Note: This article contains spoilers about the plot of Poor Things.
In anticipation of the Academy Awards this weekend, I wanted to write about a movie from last year that left me completely awestruck with its costuming: Poor Things. After high school, I went to film school to study production design, and I think that background has heavily influenced my style today. The intersection between fashion and film is fascinating to me, particularly in instances like this where the basis for the world is a familiar time period, place, or context, but there is some distortion that allows for more imaginative costuming. Some other examples of this include the near-future Los Angeles in Her (2013) with its high-waisted pants and warm, minimalist officewear, or Crimson Peak (2015), with its Victorian ghosts.
Like Crimson Peak, Poor Things takes place in a fantasy version of Victorian London. Bella’s journey begins as she ends her own life by throwing herself off of a bridge. The surgeon Godwin Baxter finds her in the river and revives her by placing the brain of her unborn fetus in her skull, thus becoming both mother and child, a new woman. As she falls, she is clothed in a dark blue gown with pleated sleeves fashioned to look like armor. Despite being visibly pregnant, she is also outfitted in a maternity corset, which was not uncommon at the time. This is notably the first and last time Bella is seen in a corset, as she hereafter starts her life as a liberated woman.
The similarity of the detailing on her sleeves to armor is not coincidental, as we later learn that Bella, before she was Bella, was married to a General. When returns to live with him, the motif also resurfaces, with militaristic gold trim adorning her cuffs and a stiff, conservative copper dress that starkly contrasts her usual ethereal, skin-baring style.
These details are what make Poor Things’ costuming so compelling. Aside from being purely aesthetically beautiful, there is embedded symbolism within each character’s look, and anachronism is used to serve the greater themes of the movie.
Despite most streaming service’s best efforts, we live in the age of screenshots. Costumes often go viral for all the wrong reasons. Audiences noted a zipper adorned with a giant pearl from The Serpent King, cheap wigs in the newest adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender, and an elastic floral top in what was ostensibly the 13th century in The Witcher. Inaccuracies are disruptive to the modern viewer, for better or for (more probably) worse. So how did costume designer Holly Waddington meld dozens of decades together so seamlessly for Poor Things?
The story itself is a spin on Frankenstein, so it only feels natural to suture disparate things together in the design of the film. Given that the plot also concerns growth and evolution on a condensed timeline, Bella’s 1960s footwear and 1980s blouse underneath a Victorian jacket show her advanced, yet uneven, progress compared to her contemporaries. She is partially molded by her circumstances and those around her, whether she is in a nursery or a brothel, but partially a woman of her own invention, and she is able to pull from all these influences to create something beautifully novel.
When Bella lives in Godwin Baxter’s house, she has a maid to dress her, and all of her clothes are padded and soft. Even though this portion of the film is shot in black and white and there are no visible pastels, it’s evident that these clothes are babylike. When she embarks on her trip with the libidinous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, she is left to her own devices to dress herself from the suitcase she has brought, and that’s when her personal style begins to blossom, in tandem with her personality and self-awareness. As time goes on, she becomes more serious about her work and adopts some of the style notes seen in the male characters. By the end of the film, Bella wears her own version of Godwin’s lab coat (with her signature puff sleeves, of course), and a much simpler silhouette with a white sweater and skirt that wouldn’t seem out of place in New York, 2024. She’s less frivolous and hedonistic now, and her clothes have become more utilitarian, while still retaining her special touch.
Bella isn’t the only one with clothes detached from a concrete time and place, though. Godwin Baxter, Bella’s father figure, also has clothing choices that pull from the future to suit his characterization as a mad scientist, a man pushing the boundaries of what is possible. In an interview with Coveteur, Waddington said:
“The thing that I like the most about Baxter’s costumes are these boiler suits he wears. He has about three of them, and they’re like utility suits with places for his pens and surgical tools in the breast pocket. They were based on thinking about him being this very utilitarian man—he’s a man of the future. The most futuristic elements are within Baxter’s house, so they wear lots of plastic. They have plastic surgical scrubs. And Bella, when she was at home, had all of these plastic trimmings on her clothes”
The men’s clothes aren’t just less extravagant because of fashion conventions, or because they’re on the supporting characters, it’s also because they aren’t evolving on the same timeline we’re shown with Bella. They’ve already grown and settled into their distinct personalities, and their costuming reflects that. The rakish Duncan Wedderburn is in pompous, upper-class suits, the shy Max McCandles is in boy’s britches, and the brutish Alfie Blessington is in his military uniform.
How you can incorporate the fantastical fashion of Poor Things into your own wardrobe?
Color palettes inspired by the grotesque
In an interview with Elle Magazine, Waddington explained her inspiration for the color palette of Bella’s clothing came from strange sources:
“I had a lot of references of really beautiful, almost anatomical drawings of shells and late Victorian studies of specimens. The frills of a sea creature, the dimples on a sea urchin, the textures in the body, the lining of the intestine, even cellulite.”
She elaborates in Coveteur:
“Basically, I had charts, a huge board with pictures of decomposing apples, because depending on the stage of the apple, you’ve got all these rich tones. You’ve got the going-brown colors. On a green apple, you’ve got these almost acid yellows—A whole spectrum of pinks And the fact that he had come up with this in the moment says something about how incredibly nuanced his visual sense is. I also think it was interesting that he suggested that because, actually, she is like this apple decomposing.”
For your own outfits, consider starting with a color palette from traditionally “ugly” or peculiar natural sources like mold, insects, or internal organs.
Underwear as standalone clothing
Silk underwear as shorts, a jacket with no skirt, and a visible bustle… Bella flaunts social conventions and expresses her sexual freedom with her clothing throughout the film. Underwear as outerwear has been popularized many times, with bras over t-shirts in the 1980s and whale tail/sagging in the 00s, but here we see it in a way that feels more soft and playful than overtly sexy. Her tap pants are a buttery yellow, and so is the frilled capelet she dons in the brothel. The other workers there aren’t in what one would imagine, something tight, dark, and seductive, probably with high heels and tightly laced corsets. Waddington said: “Rather than using black and red or colors that we normally associate with pornography or sex work, I wanted to work with a very beautiful, delicate human palette”.
Try pastel slips or vintage petticoats as skirts, frilled bloomers as shorts, or sheer nightgowns as dresses.
Blending fashion influences from multiple decades
The beautiful thing about being born here and now is that you can pull from everything that came before you. Fashion is so cyclical that there are decade combinations that go naturally together (e.g. the 1970s and the Middle Ages, 1980s and the Victorian Era), but you can also be more daring. Why not blend 00s maximalism and obsession with designer luxury with the excess of the rococo? Can you push 60s space-age fashion even further into the future with something from the 2020s?
Statement sleeves
For those not familiar with the time period, you may be surprised to learn that Bella’s trademark sleeves are not actually consistent with the decade the film is set in. They would be popularized ten years later, in the 1890s. The voluminous sleeves were part of Lanthimos’ fantasy and are a key part of Bella’s look, one you can easily incorporate into your wardrobe. Look for mutton-chop sleeves, puffed long sleeves with cinched wrists, and jackets with emphasized shoulders.
Recreating Bella’s looks with my own wardrobe:
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