8 Poor Things Wardrobe Secrets from the Costume Designer, Like Which Look Is Emma Stone’s Favorite (Exclusive)

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor people is a fantastic — if not overtly sexual — Frankenstein-inspired film starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Willem Dafoe as God (his name, not the celestial being) and Mark Ruffalo as Duncan (Bella’s occasional lover).

The film, which is saturated with color and humor, is also an explosion of beautiful costumes, under the direction of costume designer Holly Waddington. Critics Choice Award nominee, who previously worked on Reconciliation and clash of the titans, she made hundreds of costumes together with her team to outfit the cast during filming in Hungary.

In the film, thanks to God, Bella gets a second chance at life and rediscovers the world around her. Her wardrobe grows with her and evolves in color and silhouette. He also matures along with her as she discovers the joys of sex—or “furious jumping,” as she calls it.

The costumes in the film are some of the most intricate and complex we’ve seen in a while, and Stone has been outspoken in his praise of Waddington’s work. She and the costume designer did an interview together with Interview this week, where Stone even said that some of the pieces from the film are her favorite costumes she’s worn in her entire career.

Ahead, Waddington sits down with PEOPLE to reveal her process of creating the magnificent wardrobe for the film, which is in theaters now.

Warning: Some spoilers for Poor People follow.

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Emma Stone in Les Misérables.

Spotlight Pictures

The closet of the brothel is a celebration of ‘naked’ colors

The sexiest underwear is black. We are very saturated with images of sexy underwear and pornography and sex work. A Victorian brothel usually has a certain color palette. So I just wanted to come up with something that was unique to the movie. So I thought, what is the most unsexy underwear? Oh, maybe neutral tones. So let’s make a whole palette based on that. And I actually really liked it. I thought it was really soft and easy on the eye.

I took the color palette from this women’s range. The women in the brothel are indeed a diverse group. Skin tones are really diverse and I wanted it to be a kind of celebration of them and their bodies. Many have bare breasts, and I just thought that was a pretty funny subversion of “nudity”.

Mark Ruffalo poses with daughter Bella and wife Sunrise Coigney on the red carpet in Poor people UK premiere

Emma Stone in Les Misérables.

Spotlight Pictures

The whole concept of Bella’s wardrobe before leaving the house is that of a child who is always half-dressed

It started with deciding who would dress her. That’s how it was in my mind [housemaid] Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine). Baxter would probably get really nice things for her because he loves and cherishes her. So the clothes had to look kind of luxurious and beautiful and a little childish, but not too childish. There would be a half-dressed feeling. That was the thing I wanted to do. So it came from observation. I have kids — I’ve watched my kids, especially when they’re little, have a tendency to lose their clothes and end up half-dressed. So often, even if they go to a wedding or a party, their pants are missing. They are dressed from the top.

Through her undress, I like the idea that we could see some foundations. When I was looking at what it would be, I came across a reference to a quilt that looked like it was stitched. I really wanted to recreate this thing because I just felt its tongue, its puffiness, its kind of writing, weird, weird sponginess. It felt very interesting and correlated well with the space we were in. I love the idea of ​​this weird lobster tail inflator thing. (Above)

The idea is that she takes off her skirt and we see what’s underneath, and it’s just weird. And I guess with a lot of clothes, I’ve been trying to find things that have an organic quality to them. A lot of my references were sea creatures and things that live under the sea or textures found in the body, like the lining of the intestines or the bubbly texture on something like a sea sponge. So I wanted everything to feel like it was living and breathing.

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Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone behind the scenes of Jadnik.

Spotlight Pictures

They made 3 blue dresses from the opening scene and redyed the fabric to get the right color

Let me start with the color. I just love blue, but I’m very, very particular about color palettes, as is Yorgos, and I knew we had this very dreamy, soft, quite upbeat palette for Bella’s wardrobe, and I needed a complete contrast for her wardrobe when she was the person who used to be. This blue one [in the beginning] it’s not a light blue, it’s very rich. It’s a little toxic. The fabric was beautiful and already blue, but not intense enough, so we repainted it and repainted it. I worked closely with the colorist and she made about 20 different swatches to be able to push through this blue and identify this particular shade.

But then we had to redo this dress because Bella threw herself off the bridge and it got covered in mud and water, so there were three of us. It’s a lot of fabric. It was not at all profitable to make this dress this way. You never do that if you are a fashion designer. We had these Hungarian costume assistants who literally spent weeks folding and ironing, folding and ironing making these dresses. It was torture for them, but they turned out beautiful.

