‘Frankenstein’ Costume Designer Kate Hawley Reveals Secrets and Process Behind Netflix Movie
Kate Hawley was the mastermind behind the gorgeous costumes in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein was perhaps the greatest adaptation of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel yet. The filmmaker assembled a world-class team to bring his vision to life, including Emmy-nominated costume designer Kate Hawley.
If you’re a fan of Guillermo Del Toro’s movies, you’ll likely already be familiar with Kate Hawley’s costumes; she collaborated with him on both Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim. Moreover, fans of epic fantasy will have seen her beautiful costumes in Middle-earth projects, such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Hawley most recently worked on Guillermo Del Toro’s visionary adaptation of Frankenstein (which we loved), where she weaved together an array of gorgeous costumes, taking the classic, gothic style and adding unique modern references.
We recently caught up with Hawley to discuss everything from her creative process to the challenges she faced along the way. Check out our interview below!
What’s On Netflix: Frankenstein has been out a week now. How do you feel about the reception of the film?
Kate Hawley: I think we’re just all so hugely thrilled for Guillermo. We know how much it meant to him, and that was the driving force behind it. We’re there because it’s him.
WoN: From Crimson Peak to Pacific Rim, you’ve been a frequent collaborator with Guillermo Del Toro for a while now. Both Crimson Peak and Frankenstein share a similar DNA; they’re both gothic fairy tales, in a sense. How did you bring the Gothic style to Frankenstein?
Kate Hawley: It always comes back to the text and the vision of your director. Those are my Bible all the time. Frankenstein under Guillermo is so completely different to what Frankenstein would be with another director. And the script that he created, the themes within that are from his viewpoint. He takes a lot of the themes of the novel into it, but it’s his eye, the way he looks at it, that makes it unique. Compared to Crimson Peak, which was more like a chamber opera, this is the Ring Cycle; it felt like it for a minute when we were doing it. The scale was a very different thing as part of this process.
It’s his eye, we’re always as lieutenants, he calls us his four legs of his table — Dan, Lauston, Tamara, Mike, and me. I mean, although I’m a bloody big leg. We all know how to serve and what’s needed. It’s the collaboration, the communication that makes things so tight on his projects. And, you know, it’s part of what makes it very rewarding and allows ideas to grow and generate through that.
WoN: One of the most talked-about costumes in the movie is Elizabeth’s wedding dress. How did you work to design and construct it?
Kate Hawley: That was so much pressure, so much pressure. Of course, with Elizabeth, the big moment is the wedding. Guillermo and I were talking, and he decided to set this in the mid-1850s, and I was showing him lots of paintings of beautiful, morose Victorian brides. And he’s like, ‘Nah, I hate it, I hate it.’ This is Guillermo’s version of Frankenstein. And it’s a heightened operatic language.
She was definitely a nod to not only Guillermo’s idea of the bride, but, to the original movie [Bride of Frankenstein], Elsa. All the time when I’m working with Guillermo, we’re looking at echoing and mirroring imagery. And you see this within the sets, and I repeat that imagery within the clothes. It was a very much at this point in the story, we’re seeing it through the Creature’s eyes, and Elizabeth is mirrored through his imagery. The ribbon bodice becomes a rib cage; a bleeding rib cage. The bandages echo the creature, as well as Elsa and the Bride of Frankenstein. All the imagery of the film starts getting distilled. And sometimes you can read many images from one focus that we put into it. But I think that’s what’s wonderful about when you work with Guillermo.
The actual construction followed the same approach in terms of the character and the script. We were building from the inside out. We created the dress in many layers. If you opened it up and peeled it, it is not unlike a flayed skin. The back also echoes the creature.
We had a whole layer of what I call an ‘X-Ray’ layer over the top that served to sort of heighten things when there’s the transformation of bleeding through. So, you know, there’s an idea there, and then I work with my team, and we use the same technical aspects to construct something to echo the thematic qualities of what we’re doing.
WoN: Sticking with the wedding dress, another thing fans have frequently pointed out is the Tiffany Jewels on Elizabeth — how did that conversation come about?
The jewellery has a big place in terms of telling the story of family; Victor’s ancestry and that aristocracy, there’s the world of the crucifixes, religion’s a big theme. And really, it was Steve Newman at Netflix, he said, ‘Oh, you need jewellery?’ He came back, and I got introduced to this wonderful woman, Catherine Van Der Veen, who’s sort of an agent for Tiffany, and she was the one who started that conversation and introduced us.
It happened that the thematic elements of what we were dealing with were echoed in what Louis Comfort Tiffany was doing. We went to the archives, and it was hard to leave that place, actually. It’s literally like a vault in the middle of the woods somewhere, which appealed to my gothic fairytale sensibilities. You know, and, but the way they worked, you know, when Christopher [Young, Vice President & Creative Director, Tiffany] was telling about how Louis Comfort worked with Meta Overbeck, and Julia Munson, the small team of immensely creative, talented women. They talked about rooms of nature and artefacts being there as inspiration.
