Costume designer Holly Waddington built Bella Baxter’s wardrobe around character, not strict historical accuracy. In a December 2023 Barbican interview, she described taking Victorian clothing apart, leaving out corsets and letting Bella’s clothes become messier and more self-directed as the character changes.
How Waddington approached Bella’s costumes
Waddington began with Bella’s development. The production designers were already shaping the film’s world, but she said she did not see their work for a while. That distance gave her room to respond to the script and characters rather than simply match an established visual scheme.
Her starting point was Victorian dress, treated as a set of pieces to rearrange rather than a template to reproduce. “They’re based on taking a Victorian outfit with all its components, and then stripping quite a few away,” she told the Barbican. She compared the result to a five-year-old dressing up in her mother’s clothes: intentionally messy, with the question of how dressed or undressed Bella should be left open.
Why Bella does not wear a corset
Waddington said the team deliberately removed corsets. In her view, shaping Bella to an idealized body would conflict with the film’s feminist conception of the character. It would also restrict Emma Stone’s physical performance.
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Bella moves with an unruly, childlike energy, and Stone developed choreography around that movement. Waddington said that performance could not have worked in a corset. The choice therefore served both the character’s meaning and the practical demands of movement.
How Bella’s wardrobe changes with her
The clothes track Bella’s growing independence. In a separate release-era conversation with WHISTLES, Waddington described Bella beginning in grand, childlike outfits chosen by Mrs Prim, with underwear and nightwear visible. After Bella leaves, she starts assembling combinations from her suitcase herself.
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That shift makes reuse and mismatching part of the storytelling: Bella wears sheer petticoats as outerwear and combines bodices, knickers and jackets seen earlier. The pieces do not mark a clean break from her past wardrobe; they show her making new choices from what she has available.
Organic textures and strange silhouettes
Waddington drew inspiration from undersea life and unusual organisms, focusing on tactile surfaces and the impression of living forms. “I was gathering references of things that live under the sea, strange creatures, looking at the tactile surfaces of organisms; giving this sense of everything breathing and living,” she told the Barbican. She described using light, silky, airy fabrics to make the clothes feel connected to Bella as a living creation.
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The film’s 1890s setting becomes a springboard for surreal design, rather than a promise of literal reconstruction. The Associated Press describes early costumes as doll-like and animalistic, including a crinoline bustle Waddington likened to a lobster tail. For the Paris brothel, she used yellow latex for the “condom coat.” Period dress, bodily forms, unexpected materials and grotesque humor all feed into the visual language.
A favorite look: Lisbon
Waddington singled out Bella’s Lisbon outfit—yellow knickers with oversized blue sleeves—as her favorite. She particularly liked how Stone moved in it, a reminder that these costumes were designed to work in performance as well as make an impression on screen.
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Costumes beyond Bella
For Dr. Godwin Baxter, Waddington said she drew loosely on the appearance of novelist Alasdair Gray after director Yorgos Lanthimos sent her pictures of the author. She also brought in Russian Constructivist references to express Baxter’s utilitarian character.
Lanthimos described the desired Victorian world as the era “but tweaked,” according to the AP. That wider production context helps explain why the film feels surreal rather than like a literal period reconstruction; Waddington’s own account focuses more specifically on character, clothing components, materials and movement.
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When expressive design meets the realities of filming
At a UCLA costume-design panel reported in March 2024, Waddington described her approach as “discordant and slightly shambolic.” The giant sleeves were whimsical but structurally precise, and their seams were strained by Stone’s wild, childlike movement—more energetic than Waddington had initially anticipated. The practical challenge arose from the same movement the costumes were meant to enable.
Waddington won the 2024 Academy Award for costume design for Poor Things, as reported by UCLA Newsroom.
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