The newest adaptation of Mary Shelley’s timeless novel Frankenstein has captivated audiences, with director Guillermo del Toro’s film being praised for being mostly faithful to the source material. Starring Australia’s own Jacob Elordi as The Creature and Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, somehow it’s Mia Goth, as Elizabeth Lavenza, who steals the show — adorned by Tiffany & Co. jewels and 19th Century gowns. Her extensive wardrobe for Frankenstein came from the mind of Emmy Award-nominated costume designer Kate Hawley, who has worked on projects such as The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Crimson Peak. Goth’s character Elizabeth has an interest in entomology and botany, so Hawley included nods to beetles and other insects through patterns and garment shapes. Along with wasp-waisted tight corsets, certain fabrics were also chosen to mimic paper-thin beetle wings.
“With the green dress… that design was inspired by butterflies, and the patterns on butterfly wings,” Goth tells Refinery29 Australia. “[This] was something that Guillermo and Kate were exploring a lot with Elizabeth and [with] all of the costumes, everything was thought through.” To create unique insect-like patterns, Hawley studied both cellular structures and the anatomy of beetles. “It’s all about echoing those insect and beetle-like qualities, just fitted to the period,” Hawley says in the production notes.
Jewellery was also key to defining Goth’s character, with her blue outfit featuring a Tiffany & Co. signature piece from the early 1900s. The Louis Comfort Tiffany necklace is made up of blue glass beetle motifs in a gold setting. “We wanted to pull pieces that were from the age of Mary Shelley so that you could study the choices our designers were making at that time,” Christopher Young, Vice President and Creative Director of Tiffany Patrimony and Global Creative Visual Merchandising, said in a press video. The result is what jewellers describe as blurring the line “between jewellery and art”.
One of Elizabeth’s most striking dresses is her final look, a white dress where white satin ribbons wrap around her arms. Made to resemble surgical bandages, it pays homage to both Elizabeth’s fate and The Creature’s origin. “That was deliberate,” Goth says. “That was there to mimic The Creature and his band aids that he has when he’s first born.” This white dress also features multiple layers of fabric that capture the light in an interesting way, a design element thought through by both the costume designer and director. “Guillermo wanted Elizabeth to be very ethereal, and there’s an iridescence and ephemeral nature to some of those colours and fabrics that helped us [portray this],” Hawley notes.
There’s also a religious nod in many of Elizabeth’s outfits, particularly seen through the use of bonnets. “Religious language is a big part of Elizabeth’s character, and that bonnet is like a halo,” Hawley explains. “Mia has such an amazing, mercurial face — one of the first fittings we had, we put that bonnet on her, and we put the yellow veil over her, and she just became this other creature.” While Goth jokingly tells R29 she couldn’t breathe in her restrictive wardrobe, stepping into the period pieces helped frame her performance as Elizabeth. “That was helpful, because that’s exactly how a woman in the Victorian world would feel, and it formed how I moved and how I sat,” Goth says. “I felt once I started to see where the costumes were headed, I found my character, Elizabeth, kind of from the outside in this time around.
“So, [by] seeing what they were doing with her on the outside, I was then able to kind of figure out what was going on in the inside.”
Frankenstein is streaming on on Netflix now.
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