In the past few weeks, Kate Hawley has won the Costume Designer’s Guild award for Excellence in Costume Design for Period Film and a BAFTA for her work on Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025). New Zealander Hawley is also noted for her previous work on Crimson Peak, Suicide Squad and The Lord of the Rings:The Rings of Power. Next month, she’s up for The Academy award and she looks set to steal the prize!
As anyone who has seen Frankenstein knows, Hawley completely outdid herself for this one as the costumes are nothing short of jaw dropping, completely eschewing the tone you might expect from a Dickensian Victorian England. (Side note, del Toro moved the setting up to the 1850s from the 1810s). Mia Goth’s Elizabeth is outfitted in printed silk gowns, brightly coloured veils, feathered headdresses, archival Tiffany jewels like a blue scarab beetle necklace from the early 1900s (they wanted to pull pieces that were from the age of Mary Shelley), and an ethereal wedding dress. All in rich jewel tones with no black in sight, while still keeping it gothic looking!
Guillermo specifically asked to go bigger and bolder with the veils. With Claire Frankenstein’s distinctive bright red veil and dress at the beginning of the film, this colour becomes a story throughout.
Kate said that “her bloodstained hand becomes the bloodstain on Victor’s back which becomes the red gloves that he wears as a man. There’s the effigy of her and her casket with the red flowers mirrored again in Elizabeth’s bonnet in Victor’s room, while the spine on her back echoes the Creature’s spine. There’s the mother’s bed that continues the red—the archangel that’s in the room that becomes a living thing of visceral blood matter and reveals itself as death. Then we end on that image in Victor’s world of Elizabeth dying and the red bleeding through the white. And we are back at the beginning of the colour palette. You just build and the language becomes automatic when you’re part of that world.”
Elizabeth’s love of books was reflected by incorporating the marbling often seen on Victorian hardbacks into the textiles of her costumes. Her love of insects and cells is also reflected in this way. Kate’s team had a collection of beetles in their workroom to take inspiration from. Her intense jewel toned colours also came from beetles. “In our dye department, we didn’t use black – we used purples, greens and blues, and layered colours upon colours to create those darker, deeper, richer tones.”
The green ensemble she wears when she first meets the creature was Guillermo’s favourite costume in the whole film. The print was inspired by a beetle and the bonnet which she removes features a purple ribbon tie that connects her to the creature- the purple tone of his skin and scars. She also wears an exquisite shawl with this costume and others that features a moth pattern which was knitted by Liria Pristine.
Some of her necklines echo dresses worn by Mary Shelley in her portraits.
Her wedding dress echoes the creatures bandages and skeleton framework. “It has five layers of organza and a Swiss ribbon bodice, and we put that on the outside instead of the inside because, at this point in the story, Elizabeth is reflecting the creature more than she is Victor. The ribbons on her arms are also a lovely homage to [the 1931] Frankenstein and [the 1935] Bride of Frankenstein.” “Then, at the very end, when the bleeding comes through (the dress fills with blood), that takes you right back to [Victor’s] mother in the beginning (in her red dress).”
Check out details of the wedding dress and the blood gag on Kate's instagram page:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DQ4_x_Bk-jp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
For Victor, “Our references for him included Mick Jagger in Soho in the ’70s and [dancer] Rudolf Nureyev – we kind of wanted him to feel like a rock star walking on stage when he entered the lab. He’s a punk and a dandy.” Guillermo stressed that this was not a mad scientist making the creature but an artist- a Pablo Picasso or Francis Bacon. He made the creature to be aesthetically beautiful so there were no stitches like you might expect.
One costume in particular featured a waistcoat embroidered with lung capillaries that could be mistaken for foliage.
Jacob Elordi’s creature wore only bandages at first. He then gains a coat from a dead Crimean war soldier which has the memory of that man embedded into it in the form of the outline of his spine. This echoes the reality of the creature being born from the parts of many different men. It also reflects the corsetry spine of Elizabeth's dress, connecting the two characters.
We could go on- these costumes are simply stunning and Kate looks sure to squeeze the top prize at the Oscar's in a few weeks time!