The idea for the dress was that she was married to an army general and this was almost like a piece of armor and the sleeves were taken from the armor idea. That’s why they have articulated folds that go down the arms. That was the concept.

We had these Hungarian costume assistants who literally spent weeks folding and ironing, folding and ironing making these dresses. It was torture for them, but they turned out beautiful.

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Emma Stone in Les Misérables.

Spotlight Pictures

Emma Stone’s favorite look in the movie is Bella’s wedding dress

“Before we even went to Budapest and did all the research, I mapped everything out and had boards with references to the early 20th century French designer Madeleine Vionnet. She was absolutely brilliant. She was the person who invented bias cutting in the 1930s . She made this dress in the 1930s called the Beehive Dress, and it was a black evening dress, and she combined these piping with netting. I felt that this combination of horizontal stripes was a really good analogy for a marriage. It felt like a good is that her wedding dress was almost like an expression of a cage that you could almost see through.

These sleeves are huge. They are some of the largest sleeves in the film and hold up well. They are like balloons, but they are not made of anything. They are made of hat net and organza. They’re just weak. It was a nightmare to make. It was very difficult to do that. In part, we could not easily source fabrics between Hungary and the UK due to Brexit. So we were just messing around.

The dress is actually Emma’s favorite. She liked it.

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Emma Stone in Les Misérables.

Spotlight Pictures

It took about 40 people approximately 22 weeks to build the wardrobe

With a full team, we had 11 weeks of filming and then preparation, about 22 weeks of work.

The team was about 40 people, which is a lot. We had four cutters, a lot of craftsmen, one painter who worked with me the whole time, he painted everything. I very rarely use fabric alone. Everything is painted and painted and repainted. A bunch of people in costumes doing things and people on set. Many people. I needed more people. There is never enough time. There were never enough people.

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Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone behind the scenes in Les Misérables.

Spotlight Pictures

The story in color during black and white scenes is ‘rotten apples’

I came up with a palette for the first part of the house based on rotten apples and it was Yorgos’s idea. So he defined this color for me, which completely blew me off my feet when he told me that. I was coming up with references of things that were fleshy and skin tones and very similar to body colors. I wanted Emma to just keep coming back to the fact that she was a creation.

I described the colors to him through words, through pictures, and he said: “What you are describing to me is the color of a rotten apple.” And I went and looked at my phone for a bit and noticed that he was absolutely right. It was a rotten apple palette. But the very fact that he would know this speaks of this man’s capacity for visuality.

But then everything turned out to be black and white, right? We worked a lot on color, and then it was black and white, but it somehow worked, because Bella arrives in Lisbon and it’s like the world explodes in front of her. She sees the world for the first time. Suddenly she left the house and sees everything in Technicolor.

Usually when you shoot in black and white, you think about contrast, but I didn’t really do it that way, because I didn’t know in advance. We ended up redoing a few pieces with more contrast, but we didn’t have time to start over once we decided on the black and white part.

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Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Les Misérables.

Atsushi Nishijima/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Bella’s exaggerated sleeve motif was the idea of ​​director Yorgos Lanthimos

I started doing a lot of concept work for Yorgos. One of the ideas was to set it a bit earlier and have tight sleeves with almost phallic skirts. They basically looked like giant penises. I liked the idea of ​​the clothes somehow referencing body parts and having an organic unruly quality. Then I did a lot of research on those sleeves and he was really into the sleeves. That was him. He only said, “Give me the sleeves.”

Then I went to meet Emma with a big suitcase of clothes in Athens about 10 weeks before the shoot started and tried on a lot of shapes, had different different degrees of sleeves to try on and actually found that silhouette in that cut, the huge sleeve.

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Emma Stone in Les Misérables. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Bella’s clothes are meant to blend in with the men in medical school

When Bella goes to medical school in Paris, I wanted her to be a little more formed. So she has the right suit, and I wanted her to be completely mixed with the men. I didn’t want her to be at all conspicuous in that med school scene. I wanted her cut like them, black like them, but for there to be a little twist so that when she stands up and you see her legs, she doesn’t have a skirt. But fabrics are more difficult. They are heavier than her previous clothes, they are more structured, they are tighter. Suddenly it’s like real serious tailoring. It’s not a light, airy, dreamy, fuzzy, girly thing.

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Source: HIS Education