later on, you think, “Oh yeah, it’s a bit like this (laughs).” I was a bit worried about that because it crushes the shoulders a bit. The fabric is a bit heavy, and it does change the silhouette, but I think it’s quite useful in that scene, actually. 

SC: It completely works. I think it’s brilliant. 

HW: And they’re pretty down on themselves at that point, but she’s rather optimistic about the adventure and anything that comes to her. 

SC: You also bring back the silhouette with the puffy sleeves with this steampunk/dark academia-inspired look that’s all-black with those grey stockings. How did you determine what you wanted Bella to look like in this moment of intellectual transition for her?

HW: You know, by this point, she’s really evolved, and she’s fully mentally developed. She’s read a lot of books on the ship, she’s met her friend, Toinette, and she’s learning a lot about the world. I also liked the idea of her and Toinette being a little bit like French Beatniks. I had references of girls in the ‘60s in really chic black clothing and eyeliner, a bit like your look! It’s a bit like what you’re wearing (laughs) [a black turtleneck and winged eyeliner].

SC: Oh, thanks! (laughs)

HW: You know, with a cigarette and going off to a Socialist meeting. So I was transposing that into the late Victorian silhouette, and I just had these beautiful jackets. The French made these gorgeous wool, fabulously tailored jackets in the 1890s, and I put one on Emma Stone, and she just looked good in the jacket on its own. It would’ve been worn with a skirt to match, like a suit, and she looked at me and said, “I think she would’ve just worn it like this.” I wanted the fabric to have evolved by this point so it’s a bit more structured and solid. It doesn’t have a flimsy lightness. But I also wanted her, in that scene in the medical school, to fit in with the other men. I wanted her to be inconspicuous, and then when she gets up and walks away, she has bare legs. They’re sensible, and they’re not like sexy stockings. They are practical. 

SC: I love that moment. I always like to ask costume designers, if you could keep one costume from the film or choose a favorite, what would it be?

HW: Well, for me and what I wear, I would definitely have the black jacket. If I could have one in my size, I would love to have that in my wardrobe, and I’d wear it to death. I know I would. 

SC: Oh, me too. 

HW: My favorite looks in the film are when she’s half-dressed. I love the yellow shorts and the blue jacket. They’re fun and fresh, and I think she looks so great in them. And with those sunglasses when she’s walking around Lisbon. I think it’s hilarious and quite moving, too. 

SC: I completely agree. Thank you so much, Holly. This was such a fun conversation. 

HW: Yes! Thank you very much. 

Poor Things hits theaters from Searchlight Pictures on December 8.

Photos by Atsushi Nishijima and Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.