“The deepest inspiration comes from the actual Charles Addams cartoon, and the tonality of them,” says costume designer Colleen Atwood of her work on Netflix’s Wednesday. “But we really wanted, especially Wednesday [because] she wasn’t a child anymore… to be something that was her own person, to sort of resonate with people of today. Between that tonality and Jenna [Ortega]’s amazing performance, I think we came up with a Wednesday Addams that is more of our time.”
Wednesday follows Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) as she attends her first year at Nevermore Academy, a school for monstrous outcasts. As she resists making new friends, she discovers an emerging psychic ability which she must use to solve a series of mysterious killings.
Co-designer Mark Sutherland says their goal for Wednesday was to make her more relatable to a modern generation without losing The Addams Family aesthetic. “Someone who people could associate with, she doesn’t feel that far removed from society, because the Addams family was such a dark family,” he says, “and now they were sort of integrated into the real world. I think it was good that we made her more associated to her generation.”
Although Wednesday Addams dressed in black and white, due to being “allergic to color,” it was important for her costumes to still have depth. “It’s using texture, juxtaposition of light and dark, position of where the light is,” says Atwood. “In the beginning, we’d go, “Oh god, what can we do?’ And then as the shoppers went out and found stuff and as we made stuff, it came together in a way that felt black-and-white but it didn’t feel like a costume, it just felt like clothes that were black and white. They looked cool, but they felt real.”
Wednesday’s most iconic outfit this season was from the Rave’N Dance, where her unique dancing went viral on Tiktok. “There was only one in the world. They only made one and we had it,” says Atwood. “That put pressure on our workroom, because they had to create multiples for it because of the rain.”
“That dress is also not just one dress,” adds Sutherland. “It’s made up of so many hundreds of pieces, like each flounce is one separate piece… each piece had to be made individually, and every little seam had to be done, so we had to recreate three more of those dresses. The manhours that went into that was just unbelievable… but once they put it in the window of the store, everyone thought it was just the perfect dress.”
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