“I’m a changingable feast, as are all of we. [or] I am finding being alive fascinating,” Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) retorts, reading on a cruise deck in a maximalist, puffy-sleeve top and silk lingerie shorts. Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), a debauched lawyer facilitating her first adventure into the world, wails in despair. 

Yorgos Lanthimos’ award-winning Frankenstein-inspired dark comedy Poor Things follows the life and journey of Bella, a woman-slash-Victorian scientist’s experiment navigating the world for the first time. Or the second time, depending on how you look at it.

In this peculiar and vivid world, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) reanimates a young pregnant woman after her tragic death by placing her unborn baby’s brain inside her body. Named Bella, the mother-child hybrid lives and grows under his watch, as he observes the infantile brain develop in a woman’s body, synchronising into one. She remains under his care until Duncan shows up and takes her on a continent-hopping adventure into the larger world.

For Oscar-winning costume designer Holly Waddington, matching the unbridled peculiarity and extravagance of Bella’s trajectory was a tall order. Given full creative reign over her vision – a rarity for a costume designer working with a director for the first time – Lanthimos left her with a central question: What would a woman be, if she were able to start from scratch? 

The film takes place in 19th century Britain, opening with scenes of Bella donning period-appropriate “modesty pieces” – sleeveless blouses topped frilly, bib-like accessories that conceal the chest and neck. Her infantile wardrobe – which also includes baby doll dresses and skirts with padded underpinnings – reveal her in a state of partial undress to suggest naivety. “That’s what children are like – they are very quickly disheveled and unraveled,” Waddington said of the styling. This interplay between modesty and promiscuity also suggests Bella’s resistance to confinement, as it subverts the status quo of Victorian dress and foreshadows Bella’s sexual emancipation to come. 

As she starts to see the world, wandering the candy-coloured streets of Lisbon, Bella transcends time and place, pairing her modesty pieces with baby yellow lingerie shorts, white vinyl André Courrèges gogo boots, and Space Age-inspired sunglasses that resemble movie theaters’ 3D frames. Waddington cited Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne, and other pioneers of 1960s fashion as inspirations behind this look. Most noticeably, Bella wears a baby blue jacket that echoes 1930s Schiaparelli with oversized leg-of-mutton sleeves, which becomes a wardrobe staple throughout her adventures. 

Her sleeves, it turns out, were one of Waddington’s primary vehicles for experimentation throughout the film, and a means to convey Bella’s growing power. She drew inspiration from 1890s Victorian men’s sleeves, as well as London College of Fashion designer Harikrishnan’s inflatable trousers, translating Bella’s internal journey toward autonomy in an outward, visual manner. A strong believer in clothing as external organs – both metaphorically as a means for self expression and literally as a second skin – she emulated Harikrishnan’s tension between inflation and compression. “I had this fabric that was almost like the texture of an intestine or a lung … and it’s kind of breathing,” she reflected on Bella’s sleeves. Waddington also injected subtle nods to her sexual discovery through materiality, including latex, flesh-coloured pieces, and references to female anatomy, lending the director to nickname her creations “the vagina blouse” and “the condom coat.” 

The massive and sculptural sleeves were executed solely through manipulated fabric, rather than boning or corsetry. “Victorian clothes are about controlling the body and forcing it into a specific shape,” Waddington said. “This is a contradiction. She doesn’t wear a corset in her wardrobe ever.”

In the final scene, we see Bella in a voluminous wedding dress, with balloon-like sleeves made entirely from millinery netting, organza, cotton, and tulle. “The whole conceit was that it needed to be huge, but made of almost nothing,” Waddington noted. The impactful piece – closing a rotation of garments that convey Bella’s journey from an infantile child to an anarchist spirit – highlight Bella’s newfound sexual agency and growth into a fully-realised person on her own terms.