Those are the women who were working, creating the Tiffany lampshades. What I loved was the echoing of our process, the way they worked with colour, the iridescence, the colours worked in tandem with what we were doing with Elizabeth. The use of colour, having a melancholy mood and tone, all of it fed back into Guillermo’s vision, what he was trying to do.
So I think it was one of those things that it was almost effortless, you know, just everything found its place. And then we developed jewellery as well. We made some with Tiffany. A big project.
WoN: Guillermo del Toro’s films often involve rich symbolism. Were there any specific details in the costumes that you think viewers might have missed on first viewing?
It’s all purposeful. So if you’re seeing it, there’s a reason why. We talk about colour a lot in this world. We are looking through the perspective of other people’s stories, and there’s a sense of memory and layers. Even the coat that the creature puts on is like the layer and memory of another man, but the veil served the same purpose. And we use that even in the background. And I suppose it’s a nice moment to sort of say that the backgrounds themselves weren’t just extras — they were part of the painting that Guillermo was creating. They were part of the colour palette. They were part of the heightened operatic language.
WoN: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that Victor’s costumes have modern references. For instance, you took inspiration from David Bowie and Prince. I was wondering, were there any contemporary influences behind the Creature or Elizabeth?
We wove the Malachite dress — some of those patterns you’d think only belong in the modern world! It always surprises me when you go back through archives, how there’s always an eye of the generation that has a perspective that’s new and fresh, if you put it in the context of a modern world.
We definitely use the canvas of Elizabeth. You know, you’ve got that marvellous canvas with the scale of a crinoline. So we use that almost like a close-up under the microscope. We use fractal patterns on the moth shawl, which was based on cells and fractal patterns.
And then we worked with this wonderful knitter, Liria Pristine in London, so all that moth shawl is actually knitted.
I’s quite interesting in a technical way. We use modern technology to create the idea of craft, but also to do storytelling. I’m quite proud of what was achieved there.
Alex, my assistant, spent hours and hours doing the artwork along with a number of other people in our department. All of that stuff’s generated in-house. And then Liria was working, we do artwork during the day, and Liria would be on the knitting machine in the middle of the night in London.
We’d wake up the next day and see the samples. But again, that was using iridescent threads. It doesn’t matter what the technology is; we still kept the same language. And we still ended up using the hand, funny enough. It still needed people to draw, you know, people to sample, to do all of this work.
WoN: Something I really loved is your use of colour. And how did you use colour to develop the relationships between characters?
There were so many discussions with Guillermo at the beginning, and the colour palette is always a huge part of how production design, lighting, we all work together because we have to, it doesn’t work if Dan’s throwing a certain kind of colour and light, and then the colours of my clothes don’t work because you have to have the conversation. Guillermo always talked about Elizabeth being beetle-like, and we talked about greens as being her base palette. Victor being black, white, and red, which you see in the form of his early childhood.
That’s a very definitive colour palette. And then of course, there’s the famous Guillermo del Toro pigeon-reds that go through the whole film; that’s probably the one thing that’s the through line that binds everything together.
The circle of imagery is completed by Guillermo with the white dress and the stain of blood coming through it. We end on white. White is a colour to Guillermo that means death. We start with it in the Arctic. It’s the same thing. That’s almost like Limbo and Peter at the Gate, you know. White in itself is death, and then the red is just the pain that comes through. But you see it in certain scenes, you’ll see what Dan’s doing with Guillermo with the lighting. There’s a green palette washing up the back against the reds or vice-versa; the opposites on the colour wheel.
It was about finding the tonal quality that was in the script and interpreting that into colour. A lot of what I have done on this is about being evocative of the tone of the script, of creating melancholy, a sense of memory, a sort of dreamlike interpretation of the period. That’s where colour really worked. We use colour, not just saturated, but we use it in very luminous, transparent, and translucent qualities.
WoN: Lastly, many fans really want to know: What’s your opinion on the relationship between Elizabeth and the Creature? And how did you use that costume to reflect their relationship?
There’s sort of an innocence and eroticism there, I think. We get all Freudian and fairytale-like; that’s always been there when you read books. It’s that sort of, Beauty and the Beast.
And, of course, the Creature is misunderstood, for want of a better description. But, those images of the costume, their intimacy and erotic charge is, the removal of the gloves. We see Victor removing his gloves at the beginning, and we see the Creature removing Elizabeth’s. The clothing’s all about revealing layers and losing layers.
With the Creature, it builds up the other way. It’s always about repetition in that. And I think, you know, they see each other.
Elizabeth sits out of the world just like the Creature does. They’re isolated in their own worlds and controlled by others. Elizabeth is as much an owned piece of property as Harlander, hence the wave necklace in the piano soiree scene, as the Creature is by Victor.
It’s all of those constantly. You won’t be wrong in any guesses that you make, because it’s all about that repetition, reflection, and echoing two sides of the story.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Did you watch Frankenstein? What did you think of the costume design? Tell us in the comments down below!