Four-time, Oscar-winning costume designer and longtime Tim Burton collaborator, Colleen Atwood peeled back the layers behind her grim, ghastly and (often) girly designs on the Netflix series “Wednesday.” And where did this Hollywood icon find one of Wednesday Addams looks? At a Zara… in Romania.
Atwood sat down for Variety‘s “Artisans” series, presented by HBO, to discuss her Emmy-nominated designs on the latest Burton series, which she worked on alongside co-designer Mark Sutherland.
The costume designer was tasked with bringing the world of the beloved Addams family into the modern era, while keeping it centered amongst the cobwebs and spooky hues fans adore. “I won’t say I redid Wednesday but I feel like I took Wednesday into today’s world, into a world that was applicable to a large audience,” Atwood said.
After reading the script, Atwood began with the titular star (Jenna Ortega) and her roommate Enid (Emma Myers), who are depicted as polar opposites — one is decidedly goth and the other loves color.
“I started with the two girls…We didn’t want to have Enid just look silly because she was in pastels. We knew that Wednesday was in black and white, but we also didn’t want her to become a caricature in black and white,” she explained.
While the characters on the show are required to wear the striped uniform of their boarding school Nevermore, Atwood wanted the students’ individuality to come through in how they styled the mandatory outfit.
“When you look at kids outside of schools that are heavy-duty uniform schools, you see everybody interpret a uniform in a different way, and I think that that interpretation per character is what makes it stand alone as a uniform in a story,” Atwood said.
For Wednesday’s uniform, which is black and gray stripes as opposed to the typical purple and black stripes everyone else wears, Atwood began with her shirt; she had a vintage 1960s shirt with a Peter Pan collar that worked for Wednesday.
“A lot of uniform shirts have Peter Pan collars but this was a Peter Pan with some panache,” she said.
Working with stripes requires hard work to ensure that they’re captured on camera in the right way.
“The fabric’s actually hand painted, hand silk screened, because I couldn’t find a fabric that had the right gradation on camera of the black and gray that I wanted so you don’t have that strobe-y effect of stripes,” she explained. A trick she also implemented on the set of Burton’s 1999 horror classic, “Sleepy Hollow.”
Known for packing each pleat with a punch, Atwood folded a grey pattern between each little pleat on Wednesday’s uniform, so the other color is noticeable when the characters move. It was a painstaking effort to accomplish that meticulous design.
“I think the idea of the longer skirt, the sort of Victorian black stockings, the heavy shoes, which give her a real edge and weight to her character and help her with her movement are the things that make it especially Wednesday,” she said.
For Morticia, Atwood got on a call with Catherine Zeta-Jones to discuss what her iconic dress would look like.
“I made her dress in three different materials for the first fitting. I made it in leather in the beginning which looked really amazing. It felt too costumey, so we ended up with the jersey cause it draped, it was sort of ethereal.”
Of course, Morticia’s dress is also black. How did she manage working with a limited color palette on the show? “When you use black and white you’re limited, but if you’re going to be limited it’s a great world to be limited in. You can juxtaposition the two colors in different ways graphically that can make things look very different,” she said. What’s next for this timeless dress? Will Morticia surprise us all with a bold new fit in the future? Atwood keeps the details tight but teases that there will be changes, “In season 2 she’ll have a lot of looks, so it will be really fun to see what Morticia does when she’s out of the dress and into around-the-house looks.”
