By Madeline Hill
published 5 November 2025
(Image credit: Netflix)
Welcome to The Who What Wear Podcast, where designers, stylists, beauty experts and tastemakers discuss the creative work shaping fashion and film. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to hear the full episode.
Costume designer Kate Hawley traces her longstanding collaboration with director Guillermo del Toro to a chance meeting in New Zealand while she was working on another project. Del Toro noticed the collection of horror books on her shelf and immediately recognized a shared visual vocabulary. That instant of mutual understanding led to years of collaboration, including Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak, and now del Toro’s Netflix take on Frankenstein.
On the latest podcast episode, Hawley outlines how color, texture and close collaboration guided the film’s costume choices. She describes the evolution of Elizabeth’s palette: an initial bluish-green tone that shifts into flashes of red and yellow as the character moves through the story. Those choices were meant to reflect ephemerality and transformation.
Hawley says many of the costume cues came from iridescent materials and natural references—particularly
beetle shells, Favrile glass and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Fabrics the team developed, inspired by cellular structures like skin and blood cells, produced malachite-like patterns when magnified. Those enlarged textures read like beetle-patterned surfaces on camera.
Collaboration with cinematographer Dan Laustsen shaped how those details would appear on film. The production alternates wide compositions with tight close-ups, so Hawley built garments that held up at both scales. Textures had to register from distance and reveal intricate patterning in intimate shots.
The film’s bridal look grew from the same collaborative process. Hawley worked closely with Laustsen and production designer Tamara Deverell, aligning costume, set and camera language. The creature’s first found coat—a dead man’s garment—establishes a theme of worn memory. As the creature’s perspective dominates, Elizabeth’s attire begins to echo his world.
Hawley approached the bridal dress from the inside out, treating it as a kind of exoskeleton. The silhouette nods to period costume while also reading like an anatomical shell—a garment that registers as both historic and otherworldly.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. For the full interview, listen to The Who What Wear Podcast.
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Madeline Hill, Contributor
