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.
